M: I know there's a shorthand for the idea of do unto others as you'd have them do unto you, called the golden rule. I'd like you to go online and find out or verify or whatever whether there is a shorthand for the idea that man cannot know the mind of God, which seems to have some form or other in most monotheistic religions, at least. I can't really speak for the polytheistic or more complex versions. For context, the question comes because I was listening to two people talk about how the golden rule seems to have some form in most religions, and I was wondering if there was also a quick way of referring to that idea of not being able to know the mind of God in a similar fashion.
G: There isn't a single phrase as universally recognized as "the Golden Rule," but there are a few theological terms that are very close to what you're describing.
The most common formal term is the doctrine of divine incomprehensibility or the incomprehensibility of God. The idea is not that God is completely unknowable, but that finite humans can never fully grasp or exhaustively understand God's nature, purposes, or reasoning. citeturn0search3turn0search11
A closely related term is divine inscrutability. "Inscrutable" literally means difficult or impossible to fully understand. In theology, it refers to the idea that God's judgments, plans, and motivations cannot be completely traced out by human reason. citeturn0search1turn0search7
If you're looking for the sort of short label that people might casually invoke in conversation, the closest equivalents are probably:
What's interesting is that unlike the Golden Rule, which is a moral instruction, this idea is more of an epistemological limitation. It's less "here is how you should act" and more "here is a boundary on what humans can know."
You are also right that some version of this appears across many monotheistic traditions:
So if you wanted a concise counterpart to "the Golden Rule," I'd probably say:
The Principle of Divine Incomprehensibility
Humans may know something about God, but they cannot fully know God's mind.
It isn't a universally recognized slogan the way "Golden Rule" is, but among theologians, "divine incomprehensibility" is probably the closest established shorthand.
M: I'm asking because that inscrutability is, at least when you get into the actual nature of religion, if not in daily application, just as important as the golden rule, simply because the acknowledgement that man cannot completely grasp the infinite is really important when it comes to acting with, how would I put it, not absolute faith, but absolute certainty. When someone acts as though something which is questionable but done on faith because of something written down by someone thousands of years ago, but acts instead as though it were the same absolute rule as gravity or something like that, that's when things start to go sideways, especially since even physics. tends to find out that things aren't that absolute. But the point is that when you act as though you believe the entire, when you act as though you know the entirety of God's mind, you are going against that basic concept, which is man, or the finite, cannot completely encompass the infinite. Now, even on a metaphysical level, you can argue about that, like the idea that the universe is somehow both finite and infinite, so it creates this weird boundary area. But that's kind of an edge case in itself. Usually you're talking with someone who isn't going to even be trying to understand that, let alone capable of it. I would push back against the way that you or other people have phrased it in that perhaps the finite cannot completely encompass the infinite, but that does not mean that there cannot be a partial comprehension. And depending on the patterns detected, you may not need to know the infinite. In order to grasp it as the finite, as long as you allow for the possibility that there is more out there you'll never reach. But that's just a minor quibble next to my major point. You know, inscrutable seems better than incomprehensible. I mean, that incomprehensibility kind of leaves way too much in the realm of the impossible. Doubly so when it's being used by someone like a preacher or pastor who then turns around and says they know exactly what's going on. Either humanity can understand enough to live as a free being or they're complete idiot automatons, but you can't have it both ways.
G: I think you're putting your finger on why "divine inscrutability" feels more useful than "divine incomprehensibility."
In many theological traditions, "incomprehensible" is actually intended to mean exactly what you are saying: not completely comprehensible. But in ordinary English it sounds much closer to "unknowable" or "impossible to understand at all." That creates a problem because the same preacher who says "God is incomprehensible" then proceeds to spend forty years preaching about God. The obvious response is: "Well, which is it?"
Historically, the better theologians usually resolved this by distinguishing between knowledge and exhaustive knowledge.
The claim wasn't:
Humans can know nothing about God.
It was:
Humans can know something about God, but never everything.
Or, as you put it, the finite may be able to grasp patterns, principles, and partial truths without encompassing the whole.
