Comments on Theism from an Agnoiologist.
The God of Abraham (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) is the sole master of all things. He is that he is, and with this necessary self-existence comes the classical vision of the omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God. Generally understood, this means God has no limits. However, is this the correct way to understand God?
Agnoiology, the sister science to epistemology, was named by James Frederick Ferrier in 1854. Epistemology is the well-known study of theories of knowledge. Agnoiology is the largely unknown study of theories of ignorance (ironic). Epistemology concerns itself with what can be known and how we can claim to know it successfully. Agnoiology concerns itself with what if means to be ignorant and what, ultimately, will always be unknowable. That agnoiology has been ignored by modern scholarship isn't surprising. We are, as a culture, primarily scientific positivists. Therefore, the idea that something could be genuinely unknowable is deeply unsettling to us.
So, what does agnoiology have to do with God? The answer is that if something really is ultimately, absolutely unknowable, it can be unknown to an all-knower without contradiction.
But to be omniscient is to know everything! Surely, nothing is unknowable to God! Wrong, even God doesn't know a triangle with 4 sides because such a thing must be unknowable because it is impossible. Impossible? Surely, that can not be because God is omnipotent. Nothing is impossible for him. Yet mutatis mutandis, if omniscience can not know the unknowable, omnipotence can not do the impossible.
To be all-knowing is to have all the knowledge, but there is no knowledge to be had of that which cannot be known. To be all-powerful is to have all the power, but power is limited by the impossible. And all-goodness ought to be incapable of willing evil for its own sake, yet what happens when goods conflict in a tragic dilemma?
Of course, an omniscient and omnipotent being would have limits well beyond anything we can do, but that is not to say there are none. As the goddess of the underworld said to Parmenides, "the only knowledge that can be had of non-being is non-knowledge." If there are such things as the unknowable and the impossible, only God, at the maximum of capabilities, can truly know what they are.
Knowledge and ignorance relate to each other by a matter of degree. The pursuit of knowledge is also the escape from ignorance, but sometimes only the acceptance of ignorance in the moment can bring about knowledge. In asking if we can accept that something may be unknowable, which, like the claim that it is knowable, is not one we can ever be entirely sure about, it would do us good to remember that even omniscience does not contradict the possibilities of ultimate mysteries.