Does God Intentionally Withhold Information?

Critics of Christianity often seem to pose the question; If God is all-knowing, why doesn’t He share all of His knowledge with us? I believe this to be a fair question. It does seem, initially, to be rather misguided to purposefully withhold information that could drastically improve our lives, especially considering that God would likely have the ability to create us in such a way that all knowledge is already known to us. So I thought I would take a close look at this subject and see what conclusions I can come to.

God Does Indeed Withhold Information

If we ignore theories of “Bible Code” and merely take the text of the Bible as presented to us, then yes we can be quite certain that God has not presented us with all of the knowledge of the universe. But I highly doubt that anyone reading this was surprised by that statement. I think the more meaningful thing to consider might be why. Why has God chosen not to present us with all the answers of the universe?

Imagine how you might spend your days if all of mankind knew everything that there was to know. There would be no need to work, shop, or travel because we would have found ways to grow, harvest, cook everything that we needed to survive. We wouldn’t need to shop as things would be delivered before we even desired them. Why would we travel if we had already experienced and “knew” everything the world had to offer? Once, we “know” everything, it seems to me that the journey of life has reached it’s end. What would we do that hadn’t been done already? Could anything seem new to us? Perhaps we have just stumbled across the long-sought meaning of life.

While the quest for knowledge may not be the direct meaning of life, I feel as though a life without purpose, surprise, or even disappointment would start to lose its meaning. Perhaps it is a good thing that there is still so much to learn after all?

One thing about having the ability to choose which types of knowledge to seek, is that it reveals so much about the nature and state of humanity. Our ability to destroy each other has grown at a far faster rate than our ability to heal. Right now there are several countries with the ability to end all life on the planet (nuclear armageddon) but all of the worlds’ medical specialists combined could not heal all of the worlds’ sick. What does that say about our nature? We so frequently choose war over peace and this could be the very reason that God would choose to limit our knowledge, forcing us to choose our own path forward and improve our own society. Given our greed and selfish nature, is there a single person who could be trusted with exceptional knowledge beyond the rest of humanity?