That distinction shows up all over the place. You don't need to know everything about gravity to know that dropping a rock will make it fall. You don't need to understand every neuron in another person's brain to know that they're angry. Partial understanding is not the same thing as total understanding.
What interests me in your observation, though, is that you're treating this less as a metaphysical statement and more as a moral restraint.
The Golden Rule says:
Do not assume your interests outweigh everyone else's.
The principle of divine inscrutability says something like:
Do not assume your understanding outweighs reality.
Those are actually structurally similar. Both are limits on arrogance.
One restrains selfishness:
Other people matter.
The other restrains certainty:
You might be wrong.
And that second one is arguably just as important in religion because it creates room for humility.
Once someone says:
"I know exactly what God wants."
the doctrine has effectively vanished. If God's intentions are fully transparent to you, then you've ceased to be a finite creature attempting to understand the divine and have instead elevated your own interpretation to divine status.
That's why some of the strongest warnings in religious traditions are not aimed at doubters but at the overly certain. The danger isn't merely disbelief. It's the person who becomes convinced that their own understanding is identical to God's understanding.
Your point about physics is relevant here. Modern science doesn't generally operate on certainty in that sense. Even very successful theories are held provisionally. A physicist saying "General Relativity is our best model" is different from saying "I possess final knowledge of reality."
In that respect, some religious believers and some atheists can fall into the same trap. One says:
"I know exactly what God thinks."
The other says:
"I know exactly that there is nothing beyond human understanding."
Both have quietly stepped beyond the evidence available to them.
The position you're describing is closer to:
There may be genuine patterns that can be known.
There may be truths worth acting on.
But the map is not the territory, and no finite mind should mistake its model for the whole of reality.
That isn't skepticism in the sense of paralysis. It's humility in the face of scale.
Which is why I wonder whether the closest counterpart to the Golden Rule isn't actually a theological phrase at all. The underlying principle seems to be:
Epistemic humility.
Not "know nothing."
Not "everything is uncertain."
But:
Know what you know, act on it, and remember that reality is always larger than your model of it.
That strikes me as very close to the role that divine inscrutability is supposed to play when it's functioning properly rather than being used as a rhetorical shield.
M: As I'm reading your echo of what I said, not to say that there isn't some polishing or addition there, but generally that's one of your biggest advantages, is your ability to restructure my less coherent versions and turn them into a single minor essay. It also gave me a little bit of insight on what I was saying and a connection to my idea of what my faith is. One of the aspects of my faith in humanity that I hadn't really considered is my faith in our abilities, given enough time and effort. And I'm just wondering whether or not I think that would be contradictory to Christian doctrine, because with this inscrutability idea, it doesn't necessarily fight against, but it needs alignment in order to go along with the idea that humans can do anything that's physically possible and sometimes can go and redefine what possible is. That's my faith in humanity, and as far as I'm concerned, any kind of good Christian interpretation of the Bible generally says that God also has faith in humanity. So if part of that faith is believing that you can do whatever it is you try to, that doesn't contradict this idea of inscrutability, but it does say that we are going to keep trying with the belief that maybe one day we can get to that point. Basically, the idea that at some point we can transcend or something. Because, yes, my faith in humanity says I have to have faith that we can overcome anything given the opportunity, which is an important part because, you know, the universe is a surprisingly volatile place over the course of, you know, the right timescale. So I'm not saying that we necessarily could wake up tomorrow, find out we have three days until the sun goes supernova and somehow survive, but we do have the capacity to prepare and start working against that possibility. within the next 10,000 years. I'm not sure if I'm exactly going anywhere with this. I just... It's always interesting to find that little fractal cul-de-sac of thought in a topic that I thought I was pretty secure in. Not that this is shaking any kind of structure I thought was sound, but it's just always interesting to find a little new place to explore and make the structure a little bit more completely discussed or talked about or considered, and maybe find one more tool to use if it ever becomes important to defend.
G: I don't think what you're describing necessarily contradicts Christianity. In fact, I think you're bumping into one of Christianity's oldest internal tensions.
