the existence of sin might be an answer to that. in the bible people like Moses and the prophets understood God in a way that most men didn't, even though they didn't understand him completely. these men were called 'righteous' even while they still had flaws. later in the new testament it was taught that it was their faith that made them righteous (in Hebrews) - and that faith made them live lives with less sin than ordinary people. so the two principles of faith and avoiding sin are connected, and understanding God seems to go hand-in-hand. certainly the more we devote our thoughts to God, the less we do to ourselves, and that leads to more 'righteous living' - and who is going to understand God that hasn't put any thought into it?
the god in the bible says we have to trust him before we can know him, that we are poisoned and that he can heal us, if we trust him to do so - and that until we are healed we can't really know him.
if we assume the way He's made things is best, then He must consider trust without complete understanding to be better than understanding him first, and then trusting. a lot of human systems are the same way - a good servant, soldier, employee or computer code operates effectively on very little information. it does it's job without a big data packet being stored and moved around, or without sending out the complete battle plan or design specs to everyone.
maybe God is just cutting down on unnecessary paperwork!
haha i don't always fall back to that. the way i think, i don't want to 'judge' God, but i still want to understand Him. it's like having a crashed spaceship to look at -- i take for granted that the technology is superior, so when the systems aren't like earth technology, i want to find out why, and i might have to throw away my preconceptions of good engineering, and accept some cogs and circuit boards as 'black boxes' until i've learned more.
yes!
but "long enough" may be a lot longer than our lifetimes.
when people get into science vs religion arguments, they often forget or downplay how much faith is involved in science. the whole basis of doing physics and trying to find natural laws to describe how the universe works is the assumption that there are natural laws, and that rigorous mathematics can be used to describe how everything happens. this really is just an assumption - there's no 'reason' that everything should follow a pattern and that pattern should be the same all over the universe, all throughout time -- but doing science is trusting that that's the case.
performing a 'god experiment' can be like looking for a higgs boson - we may need to build bigger and bigger spiritual 'atom smashers' even while every one we've built so far didn't give us any results. it may take more energy than the sum of all the resources in the solar system to build one big enough. we may need to build giant water reservoirs miles under the surface of the earth and wait centuries before an unlikely collision takes place - our grandchildren may not even live to see evidence. we may have to build some great detector or apparatus in outer space, that our technology and resources can't accomplish, but may one day if we don't blow ourselves up first in some petty war.
maybe understanding God is most like needing a spaceship that can travel to some distant star. it's something we cannot do firsthand until we've devoted enormous resources to it, and then it may be that only our great great great grandchildren get to see it, because of the faith we had when we built the generation ship. or like evidence of life after death - no one can be sure until they've died, and those that passed over can't come back to give us the results.
it's a catch-22 -- we won't know if we don't spend an enormous amount of time and energy, and we won't know if all that time and energy was worth it until after we spend it. the bigger question becomes whether or not the first question is worth finding an answer to!
