What's your opinion on apophatic theology?

[whatthehey]

3. It's both sensible and silly

Bear with me.

Incidentally it's not quite as the comic shows.. Apophatic approaches are all about negatives. God isn't human, God isn't limited, etc. It's approaching the above but from the other way and technically it's possible to fairly closely define something if you negate enough potential attributes.

It's sensible in that if any god worth calling that exists, it's way further removed and superior in regard to us than we are compared to, say, starfish. Now if starfish could communicate they would be able to say little to nothing positive about us, have no idea what we do and why. How much less can we make positive claims about God? We can only say he's not, metaphorically a starfish and does not do starfish things. Ineffability, it's true, is the final destination of any rational theology.


And therein lies the silly part. If we cannot say God is X or God is Y, on what do we base claims of knowing what he wants? It's much easier, to stretch a metaphor brutally, for a hypothetically sentient starfish to know that we are larger and more advanced than they are than for them to infer the existence of our general desire for ice cream over broccoli. So if we cannot even describe God so positively as the above, and we cannot, how are we supposed to know he prefers credulous piety over rational disbelief using the brains he supposedly intended for us? How can an ineffable being be immanent in any way?