God exists, but cannot be known. It is, however, the fact that God cannot be known that is the one means humanity has of knowing that God exists. This sounds paradoxical, but it is not. For, while God is unknowable, the desire to know God can be shown to exist. While this desire is, admittedly, a human impulse, it is also an impulse that is not related to the limited range of human existence. There are other, seemingly unrealizable, goals to which humanity aspires. But love, peace, justice, knowledge and others like them are clearly related to the limited human sphere. The desire to know God might, in order to distinguish it from these desires, be called a transcendent impulse. It is only the existence of this impulse that even hints at the existence of God.
The severe constraints inherent in human knowledge, language and reasoning make the demonstration of God's existence impossible. No human term--not "universal," or "omnipotent," or "infinite," or "omniscient," or even "other"--is adequate to the task of describing God's existence. These terms hint at humanity's recognition of the essential unknowable-ness of God. Each of them describes some quality that cannot be realized by a human being and can only be a quality of some existence that is not human. Yet these terms fail to achieve their goal of describing such an existence because they themselves exist, inevitably, in relation to human experience. They are terms that originate in humanity's recognition of its own limitations. They are not words that originate in the recognition of that which has no limitations, and indeed there can be no such words. Thus humanity is left only with the knowledge that it desires to know something which it cannot describe--but to which it assigns terms that attempt to describe its indescribability.
Since humanity has no other way of reasoning about this impulse, it has always been necessary to develop some manner of representi...