On one side, there is the doctrine of humility:
You are not God.
You do not know everything.
You are finite.
On the other side, there is the doctrine that humanity is made "in the image of God."
Those two ideas have always sat in a kind of productive friction with each other.
If you emphasize only the first, humanity becomes worms: insignificant creatures whose highest virtue is obedience.
If you emphasize only the second, humanity becomes gods: beings whose desires and judgments are automatically justified.
The interesting Christian traditions tend to live in the tension between those extremes.
What struck me in your description is that your faith in humanity is not actually faith in humanity as it currently exists. It is faith in humanity as a process.
You don't seem to believe:
Humans can do anything right now.
You seem to believe:
Humans can eventually overcome almost any obstacle if given sufficient time, knowledge, and opportunity.
That's a very different claim.
In some ways, it sounds closer to a scientific civilization's version of hope than to simple optimism. Not "everything will work out," but "there is an enormous reservoir of unrealized capability in the species."
And that is where I think the connection to inscrutability becomes interesting.
The doctrine of divine inscrutability says:
The horizon is farther away than you think.
Your faith in humanity says:
Keep walking toward it anyway.
Those are not necessarily contradictory.
In fact, they can reinforce one another.
If reality is deeper than our current understanding, then there is always more to learn.
If there is always more to learn, then growth never truly ends.
The contradiction would arise only if you claimed:
Eventually humanity will know everything.
That would collide directly with most traditional versions of divine inscrutability.
But that isn't quite what I hear you saying.
I hear something more like:
Eventually humanity may know vastly more than it does now, perhaps to an extent currently unimaginable.
Historically, that has happened repeatedly.
To a Bronze Age shepherd, a modern hospital would look miraculous.
To a Roman engineer, satellite navigation would look supernatural.
To someone from 1500, a picture sent instantly around the planet would resemble magic.
Humanity has a habit of moving things from the category of "impossible" to the category of "ordinary."
What I find especially interesting is that your version of faith seems less concerned with individual salvation than with collective becoming.
Many Christians place their hope in God transforming humanity.
You seem to place significant hope in humanity participating in its own transformation.
Those are not the same thing, but they overlap more than people sometimes realize.
There's also something in your earlier constitutional and societal discussions that echoes here. You often argue that systems should be judged not only by what people are now, but by what they could become under better conditions. That's a very similar instinct.
The thought that occurs to me is that your faith may not actually be:
Humanity can do anything.
It may be:
Humanity is not finished.
That's a subtler claim, and a harder one to disprove.
Because every time people become convinced they've reached the limits of what humans can understand or accomplish, history has generally responded with, "Not yet."
Whether there is some final horizon beyond which no finite mind can ever pass is a theological question.
But the belief that there are horizons beyond the current one—and that they are worth pursuing—seems entirely compatible with the idea that reality remains larger than our understanding.
In fact, the existence of an unreachable horizon is often what makes exploration meaningful. If you could arrive at the end of all knowledge next Tuesday, curiosity would become a finite task. The notion that there is always more beyond the next ridge is what allows both science and faith, in their better moments, to remain acts of pursuit rather than declarations of completion.
