This is, if you like, a "negative theology." The next sentence but one after the five ways (Summa theologiae 1.2.3) begins, "Because we cannot know what God is but only what God is not..." Aquinas thinks that we do not and cannot in this life know the answer to the question, Why is there anything instead of nothing? -- but we label it "God." To say that we have a valid question (one with an answer) is to say that God exists; for what we mean by "God" is just whatever answers the question. Apart from knowing this, says Aquinas most insistently, all we can do is point, as systematically as we can, to several kinds or categories of things that the answer could not be -- e.g., whatever would answer the question could not itself be subject to the question, otherwise we are left as we were, with the same question still to answer.
--CGE (still quoting H. McCabe)
On Tue, 14 Dec 2004, Jon Johanning wrote:
> Perhaps we could go back to Thomas Aquinas for this. His proofs for
> the existence of God were not the same as the contemporary one from
> the complexity of the observed world, but his position on the
> knowability of God could probably be applied to the contemporary
> "provers." Namely, if certain statements about the observed universe
> are true, then an infinitely wise, etc., intelligence must exist to
> explain them. However, the full nature of this infinite intelligence
> cannot be known by us, because our minds are too limited to penetrate
> such mysteries fully. Hence, we must make use of revealed truth to
> fill out the picture.
>
> People who reject this position (like me, and also you, I suppose)
> often argue that even if these "proofs" proved what they are supposed
> to (which they don't, because of various flaws that have been
> exhaustively discussed in the literature), the ultimate resource to an
> authoritative text which must be believed to speak the truth just
> because T. Aq. (and his friends) say so makes those proofs
> unnecessary. If we have to believe what the authoritative texts tell
> us, we may as well believe that the deity or deities they speak of
> exist in the first place. What's the point of going through all the
> elaborate business of offering "proofs"?
>
> Of course, T. Aq. also says that the existence of God, though
> rationally provable (he thinks), is also revealed because there are
> those without sufficient intelligence to understand the rational
> arguments.
>
> On Dec 14, 2004, at 4:33 PM, Jim Farmelant wrote:
>
> (about Hook's criticisms of Aquinas)
>
> I tend to agree with Hook's criticisms, but from a little different
> direction. The problem with T. Aq.'s "analogical" variety of meaning
> is that the analogy he is referring to is, roughly: "X as it applies
> to God : X as it applies to human beings and the rest of the created
> world :: God the Creator (who is infinite, i.e., unlimited in any way)
> : the created world" (where X is a property such as "good,"
> "intelligent," "just," "powerful," etc.). In other words, "God is
> good" in an "infinite" or "unlimited" sense, not like the goodness of
> humans, and God is creative and powerful in an "infinite" sense
> (which, by the way, is why T. Aq. thinks the chain of causation from
> effect to cause to cause of that cause ... stops at God, since being
> unbounded in any way, he doesn't something else to bring him into
> existence.)
>
> The problem with this, though, is that once you call God "infinite" in
> this metaphysical sense (different from the mathematical meaning of
> the word), you no longer have any way of giving an understandable
> meaning to what you are saying about the fellow, since language that
> is understandable to humans must use words which are defined by
> limiting their meanings. Or as Hook puts it, there is no way to
> control the appropriateness of God-talk.
>
> As it is often said, theology is a kind of intellectual tennis played
> without a net.
>
> OTOH, the closest to an honest way of talking about God is the
> "negative way," the _via negativa_, in which one admits that there is
> no way of speaking intelligibly about what God is like, only what he
> is *not* like. I don't think it's quite completely honest, because
> statements about God with "not" in them are just as lacking in meaning
> as ones without "not," as far as I can see...