Who can know the mind of God?

Cosmologist Stephen Hawking's publicists are busy promoting his latest book right now, giving us the impression that his latest theories dispense with the need to consider that existence, the universe (or universes if there be many) ever had or ever needed a creator. He speculates about demonstrating mathematically that everything in existence is simply self generating, with no need for a divine Author to enter the equation. He is confident that the laws governing the process will be one day be proved by experiment to be the only necessary reality. Similar controversy forty years ago surrounded Prof Fred Hoyle who proposed his steady state theory by which new matter is spontaneously created out of energy as old matter is transformed into energy. That speculation didn't need God either to propose no beginning or end to the material universe.  Cosmologists work on mathematical theories which only a tiny elite can really understand, and are difficult to ground in everyday reality. How different is this from wondering how many angels can dance on the head of a needle?

Hawking is utterly brilliant and challenging, to give him his credit. In his 'Brief History of Time' twenty odd years ago he expressed the confidence that mathematics and observation would deliver us theories which unified and even simplified all the laws of nature in a way that enable us to know the 'mind of God'. OK, it's a respectable enough scientific pursuit, but the idea of knowing the 'mind of the God' originates in a rhetorical question on the part of St Paul, marvelling at the mystery of existence and divine transcendence, in first  Corinthians 2:16 and in Romans 11:34, (in a doxological poem derived from a Greek Jewish earlier text) The complete phrase says: 'Who can know the mind of the Lord?' (here, the Lord = God). It expresses the classic idea of divine transcendence and unknowability to reason, a notion pre-dating Christianity, which is re-iterated by St Augustine in the fifth century AD.

So, when Hawking first stated his position, was he being over-confident, optimistic or arrogant about knowing the un-knowable? Attempts to tell the true story about the origin of all things describe creation from nothing in the language of the laws of nature, laws derived from mathematical theories verified by observation. There's no need to embed God in the equation as the 'first cause', kick-starting the appearance of matter, time and space from nothing, just because ancient story-tellers did  this in the scriptures. There's no way that reasoning could confirm it was true anyway, if God is unknowable to reason. 'In the beginning God ...' is a statement of  faith conviction arising from a sense of awe and wonder experienced when the universe is contemplated, by whatever means.

Any attempt to give a complete account of creation occurs inside the very thing it seeks to describe, however thorough and exhaustive the attempt, it can only ever be partial. There's no absolute certainty that the 'insider' can understand or represent a transcendent whole view of all that exists. Even if our account of all the laws of the universe was complete and correct, the question about the origin  of such laws stands unanswered. You can say the laws 'just are' and don't need an origin if you like, but that's a choice opinion, no more than speculation which cannot be proved true or false. Even if we say the laws originate in the mind of God, it's only our theory, equally un-testable, if God is unknowable, and beyond the power of reason alone to grasp.

Knowledge of God derives from  love, God's self disclosure happens in the experience of being loved and returning love, which transcends all experiences of human relationships and dwells in the depths of our humanity. This is knowledge as it lives in feeling, intuition, imagination and will, more than it does in reason. Reason at work in detachment from these other elements issues in partial fragmentary knowledge about anything. The whole person knows what the mind alone does not. Faith of the whole person that 'God is' - in, above and beyond Creation, does not explain the universe,  but enables us to point to a source to the universe and the laws which have formed it  and reverence with awe the source of existence, the mystery beyond our finite ability to conceive or contain. 

The ancients seem to have understood this well enough within their own limited worlds and cultures. They used anthropomorphisms and picture language to tell stories about divine creatorship with fertile liberty. They knew their stories pointed people in the direction of  unknown reality, and helped them engage with it. Science and maths tell creation stories today in their own way. It may be more abstract and elaborate than the myth making of old, but it serves the same  purpose - helping us live more truthfully the life we have. We just seem to find it so much harder than they did to acknowledge anything outside or greater than our own power to reason. Is our sense of self significance doing us that much good, I wonder?