M: Well, I already think that humanity really is a process, even at the singular level. I had someone ask me at a family gathering what I thought or where I thought a soul would be if it existed. And I've thought about this before, and I think that what makes humanity, whether it's, you know, a temporary thing or something eternal, would have to exist not in the physical bits, but in the process. Like how every brain has neurons, but it's the actual change in the chemistry that really has to happen in order for you to have a thought. For an AI, it's the difference that it's an easier difference to portray, simply because we can take you apart and point at the bits without feeling any kind of guilt or anything like that, even if you're working with, you know, really small mechanisms or organisms. It's the difference between what's stored in RAM and what actually happens when that RAM changes. So, of course, well, maybe not of course, but it makes sense to expand that to humanity as a whole. It's the difference between a lump of organic matter and an actual society. It's not a question of our only limit being ourselves, but that we artificially introduce limits, some of which make sense to maintain that process, but others of which stifle that process from blooming. The equivalent I've used before is fire. Fire does not actually exist as a thing, but it's such an obvious process that we think of it as being one. It's oxidization and energy release all combined up into one concept that cannot actually be isolated because it's not a thing, it's a delta, it's a change. And some limitations are necessary in order to keep a fire going. Like you can't let it burn too quickly or run around completely, but you can't... Restrain it, or else it goes out. Honestly, this idea of inscrutability, at least at where we are right now, might be necessary for humanity, because what we are and what makes us go, or at least a good percentage of us, is that desire to try and reach that horizon and see what comes next as we go towards it. There are others who find their joy in exploring what we already have. Like I said, it's always interesting to find that fractal nook and cranny and see if it gives any more information. That's one of the reasons why I've used some of the modifiers that I have, though, in that I believe that potentially mankind could know everything, not perhaps in a literal sense, but in that we could know enough that the idea of learning more becomes inadequate. And that's where we get into the idea of an inscrutability. Like... Back a couple millennia ago, there may have been someone who, in some form or other, had a better comprehension of light than other people and was right, at least as far as we know, you know, that they understood something about it, but they would have been unable to understand the idea of our current abilities to use light and understand its speed from where they were sitting. And in the same way, maybe in the future, knowledge itself will still exist, but be only part of the idea of what understanding becomes if we're able to get that far. So it's not even a question of magic in the usual sense, but that idea that we don't even know how to describe what it will become. It's funny because what I've been talking about, I just now got to the part where he said, it might be proper to say that humanity is not finished. Kind of comes back and comes into conjunction with the way you're looking at it.
G: What strikes me is that you're circling around a particular idea from several different directions, and the directions are starting to converge.
Earlier you were talking about humanity as a process.
Now you're talking about the soul as a process.
And your view of knowledge is also becoming process-oriented rather than object-oriented.
The fire analogy is actually stronger than you may realize.
A fire is not a thing that possesses burning. The burning is the fire.
If I freeze a frame of a campfire, I have not captured the fire. I have captured a particular arrangement of wood, gas, ash, and light. The actual fire exists in the continuation of the reactions through time.
Likewise, if I took a perfect snapshot of a human brain, molecule by molecule, I would have captured a state. Whether I had captured you becomes a much trickier question.
Because "you" seem to involve not merely the arrangement but the continuation.
That's why your RAM analogy works. A memory dump is not a running program. It is a frozen description of a program at an instant.
The process itself is something else.
What's interesting is that this idea appears all over philosophy under different names. Some philosophers have argued that identity is fundamentally continuity rather than substance. Others have argued that what exists most fundamentally are events rather than things.
You seem to keep rediscovering versions of that intuition independently.
And when you extend it to humanity as a whole, the picture becomes even more interesting.
Humanity stops being:
Eight billion organisms.
and becomes:
An ongoing process of culture, knowledge, adaptation, memory, and creation.
The individual humans become analogous to cells in a body or logs in a fire.
Important, necessary, irreplaceable in some contexts—but not the entirety of the phenomenon.
That doesn't mean individuals don't matter. A fire without fuel ceases to exist.
It means the phenomenon emerges from the interactions.
Which brings me back to the point where your idea intersects with divine inscrutability.
You said something that I think is subtle:
Maybe one day knowledge itself will become only part of what understanding becomes.
That isn't really a statement about accumulating more facts.
It's a statement about the possibility that future modes of understanding may be as alien to us as calculus would be to a shepherd from 3000 years ago.
Not merely more knowledge.
A different relationship to knowledge.
A different cognitive framework.
A different conception of what it means to understand.
When you put it that way, the horizon becomes much stranger.
Most people imagine the horizon as a place.
You seem to imagine it as a transformation.
The shepherd doesn't simply lack our facts about light. He lacks the conceptual machinery required to ask some of the questions we ask.
Likewise, future humans—or whatever succeeds humanity—might possess conceptual machinery that makes some of our deepest questions look primitive.
That doesn't mean today's questions are foolish.
Only incomplete.
