How is it Possible to Talk About God?

David Hume and St. Thomas Aquinas's Perspectives

Philosophers have long been aware of a very real problem when it comes to thinking about God. For us to name a thing, we have to be able to grasp its nature. But, we are not capable of grasping God’s nature. So it seems like when we speak about God, we are out of our depth, or even actually unintelligible. 

Skeptical Enlightenment Philosopher David Hume’s Dialogues on Natural Religion feature a debate between a group of people that is meant to show the absurdity of speaking about God because of the deficiency in human language to actually speak about God. I included the link there if anyone wants to read it. I actually find that Hume’s dialogue succeeds. He shows the absurdity of speaking about God according to the theories he lays out. The problem is, he leaves out a very important theory. 

There are a few different ways that people have tried to answer this question. They can be broken into grammatical categories based on their positions. Some posit that when we talk about God we are able to say exactly what we mean. When we say that God is powerful, we mean that literally. The same would go for any other name given to God: wisdom, goodness, strength, foresight, intelligence, etc. This is called univocal use of language because the meaning of the term is one between the speaker and the thing spoken about. 

This view seems problematic, though, because we don’t fully grasp God’s Divine Nature, and so we aren’t really in a place to speak about what his power is like. It seems like it leans into an ultra confidence in human intelligence. To think that you can speak literally when you describe God’s attributes would have to mean that you are very intelligent and that you grasp God’s nature in a pretty full way. 

Another equally problematic view is sometimes called the Equivocal view. The name is confusing here. The concept refers to when a term is used in an ambiguous and unintelligible way. Sort of like when I say, “I find it strange how bats sleep” (referring to the animal). If you take me to mean bat as in baseball bat, you are going to be very confused. The equivocal naming position thinks that when we speak about God this is what we are doing. We are totally unable to give qualities to God because we don’t have a vocabulary capable of describing Him. This is problematic because it would mean that we are unable to speak about God at all. God becomes an unintelligible concept to us. This, then, leans towards too far in the direction of human stupidity. It assumes that we are not intelligent enough to think about or know God. 

So, we have two extremes. One extreme says that we can know God perfectly well, the other extreme says that we can’t know God at all. One of the important positions articulated by Saint Thomas Aquinas is a middle road on this very question. It is called analogical naming, or the theory of analogy. Hume does not address this theory in his dialogue. 

The idea is this: when we speak about God we are not able to fully comprehend the terms that we use. When we say that God is good, we don’t know fully what that means. Again, the same will apply for other names, terms, and attributes for God. But, Aquinas holds that this is not an all or none game. Just because we don’t have full comprehension of what these terms mean, it doesn’t follow that we don’t have any intelligibility as to what they mean. Let’s take the term goodness, or good. We use this term all the time. There are good apples, good TV shows, good dogs, and good people. The term good doesn’t mean quite the same thing in every case. But, it does mean something of the same thing in every case. An apple is good and a TV show is good in the sense that they fulfill their function. Apples in tastiness and nutrition and TV shows in entertainment value. St. Thomas famously uses the example of healthiness to show this. The healthiness of a patient vs the healthiness of a medicine are analogous terms. They don’t mean exactly the same thing, but they do communicate something in common, just along a spectrum. So how does this apply to God? 

When we say that God is good we do not fully comprehend the meaning of that. God’s goodness suprasses our comprehension. But, based on the different kinds of goodness that we observe in the world, we are able to analogize to goodness of God and His Divine Nature. The same kind of work can be done with any of the terms that we use to describe God. 

It’s important to emphasize at this point that the analogy is on our end, not on God’s. Goodness in reality is realized most perfectly in God. Power in reality is realized most perfectly in God. And so on with all other qualities: Justice, Mercy, Intelligence, etc. It is beautiful, but metaphysically true then to say that Mother Teresa participates in God’s mercy. Albert Einstein participates in God’s intelligence. Anything that is good participates in God’s goodness. Anything that has any of God’s qualities in any way, is participating in God’s eternal possession of that quality. So your good qualities, including your existence and goodness, are participations in the very Godhead. 

I hope this is helpful for thinking about God more clearly, and for thinking about God’s creation more generously.