Is belief or faith the same as idolatry?

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To paraphrase your question, it seems like you're asking if the transcendence of God precludes true knowledge of God.

The answer is no.

The transcendence of God means that God is beyond our full comprehension. We cannot "master" God like someone can master arithmetic, or a foreign language, or how to ride a bike. Our brains can't contain everything there is to know about God, we can't fit him into any boxes. We are finite beings, who cannot comprehend the infinite, and we cannot know God as God knows himself.

But this does not mean that we can't have true knowledge of God. God created human beings, including our brains and our minds. He gave us powerful intellects. He also gave us a powerful tool: language. He designed our brains, our minds, and our languages so that we can know many things, including many things about himself. He made us with the intention of having relationships with us, so we would be faulty creations if we were incapable of that. He designed our languages so that he could give us texts that communicate truths about himself. Yes there are limits to our languages, but those limits do not mean the scriptures are useless at revealing God, far from it! He gave us the mental capacity to fulfil our purpose: to know him.

Every thought of ours is not idolatrous. Every one of our conceptions of God was not crafted from our neurons. Only those that do not come from reflection on God's self-revelation to us in the scriptures he inspired. When we read that "God is good", that is true, even though we can only know a small portion of his goodness. When we read that "God is just", that is true even if there are occasions when we can't understand the logic of his just actions. When we read that "God is uncreated and eternal" that is true, even though we can't understand what it means to exist outside of the creation and outside of time.

Let me give an analogy to finish up: our knowledge of God is sometimes like the knowledge that someone who was born completely blind has of colours. They may be able to understand the physics of light waves of various frequencies. They may be able to understand that light can be beautiful because they understand the beauty of music. But their knowledge and understanding lacks the personal experience of someone who can see. But they can still say true and false things, that trees have green leaves, that the sky and sea are blue. They can tell the truth that an apple is red or they can lie and say it is blue. When we say that God exists outside the universe he created, our knowledge of that existence is like the knowledge of green apples and green trees for someone who has never seen the colour green. Transcendent, but still absolutely true.

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