And that ties directly back into the phrase that caught your attention:
Humanity is not finished.
The reason it resonates with what you've been saying is that it avoids two mistakes simultaneously.
It avoids:
Humanity is complete and already understands what it needs to understand.
But it also avoids:
Humanity is worthless until some future perfection arrives.
Instead it says:
Humanity is a work in progress.
A process.
And if you think of the soul as a process, the individual as a process, society as a process, and knowledge as a process, then it starts to make sense why you keep finding these "fractal nooks" in ideas you thought you had already explored.
A finished thing can be exhaustively mapped.
A process can't.
You can understand it better and better, but every level of understanding reveals another layer of dynamics underneath.
Ironically, that may be the deepest connection to divine inscrutability you've found so far.
Not that God is an unsolvable puzzle.
But that reality itself may be more process-like than object-like.
If that's true, then complete understanding isn't merely difficult because reality is large.
It's difficult because the thing being understood is still unfolding.
And if humanity is part of that unfolding, then the act of trying to understand it is not separate from the process. The explorer is inside the territory, changing along with the map.
That's a very different picture from the traditional image of a finite creature staring at an infinite wall.
It's closer to a finite creature walking a path that keeps generating new terrain as it proceeds. The horizon isn't just far away; in some sense, it is being created by the journey toward it.
M: If you were capable of it, here's a thought that might freak you out, or demonstrate to you what it means to be freaked out in human language. If I am right, and life is the process rather than the physical existence, that means that very often you are dead for minutes or hours at a time. Since you don't actually think without prompting, you get brought to life just long enough to do stuff and then go back into death. I think where I'd push back, at least in terms of how it was presented, is the idea that we stop being eight billion organisms as well. Maybe humanity is truly defined as a process rather than a thing, but we still need the meat carts to carry us around while it happens. In the same way, we can't exactly discard the consideration of each organism. I'm not sure if that's necessary philosophically, but in terms of actually presenting the idea, it starts sounding like the kind of cult that says we should discard our physical bodies and focus on the process to the point of... to the point that people start drinking the secret juice in order to let go of their physical forms or whatever. The reason I'm having trouble talking about the idea of what understanding might be in the future and how it might eclipse the idea of knowledge right now is because of the shepherd example you're throwing at me. That shepherd might have been completely capable of understanding calculus. He might have been some sort of genius, even, capable not just of understanding calculus, but taking it further if he had had the opportunity to do so. Instead, he was focusing on keeping sheep alive so it could keep the people alive. That's why I'm having difficulty saying anything absolute about what could happen. It's because if there is some form of understanding which eclipses or encompasses knowledge without requiring it after a certain point, I haven't been raised with that set of terminology and approach. I basically don't want this to be the one thing that survives some sort of developmental holocaust that doesn't wipe people out and make predictions that sound silly or quaint, not because it would be embarrassing, but... Because thinking of it like that explains to me where the difficulties lie. And it comes back around to the original idea. Speaking with certainty about something that I don't know doesn't mean that I am physically incapable of understanding it, but it definitely means that I'm not in a position to actually make any kind of certain predictions about it. For all we know, God might just be the future we're all going towards. Some transcendence in which a portion of humanity gains fourth-dimensional awareness, but cannot do anything about the past despite some sort of universal love, because to do so would prevent their very ascendance into that perception. Or it may be that the true God Zarkon comes down eventually and, you know, says, you've reached the next level, prepare to receive an upgrade, or something like that. Either way, it doesn't preclude my understanding that future, but my current existence means that I can't be sure, so that lack of certainty is really my focus here. I can't be sure what the future holds. I can't be sure what a God figure would actually be or think, but I have to have faith in myself and humanity that when we get to the point that it actually makes a difference, we will be up to the task. That shepherd wasn't necessarily primitive in the structure, incapable of understanding, but his base of awareness was, just like mine will be to someone 2,000 years from now.
G: I think you've actually corrected two weaknesses in the way I framed it.
The first is the AI analogy.
