On the sidebar that followed:
Truly, no one is exempt from the "observer problem." And that includes theologians who sometimes wander beyond the revelations of God, fabricating doctrines and traditions of their own imaginings.
Some of them are harmless - like the color of the carpet - or pointless, like ritual washing of dishes. But some of them can be very harmful indeed, especially when they direct hapless followers away from God.
The most common problem vis-à-vis God and the observer problem is the tendency of men to anthropomorphize Him.
For instance, they may insist that God must comply with Aristotlean Laws of Logic. They might say, by reason of the Law of the Excluded Middle, commandments or revelations in Scripture must be either/or and never both.
As another example, they may insist that God must abide by their own sense of an arrow of time and thus cannot judge a person before he comes into existence to say or do anything whereby he would be judged.
By anthropomorphizing God, they deny God who IS and create a smaller "god" of their own imagining, one they can comprehend.
For instance, they may insist that God must comply with Aristotlean Laws of Logic. They might say, by reason of the Law of the Excluded Middle, commandments or revelations in Scripture must be either/or and never both.
As another example, they may insist that God must abide by their own sense of an arrow of time and thus cannot judge a person before he comes into existence to say or do anything whereby he would be judged.
By anthropomorphizing God, they deny God who IS and create a smaller "god" of their own imagining, one they can comprehend.
It's also possible (and common) to err in the opposite direction: To over (or too exclusively) emphasize God's transcendence at the expense of his immanence in the world.
For instance if God is truly immanent in the world, then some aspects of God do exist within "the arrow of time". (Some, and of course not all, which would be pantheism as opposed to theism.)
Likewise if God is ALL knowing then he must know, in some genuine fashion, of phenomena such as discovering and experiencing new things. Therefore God must have aspects of or within himself that are NOT omniscient, if God in His completeness is omniscient.
Of course both of these aspects, among others, are found in God's incarnation as Christ.
Anyway this opposite error makes for a "big" God, but also one far too distant from his creation.
I disagree.
I would say that there are far more people like myself who wonder why the God of the Bible (especially the Old Testament) seems to be archaically unsophisticated. God's endless blathering about how to grow your crops, treat your slaves, and run your small regional city states makes him seem like a local wise man squatting in an incense-filled lambskin tent rather than the incredible, timeless, all knowing ruler of the universe.
If God is so omnipotent and involved in the goings on of heaven and Earth, why does he limit his scripture's geographic reach to middle eastern backwoods? Surely there were righteous men and human upheavals happening elsewhere in the world that could have used his guidance.
His explanation of the creation time, space, and the Earth reads more like a big budget version of the story we tell children to explain where babies come from; instead of the stork delivering the baby to awaiting parents, we have God fashioning the universe in a few days like he's putting together a train set.
Why does God's words seem so caught up in the dated rituals and social norms of slavery and animal sacrifice that even the laziest and amoral of modern men have long abandoned?
The New Testament is somewhat of an improvement to the Pentateuch and later books of the Old, but it still doesn't do much to improve the ostensible impression that the God of the Bible is very much a being invented by Bronze age story tellers.