Views of God Part II: Why does everyone see God differently

Why is there so many different interpretations of "God"? there quite a few possibilities. Just to enumerate some of the possible explanations:

1. God has many facets: God is not human, so he does not need to be restrained by a finite brain or a finite number of traits. He could be many things at the same time. This is not tantamount to saying that God changes over time, just that the way He choses to reveal Himself changes.
2. God is incomprehensible: Being not a part of the world, He got a series of traits that are not comprehensible by the material human brain.
3. The biblical God is contradictory: By matter of changes in the original texts, or inaccurate accounts of the facts, or ambiguity of the human language, God has a poorly description or a wrong one.
4. Human knowledge is limited: People try to model reality according to observed behavior in the past. That way we can predict, for example, how a ball would fall from a table or how a rabbit would act if we spill hot water in his cute white tail. For more complex objects, like human beings, we can have strong feelings about how one should act, but our predictions still are going to fail once and again. If we can not model people perfectly, let alone God, Who is, by definition, infinitely more complex.
5. God does not exist: if God is purely fictional, people imagine God as they will. Because the bible is so full of contradictions, one has to select parts of the bible to create a coherent God image. Because there are infinitely many ways to chose characteristics, there are a large array of interpretations one can give to God.

We may never know which one (or a combination of them) is the right answer, but what we do know is that people's interpretations change. They change from person to person and they change over time. In the next part I am going to discuss how the concept of God changed since the dawn of man.

links:

• Why do people believe in God [en]