The original source from which I took my ideas for this article suggest that we “must admit, when it comes to thinking about God, that we’re all a   little stupid. If you look around you will find that the world is filled with stupid ideas about God and new ones seem to crop up every day.

However, the road to the smart ways of thinking about God is not always smooth or easy. Needless to say, for an invisible God proof can’t be as simple as See God. In fact, it’s actually quite the reverse. When it comes to God, believing is seeing. This may sound like a cosmic Catch-22, but when you think about it, it makes sense. We never discovered the atom until we began to believe it could exist. We never discovered bacteria until we began to believe that illness has a scientific explanation. For discovering and exploring the hidden, more subtle realities beneath the surface of things, believing is seeing. Or at least the beginning of seeing. And it’s really no different when we think about discovering God.

But let’s face it, it isn’t easy to think about God when your human. Like it or not, we’re severely limited by our human nature. We can think about God, or anything, only in human terms. We can create only human ideas about God. We can relate to Him only through concepts, theories and pictures. We can describe God only by human language and through experience. This, of course, limits our ability to embrace smart ways to think about God.

So, of course, there’s plenty of room for contamination. There’s a lot of opportunity to superimpose our view of ourselves on top of God, a lot of opportunity to accidently fashion God after ourselves. (This is find to be especially true when people think about God’s justice and mercy).

Alas, we’re stuck. There’s no way we can ever think about God that will not make Him appear human to some extent. Even if we conceive of Him as some great disembodied force, we can still only conceive of a “force” as we understand it in human terms – such as lightning, electromagnetism, and other such forces. But we need not apologize for that. After all, we are what we are. Still, we are bound to make a few human mistakes.

To err is definitely human. But somewhere you’ve got to draw the line. There are some ways to think about God, as human as they are, that are simply false.

Take a little time to think about how you think about and image God!