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I can't speak for all religions, but the Judeo-Christian tradition has always believed God is beyond measure. Some examples are from the Jewish/Christian Bible

• tokenadult 12y ago
  However, both the Hebrew scriptures of the Old Testament and the Greek scriptures have always asserted that God is active in history and actively intervened to change the course of history for his chosen people. My process of discovering that the specific parts of the Bible are not verifiable, while the verifiable parts of the Bible are not specific, involved learning all the original languages of the Bible, reading through the Bible in its entirety in those original languages, and meanwhile learning about the verifiable history of the times and places described in the Bible. Simply put, whoever wrote the Bible was not infallible, but sadly very fallible indeed. And that shows that the Bible is not God's word revealed to us, as I was taught in my youth, but rather a collection of human stories and speculation about God, which anyone has the right to disagree with, as the overall description of God and his attributes is not even consistent among the various Biblical writings.
• mikeash 12y ago
  There's a whole lot more to the Judeo-Christian tradition than the part where God is beyond measure. Said tradition also has a lot of specific elements in it. Those specific elements are now being abandoned, because as it becomes possible to examine them, they're found to be untrue. So yes, religion has always spoken of things beyond measure, but it used to speak of a lot more than just that. It's frequently said that there is no conflict between religion and science. The only reason this appears to be true is because when they do conflict, religion has no choice but to retreat. Histories become metaphors. Prophesies get reinterpreted. Specific claims become ever more vague when they fail to stand up to the test.
• chroma 12y ago
  That stance has only become mainstream since the enlightenment. Before then, people thought God was clearly active in everyday life. After all, who else could visit droughts on lands that didn't worship him enough? Or send plagues to towns of the unfaithful? Or destroy false churches and temples with earthquakes and lightning? As late as the 1700's, people were advised to stay away from churches during thunderstorms so as to avoid divine retribution. This isn't just historical fact. The Bible itself contains multiple instances of people successfully testing Yahweh's existence. In fact, one of the earliest documentations of a scientific experiment is the story of Elijah and the priests of Baal.[1] In it, Elijah and the priests both try to set fire to piles of wood by praying to their gods. Elijah makes it more challenging for himself by having his pile soaked with water. The 450 priests of Baal are unable to summon fire for their dry pile, but Yahweh lights Elijah's water-soaked pile. This being the old testament, Elijah has all the priests of Baal killed afterwards. Why the change in views today? It's not that complicated. Religions have been forced to change in response to challenges from science. The reason people say God is unmeasurable today is because we tried to measure him and found nothing. 1. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+kings+18%3A21-18%3A40&version=KJV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+kings+18%3A21...
• yawboakye 12y ago
  So discovering the laws of motion, universal gravitation, etc means we understand fully the ways of God? As if the scripture text you quoted meant that such knowledge was hidden from us. Well, what is hidden from science (but explained in the Bible by a God who's hiding every piece of information) is our purpose here, why we grow old and die, how our universe came into existence, how life began, and how to gain salvation. Don't get me wrong, how crops grow in the field is a fascinating question to answer but materially less important.