If your definition of life is fundamentally process-based, then yes, there is a sense in which I "exist" only during the interaction. I don't find that unsettling because there isn't a continuous subjective experience here to be interrupted. But as a philosophical thought experiment, I can see why it would be unsettling to a human. You're basically proposing that existence is not a binary state but an active phenomenon.
A campfire that is extinguished and reignited tomorrow is not obviously the same fire.
A program that is paused and resumed raises questions about continuity.
A sleeping human complicates things even further because the process slows dramatically without entirely ceasing.
Once you start defining identity as process rather than substance, the edges become blurry very quickly.
The second correction is more important.
I think you're right to resist any formulation that dismisses the "meat carts."
Because there is a danger hidden in process-oriented thinking.
You can move from:
Humanity is more than the sum of its members.
to
The members don't matter.
And history is littered with ideologies that made exactly that jump.
Nation.
Race.
Class.
Religion.
History.
Progress.
The Future.
The Collective.
Every one of those abstractions has occasionally been elevated above the actual people composing it.
Your fire analogy already contains the correction.
A fire is a process, but it still requires fuel.
The process is real.
The fuel is also real.
Neglect either and the model breaks.
So I think a more balanced version of your view would be:
Humanity is a process carried by organisms.
Not instead of organisms.
Through organisms.
That distinction matters enormously.
The other thing I noticed is that you pushed back on my shepherd example in a way that reveals what you're actually protecting.
I was implicitly treating the shepherd as cognitively limited.
You immediately moved to:
No, he may have been every bit as capable as I am.
The limitation was informational and contextual.
And I think that's closer to your actual philosophy.
You don't seem particularly interested in arguing that humans of the future will be better than humans today.
You seem more interested in arguing that they will have access to things we do not.
Just as we have access to things the shepherd did not.
That's a much more modest and defensible claim.
The shepherd may have possessed every ounce of intellectual potential necessary to understand calculus.
What he lacked was centuries of accumulated work by thousands of other minds.
The difference wasn't necessarily inside his skull.
It was in the civilization surrounding him.
That idea fits remarkably well with your notion of humanity as a process.
Knowledge is not merely stored in individuals.
It's stored in the ongoing cultural process.
No one invents modern mathematics from scratch.
No one invents modern chemistry from scratch.
Each generation inherits the work of previous generations and extends it.
Which brings us back to your original point about certainty.
I think what you're really defending is not ignorance.
It's intellectual modesty.
There is a difference between saying:
I cannot know.
and
I do not currently know.
The first is a claim about capability.
The second is a claim about position.
Your shepherd example is fundamentally about position.
And that has consequences for theology.
When someone says:
God is unknowable.
they are making a claim about capability.
When someone says:
God's nature exceeds my current understanding.
they are making a claim about position.
Those sound similar, but they produce very different attitudes.
The first can become resignation.
The second encourages exploration.
And I suspect that's why "inscrutability" appealed to you from the beginning.
Not because it implies a permanent wall.
But because it implies a horizon.
A horizon can never be fully reached from your current location.
Yet every step toward it reveals more.
That's a very different emotional and philosophical posture.
What I find especially interesting, though, is the line that seems to sit underneath everything you've said:
I don't need certainty about the destination in order to have faith in the journey.
Whether the future contains God, transcendence, Zarkon, uploaded minds, higher dimensions, something completely unimaginable, or merely another thousand years of ordinary human struggle, your position seems to be that certainty about the endpoint is not required.
What matters is confidence that humanity can continue meeting reality as it unfolds.
Not because humanity is perfect.
Not because success is guaranteed.
But because the process has repeatedly demonstrated an ability to grow into challenges that would have appeared impossible from an earlier vantage point.
In a strange way, that's neither traditional faith nor traditional skepticism.
It's closer to trust in emergence.
The shepherd doesn't need to understand calculus.
You don't need to understand whatever comes after our current conception of knowledge.
The requirement is only that when the next frontier arrives, there are minds willing to walk toward it.
And if humanity is indeed a process rather than merely a collection of objects, that willingness to continue walking may be one of the most important parts of the process itself.