Stated more generally:
Are there entities whose claims—by the nature of their existence—are outside the scope of rational inquiry?
Consider the example of the Abrahamic God, the relevant matter not that he's omnipotent or omniscient but that he exists on a whole different level than mere humans. Does his position make him unquestionable using normal methods of inquiry?
If he were to make a claim, i.e. "The Sun is hotter than 6000 kelvin." Are we, as humans, in a position to verify the truth of that claim?
Michael Dorfman suggested below that the nature of an entity (being all-powerful, outside the scope of time, etc.) does not alter the validity of our epistemological approach. Using the example above, whether it were a human or God doesn't seem to matter when we attempt to verify whether the Sun is hotter than 6000 kevlin or not.
However, I remain not quite satisfied with this answer. A new question thus arises, related to but slightly different than the original: Are there some claims that could be made which would be unverifiable when posited by a God rather than a human? In other words:
Is there a connection between the truth value of a statement and the entity which poses it?
Continuing from a previous question I asked regarding whether we could determine if an omnipotent entity is lying or not, a question occurred to me which is best understood through example:
In order to judge whether or not I should believe something, it is important to determine the accuracy of God-spoken scriptures, events, records etc. Fundamentally, the full conclusion should also depend on whether God has lied or not, which I feel many do not consider this.
Example, if we establish that:
- Record shows "X says Y is evil."
- But Y is, in fact, not evil.
The possible explanations for this thus are:
- X lied
- X told the truth but was not knowledgeable
- The Record was falsified and is not actually the word of X
How would we determine which of the 3 occurred? Perhaps more relevant: Does the fact that we are dealing with an omnipotent, omniscient entity alter how we would go about this process?