There is a modern proclivity to take intellect as the epitome of being, and because of that inclination many think it profitable to frame the idea of the divine in terms of intellect. The divine becomes the all-knowing as well as the answer to all we do not know.
The divine term, whatever it may be, cannot be used as an answer for the inexplicable or the unexplained. If the divine is tied to the idea of that which we do not know or understand, sooner or later, the divine will become irrelevant, since knowledge progresses. The divine can never be used as a Deus ex machina without becoming discounted.
I suggest it is better to think of the divine in terms of the “in-expressible”. We are intellectually able to use ideas such as life, love, hope, beauty, truth, contradiction of opposites, etc., but the depth of that to which they refer is in-com-prehensible (because they enfold us, not we them), non-under-standable (because we stand on them), in-expressible (because their scope transcends us and our intellectual categories).
The Prophet Isaiah speaks of the divine as dwelling in light inaccessible, as completely transcendent, and Apostle Paul speaks of the divine as that power working in us that can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine, the divine as completely immanent. These ideas are contradictory, but they express two aspects of the divine that every theology has struggled with: God as the wholly other and beyond, and in that sense, irrelevant, and God the totally immersed in the fabric of being, and in that sense indistinguishable from it. That the divine is both may be is logically a contradictory statement, but instinctively, this inexpressibility carries weight.
Too often talk about the divine forgets that the great theologians have consistently taught that we talk of the divine by way of some form of analogy. We have no direct empirical experience of the divine. But we do know something about ourselves and the world we live in. We have the ability to organize matter and information, and the ability to project ourselves (in trust in others and ideas, in hope, in love). We can extrapolate or infer that the order of science, the will to be and to live, the impulse to put ourselves forward in search of knowledge, possibilities, others, are qualities that have an origin or basis in the source of all things, the very life-force of (or beyond) the universe. There is, in this sense, a basis to speak of the divine as the source of all knowledge, hope, love, even as a person, since for us “person” is the concept that expresses all those things in one independent sustained package. But, we cannot allow ourselves to rationally erase the words “by analogy”. We cannot jump from saying these things are reflective of life, to saying these things are the nature of Life-Itself, the definition of Life-Itself.
And there is a wee problem in the use of analogy based on human nature: we are not perfect. We may have the capacity to live and love and hope and trust and learn, but we also have a capacity to vegetate and turn to dust, and to hate and destroy. We can scarcely exalt the good things about us to the highest degree and ignore the bad. If the divine is the source of life as we know it, and we feel justified in talking about the divine as the source of all that is good and orderly in the universe, we cannot turn a blind eye to the existence of chaos and evil.
There is a wonderfully insightful line in the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis. When humanity tastes the forbidden, God decries that they shall now be like the divine knowing good and evil. Keep in mind it is one thing to know something, another to comprehend it, another to understand it. Knowledge indicates a working experience of something. Comprehension is a broader term indicating an ability to encompass the experience, and understanding indicates an ability to grasp the root of the reality. We neither comprehend nor understand evil, physical or moral. That is why it is perennially referred to as the “problem of evil”.
But, sanctimoniousness aside, we cannot deny these powers to the divine, and we instinctively know that, and manifest that in talk about gods of destruction, judgment to hell, divine wrath, etc. I suggest it is our own dislike for the darkness within us and the ills that plague us that cause us to delete these qualities form inclusion in the divine. We experience them as negative experiences, and want life to be a positive experience. This is a point for hope. But if the Life-force, the divine, is the font, the foundation, the fabric of all that is, in some in-expressible way that frothing, gushing, ever flowing creativity is at once and in the ultimate degree the bedrock of good and evil, the Father not only of Jesus, but Satan, not only of Gandhi, but Hitler. Our logic demands contradictions cannot exist. Our questing for the ultimate leads us to, if only in the most contorted of ways, acknowledge that opposites can be reconciled, if only within the scope of the eternal, the all-encompassing, the in-expressible source and end of all that is. But the “problem” cannot be erased except by hope or better said, “in hope”.
The great myths, the holy scripts and creeds, the great theologians and spiritual teachers have all, in the words and ideas of the day, tried to convey the mystery that enfolds us, that we flow out of, that we flow into. Their words are not the words of science, but the sighs of love and hope, the poetry of the human spirit soaring out into the vastness of being, the song of the soul closing its eyes in upon itself. These things yield no science, speak no knowledge, but they raise the heart and mind to a level where hope dares, trust takes a step out into the vast future, and man can bless himself and his world saying “yes, life is good” and be thankful for it, for it all.