How Can We Know God? Part 2: Primates, the Divine, and Christopher Hitchens

This month's issue of Vanity Fair includes yet another reflection from contributing editor Christopher Hitchens. Titled, "Unanswerable Prayers," Hitchens is continuing to reflect on his recent diagnosis of prostate cancer.

The writer and agnostic has been receiving great attention as of late because his prognosis isn't good and many are claiming, hoping, and wishing that Hitchens would recant his belief that we live in, "a splendidly godless universe."

His precise statement of belief is actually agnostic, but his writing and speaking gives little room for the consideration of the divine.In this month's Vanity Fair column, Hitchens responds to an unnamed radical blogger who claims that Hitchens' cancer is "God's revenge for him using his voice to blaspheme." He spends much of his column mentioning the many calls, emails, and letters he has received, informing him that churches of all types are praying for him.

His response to this blogger is in four points: 1) What "mere primate" can really "know the mind of god?" 2) Does this author really want these things read by his children? 3) Why not a thunderbolt to take him down, or something more "awe-inspiring." 4) "Why cancer at all?" Cancer is one of the most random diseases contracted by humans.

I am, of course, most concerned with the blogger and secondly concerned with Hitchens' common claim: how can a primate know such a god?

This is a common threat and a place I'm afraid many Christians fumble in answering. If God is so great and so big, how can you - an insignificant human - know him? I've been called prideful, arrogant, and many other things for claiming to know the things of God.

The claim of many religions is summed up in one word: revelation. God, in his might, made himself accessible to one or a group of people so that they might tell everyone about him. These people are called "prophets" or "founders" or "forefathers" of the faith.

Christianity agrees with this in part, but goes further. Christianity claims that all Christians are not Christians unless God himself reveals who he is to an individual through the person and work of Jesus Christ.

As Peter Jensen says in his brilliant book The Revelation of God: "The gospel is a gospel of grace precisely because it regards human beings as unable on their own to seek and find God."

It's not that God just revealed himself to prophets and apostles, but he revealed himself to me and is revealing and will reveal himself to whomever he so chooses.

A.W. Tozer goes further, saying that the pursuit of such a God is contingent upon that God pursuing us: "We pursue God because, and only because, he has first put an urge within us that spurs us to the pursuit."

Jesus Christ, who is Christianity, stated himself in Luke's gospel: "All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, or who the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him" (Luke 10:22).

To Hitchens I would say this: What mere primate can know God? The ones that Christ has shown himself to, and they are few (Luke 13:22-30).

Lastly, to the blogger, who is of great concern to me: if you knew God, it would be clear that he is not such a cause-and-effect type of God. We know many things of God, but it is a mystery how he exactly works and relates in our world.

Hitchens is incorrect when he says we cannot know God, but he is fully in line with Christian Orthodoxy when he asks, "Which mere primate…can know the mind of god?" You might be surprised, but this agnostic repeats verbatim the Holy Scriptures:

"For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor" (Romans 11:34)?

We can know God - he is good, righteous, fair, and loving - but how he works on earth is not as easy to detect. Many are concerned with the latter when missing the first can be deadly.