The oldest theological tradition said God cannot be described at all
Long before modern atheism, the most rigorous believers in the three Abrahamic faiths insisted that every positive claim about God was already a mistake.
Medieval theologians had a name for it: the via negativa, or apophatic theology. The idea was startling in its discipline. You cannot say God is wise, because wisdom is a human category and God exceeds every human category. You cannot say God is good, for the same reason. You cannot even say God exists, if existence means what it means when you apply it to rocks or people.
What you can do is say what God is not. God is not finite. Not limited. Not comprehensible. The closer you approach, the more language fails — and the failure is the point.
Karen Armstrong traces this tradition in A History of God (1993), showing it running through Jewish thinkers like Maimonides in 12th-century Córdoba, through Muslim mystics like Ibn Arabi, through Christian contemplatives like Meister Eckhart. All of them arrived, by different routes, at the same conclusion: the God you can fully describe is not God.
Armstrong argues that much modern atheism is responding to a naive, literalist version of God that the medieval mystics themselves would have rejected. The conflict is largely between two different kinds of theism, not between theism and its critics.
The apophatic tradition is more interested in silence than in argument. It treats mystery not as a problem to be solved but as the only honest place to stand.