Can We Really Know What "God" Means?
A problem one will invariably have to deal with when discussing the existence of a god, is the issue of what exactly is meant when one speaks of a god, more specifically, the Christian god. Not every theist attempts to define or give meaning to his god. However, as is with the Christian religion, some theists belong to a religion based on a "revealed" god. That is, attributes of a god have been revealed through prophets, holy texts, or by some other medium. To escape theistic agnosticism, knowledge of said god is necessary. This leaves the theist in an interesting quagmire, divided between saying what the god is and what the god is not. Without a meaningful trait to characterize a god, we have no possible way of knowing what the god is; we have no way of knowing what we are to worship or what we may all ready be worshipping. That in mind, I think that when one tries to speak of "God" he is speaking of something that is incoherent. The concept of "God" may be very real to the believer, nevertheless, it is illogical and incoherent.
When trying to define a god by saying what it is not, made popular by Thomas Aquinas based on the assumption that "we cannot know what God is, but rather what He is not,"* we are trying to gain insight about the god’s nature by saying what it is not. To say that a god is immutable, is saying that the god is not changing. To say that a god is infinite is to say that the god is not finite. This method of defining a god is called negative theology. A major pitfall of this method of defining a god is that it provides no way of determining what the god is, from nothing at all. We could say that our god is invisible, infinite, and made of non-matter—we can say the same about non-existence. Perhaps the greatest pitfall of negative theology is that it cannot support itself.
Negative theology presupposes that we already know something about the god. We can’t say that the god is immutable, unless we know something about the god to base this claim on—nor can we assert that a god is invisible without having some knowledge about the god. How else could we know the god is immutable or invisible? We could not. If we do not previously know something about what the god, negative theology fails as a method of gaining insight about the nature of a god. In other words, we cannot say with any reliability what a god is not, unless we can say with certainty something about what the god is.
Defining a god by what it is, is called affirmative theology. Since affirmative theology must be true to allow negative theology to be true, if affirmative theology fails so does negative theology by default—leaving us with no logical way to define "God".
A problem is immediately noticed when we try to define a god by saying what it is. We must give it a characteristic. Giving a god a characteristic automatically places a restriction or limit on the god. A common way the theist tries to escape this is by claiming that the characteristics we give to the god are analogous to man. To say that a god is loyal is giving it a characteristic, in turn limiting the god. So, we’re told that it the characteristic of loyalty is analogous to man. The word loyal is applied to the god in proportion to the god’s nature. Much like an analogy between a man and his dog. To say that the dog is loyal to his owner, is applying the word loyal to the dog in proportion to its nature.
A critical problem arises when the theist tries to avoid assigning a limiting characteristic by saying it is analogous to the god’s nature. We can say that a dog is loyal to a man, applying loyalty to the dog in proportion to the dog’s nature because we know the nature of both the man and the dog. Unfortunately, we are not privy to such things as the nature of the god. Using the dog/man analogy as a justification for the god/man analogy fails because we can’t apply anything in proportion to a god’s nature. We don’t know the nature of the god! To say that a god is loyal, only loyal in proportion to its nature, renders the word loyal meaningless. We cannot know what it means to say that an unknown nature is loyal in proportion to its nature, since loyal is a description of that unknown nature.
In order to make an analogy work between a god and man, we must first know something about the god. Thus, analogy fails if we do not know something about the god. We can’t give the god a positive characteristic without limiting it. If the theist is willing to admit his god is limited, he is then left with the burden of logically explaining how he came to know the characteristics he claims his god has are actually characteristics of his god. His source of information must also prove to be reliable.
*Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1st Part, Q. 3, Preface
Note: The quote by Thomas Aquinas was originally found in Atheism: The Case Against God by George H. Smith. I looked the quote up myself, having done that I cited Aquinas as my source, rather than Smith. This essay is a re-write of an earlier essay I wrote in high school, I clearified it after reading Smith's book. |
