On Tue, 14 Dec 2004 12:37:10 -0600 "C. G. Estabrook"
<galliher at alexia.lis.uiuc.edu> writes:
> Aquinas, for one, recognized the problem posed by these analogies,
> and he
> thought that it was a problem about language. To put it crudely,
> our
> language (however it works) is about things in the universe, and God
> is
> not a thing in the universe: therefore our words can at best
> "gesture" at
> God. Thomas called that "analogy," extending so to speak Aristotle's
> usage.
>
> He suggests that words can be used to "try to mean" what God is,
> even
> though they do not circumscribe what God is. The obvious objection
> to
> this is that in, e.g., "God is good," "good" must either mean the
> same as
> it means when applied to creatures or something different. If it
> means
> the same, then God becomes another thing in the universe; if does
> not mean
> the same then we cannot know what it means by knowing about
> creatures --
> we should have to understand God himself; but we do not, hence we so
> not
> understand it at all -- we only have an illusion of understanding
> because
> the word happens to be graphically the same as the "good" we do
> understand. Thomas wishes to break down this either-or. It is not
> true,
> he says, that a word must mean exactly the same in two different
> uses or
> else mean something altogether different. There is a possibility of
> a
> word being used with related meanings (Aristotle's point).
>
> We might ask why he is not content to say simply that our language
> about
> God is metaphorical. He does not say this because he wants to
> distinguish
> between two different kinds of thing said about God; between
> statements
> like "The Lord is my rock and my refuge" and statements like "God is
> good." The first of these is quite compatible with its denial -- "Of
> course the Lord is not a rock" -- whereas the second is not.
> Theists
> would not say, "God is not good," though they are quite likely to
> say "God
> is good, but not in the way that we are." It is an important point
> about
> metaphor that while we can easily say, "God is not really a rock,"
> we
> cannot so safely say, "The Lord is not a rock in the way that
> Gibraltar
> is." Being a rock in the way that Gibraltar is, is what the poet has
> in
> mind. Unless we think of God as being just like Gibraltar --
> although of
> course not really being a rock -- we betray the poet's meaning.
> Qualification enervates the meaning in a way that flat contradiction
> does
> not. In the case of "good," however, since there are in any case
> many
> ways of being good amongst creatures, there is nothing incongruous
> in
> saying, "God is good, though not in our way." It does not, as
> Thomas
> insists, follow from this that to call God good is to say that God
> is the
> cause of goodness; it is to say, he thinks, that there is something
> we can
> only call goodness in God -- goodness is the best word available for
> signifying this although it does so imperfectly.
>
> No metaphor is the best possible metaphor -- you can always say, "I
> don't
> really mean that." But Thomas thinks that some things said of God,
> even
> though they are imperfect, cannot be improved on by denying them:
> their
> imperfection lies in our understanding of what we are trying to
> mean.
>
> --CGE (all but the first paragraph comes substantially from a note
> in the
> Blackfriars edition of Thomas' Summa theologiae)
>
>
>
Sidney Hook attempted to address what he saw asthe problems with religious language, including the analogy theory, outlined above, his essay, "Modern Knowledge and the Concept of God" in his book *Quest for Being*? There in discussing this issue he wrote:
---------------------------- It should now be clear why those who talk about the concept of God, especially in traditional terms, have such difficulties, and why their arguments keep breaking down. In intellectual fairness we must recognize that they have embarked upon a project of belief which forces them to use the language of paradox and analogy. What exacerbates their difficulty is that the language of paradox and analogy cannot be the same as the ordinary models of paradoxical or analogical discourse. To do justice to the theologians, imagination must give wings to our understanding and broaden the perspective of our vision. But we must remain within the horizon of intelligibility or of what makes sense.
If the term "God" has meaning, we must be able to say what it is. If we say what God is, we must be able to describe him in certain distinct combinations of words and sentences, and therefore we must find some principle which controls our statements. No one who regards the term God as meaningful will admit the propriety of any statement about God, but at the very least he must recognize the degrees of appropriateness with respect to language. And the problem with which we are wrestling breaks out all over again when we ask: what principle determines the appropriateness of the language? For example, the reflective believer in God knows that the ephitet "person" or "father" cannot be literally applied to God, that God isn't a person like other persons or a father like other fathers. Nonetheless he finds no difficulty in praying to "Our Father in Heaven." He would deem it singularly inappropriate for anyone to refer to God in prayer as "Our Nephew in Heaven." Why?
The most plausible answer, based, upon a study of the names of God and the attributes predicated of him, suggests that the principle which controls the appropriateness of our utterances is derived from the language of human ideals, in their anthropological and ethical dimensions. The conclusion is uncontestable that in some sense every intellectual construction of man will reflect his nature. Nor does this fact necessarily entail subjectivity. For even science (which next to mathematics is most frequently taken as a paradigm of objectivity) can be considered to be a human enterprise whose propositions are constructions of, or inferences from, the data of ordinary experience, and describable in language either continuous with ordinary language or constructed from terms which are ultimately so derived, no matter how technical. But the great difference between God as an object of religious belief, and the objects of scientific belief, is that assertions about the latter are controlled by familiar rules of discourse, understood by all other investigators, that they are related by logical steps to certain experimental consequences, and that these consequences can be described in such a way that we know roughly what counts as evidence for or against the truth of the assertions in question. Now that is not the case with respect to those statements which affirm the existence of God. Certain observable phenomena will sometimes be cited as evidence for the truth of the assertion, but it will not be shown how this evidence follows from God's existence; nor will there ever be any indication of what would constitute evidence against its truth.
.
.
. This bring us back to a consideration of the principle which controls the appropriateness of our utterances about God. The most fruitful hypothesis about this principle seems to have been formulated by Ludwig Feuerbach, that greatly neglected figure of the nineteenth century, who declared after a study of the predicates attributed to God that they were projections of human needs - not the needs of the understanding but the needs of the heart, not of the human mind but of human feeling: emotions hopes, and longings. What Feuerbach is saying, as I interpret him, is that the principle which controls the appropriateness of our utterances about God is man's idealized conception of himself, and that the predicates of God, particularly those which make him an object of reverence, worship and aspiration are objectifications of man's highest ethical ideals.
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