Explain religious language as non-cognitive and analogical with reference to Aquinas and Ramsey [30] Flashcards
What did St Thomas Aquinas conclude about the naming of God?
Long before the debates regarding the meaningfulness of religious language from the Vienna Circle, the use of words in the relationship between God and man was examined. St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) considered the function of religious language differently to the verificationist, looking at how we could further understand the mysteries of divine nature: he concluded that “no name belongs to God in the same sense that it belongs to creatures.”
What are the two ways language is used according to Aquinas?
Language is used univocally and equivocally.
What is univocal language?
Aquinas recognised that language was used in two ways: univocally and equivocally. Univocal language has one universal meaning, regardless of context, objective. Aristotle commented “that a measure must be generically one with what it measures.” For example, the noun ‘carpet’ has identical meaning in a variety of contexts such as ‘the bedroom carpet’ or ‘the carpet in the mosque’, referring to a form of floor covering.
What is equivocal language?
Equivocal language as defined by Aquinas means “[w]hen the same word is used but with different meanings.” For example, the noun ‘set’ could be used to refer to a mathematical device or even a television: without understanding the specific context in which it is being used, no insight is provided about its meaning, subjective.
Why is univocal language inadequate for understanding God?
Clearly, neither of these uses of language were helpful for a religious believer in their quest to gain a deeper understanding of God’s nature. Univocal language is regarded as hopelessly inadequate: God is too different, existing externally. Equally, using equivocal language would result in us having no knowable terms of reference or understood context, thus the language becomes nonsense.
What did Aquinas say about the relationship between God and creatures?
Aquinas maintained that “[n]othing can be said univocally of God and creatures. For effects that don’t measure up to the power of their cause resemble it inadequately, not reproducing its nature.”
What is the middle ground Aquinas proposed for religious language?
Aquinas therefore settled for the middle ground of analogy, which accepted that the subject of the language was not always perfectly understood: for Aquinas, God’s transcendent and omniscient nature could never be fully understood as humans were too limited: “It seems that no word can be used literally of God.”
What is Paley’s Watchmaker analogy?
Paley’s Watchmaker analogy has been used to suppose a correlation between a complex mechanism designed by an intelligent human with the complex universe designed by the intelligent divine being: God. The key feature of a successful analogy was ensuring a relationship between the two things being compared.
What does ‘imago dei’ refer to in Aquinas’s view?
For Aquinas, God was the source of all existence/creation as Judeo-Christian scripture ‘Genesis’ contains direct reference to God making humans in his image, imago dei, thus, for Aquinas, there is a definite link: “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness.”
What did Alister McGrath say about analogy in relation to God?
stated that analogy “does not reduce God to the level of a created object or being; it merely affirms that there is a likeness or correspondence between God and that being […] A created entity can be like God, without being identical to God.”
What is the analogy of proportionality proposed by Aquinas?
Aquinas considered the universe was inhabited by a sense of order/hierarchy: God’s authority is placed above humans, humans above plants etc and each order possessed particular characteristics considered appropriate to itself, even though the same adjective may be applied.
This is the analogy of proportionality: the view that all good qualities belong infinitely to God and, in proportion, to humans too. For example, we could consider what it means for a human to be intelligent and for a fox. Both creatures occupy different positions, therefore, application of a characteristic is subjective and must be applied individually to each.
There are clearly common features in the word ‘intelligence’ relating to ability and intuition, but the application is relative in proportion to the reality of the subject being spoken about. Therefore, for Aquinas, it was possible to talk analogically about God by making reference to human qualities.
How does John Hick illustrate the analogy of faithfulness?
John Hick (1922-) uses the term ‘faithfulness’, which might be attributed to a dog, human or God. He suggested that “Clearly there is a great difference between the faithfulness of a man or woman and that of a dog […] and a dim and imperfect likeness of this in the dog is known by analogy.” If we compare the faithfulness that humans have to that of a dog, the dog’s faithfulness is limited, but when we compare ours to God’s, ours is infinitely smaller.
What is the analogy of attribution according to Aquinas?
The second analogy was of attribution: the view that the cause of all good things in humans is God. Common positive attributes, including ‘good’, ‘loving’ and ‘wise’ are used to describe humans. However, Aquinas believed these to be entirely divine inspired and to have come from God. Therefore, God’s attributes are simply on a higher level of our own. Humans are not good independently of God, but good because they are dependent on God. For example, the word ‘healthy’ could be attributed to an animal because of the knowledge that its blood, diet and exercise regime is healthy: however, none of these are healthy in themselves/intrinsically healthy. They derive their healthiness from the relationship with the animal.
How does Brian Davies illustrate the analogy of attribution?
Brian Davies uses the analogy of bread: if we say that the bread is good, it must mean that the baker is also good, the bread is the product of the baker and so his goodness spreads to the bread.
What is via negativa as proposed by Pseudo-Dionysius?
Further to this, put forward by Pseudo-Dionysius, via negativa is the belief that words limit our understanding of a transcendent God; he is so vastly different to what we know that human terms limit him. Instead of saying what God is, we should state what God isn’t with words such as immortal, immutable and timeless: positive terms may be misleading, because they are rooted in our language. He said: “God is beyond assertion” and “beyond every limitation.”
What did Ian Ramsey believe about religious language?
Ian Ramsey wanted to examine how we used language and how he felt it should be understood: for him, all experience was essentially a continual encounter between God and his creation. For Ramsey, religious language that grew out of religious situations become revelatory and were referred to as disclosures: moments where humans could grasp understanding of the divine. Based on Max Black’s concept of models, Ramsey renamed these disclosure models
What are ‘disclosure models’ according to Ian Ramsey?
he believed was the characteristic way that religious language functioned.
How does Ian Ramsey support Aquinas’s use of analogies?
Ian Ramsey supports Aquinas’s idea of using analogies in religious language. Ramsey argues that words like ‘kind’ and ‘caring’ cannot be used univocally or equivocally, and on their own, were regarded as insufficient ways to properly refer to God. Therefore, we have to make use of ‘qualifiers’: these provide language with quality and sense.
What example does Ramsey give to illustrate the use of qualifiers?
For example, with added words such as ‘transcendent’, ‘infinite’ or ‘almighty’ to ‘Father’: Revelation 1:8 states “the Lord God […] the Almighty.” Another dimension is added and the believer is brought into a meaningful disclosure through religious language. Ramsey said “The qualifier ‘infinite’ is a directive stimulating us to go on…and on […] until it dawns on us that when we talk of God we are not talking of something which is comparatively superior.”
