Ben Conroy
The idea that you can’t say anything meaningful about what you don’t understand has a lot of intuitive appeal. If, after all, you know nothing whatsoever about the thing you’re talking about, then you can’t say anything whatsoever about it either. Imagine overhearing the following exchange:
“I just happened across a Fringle.”
“Oh cool! What’s that.”
“I don’t know!”
“…What?”
“Yeah I have no idea at all what a Fringle is. Can’t tell you what it looks like, what it smells like, the effect it has on anything else. No one’s ever given me a shred of information about Fringles.”
“… But you happened across one?”
“Yes, definitely.”
“How do you know?”
“I just do.”
Fringle-spotter
We’d have to conclude that the would-be Fringle-spotter wasn’t saying anything meaningful. They’d be making sounds, yes, but their words wouldn’t convey anything. Without any understanding of the Fringle, there would be nothing for their words to convey. His talk about Fringles is nonsense: literally, the words are without sense.
A version of the trouble with the Fringle-spotter is a major issue in philosophy of religion. Called ‘The Problem of Religious Language’, it’s a difficulty with the idea of talking about God. God, after all, is supposed to be a completely different kind of being to us. As God says in the book of Job “my ways are not your ways”. God is so different, in fact, that even to call him “a being” is arguably incorrect. Rather God is supposed to be “the ground of all being”, existing outside of time and space, perfectly simple yet constantly sustaining all of the universe. How could the language of time-bound, finite beings such as us capture anything about God? A concept like “strength” is one that we have learned in the context of lifting and moving things in a physical world. What could it even mean for a non-spatial being to be strong? How can we use adjectives like ‘strong’, ‘wise’, ‘loving’ or ‘good’ to describe God if God is far beyond our understanding and we cannot imagine what it would mean to apply them to God?
The trouble is that if we can’t say anything meaningful about God, then all our talk about the divine will be like talk about Fringles: nonsense. Even if God does exist, if we can’t talk coherently about him that makes organising our lives around him extremely difficult, and communicating about him impossible. If God can’t come within the reach of our words and concepts, that means we can’t even really call him ‘worthy of worship’. If we couldn’t know God at all, then we couldn’t love him.
Philosophers have proposed many solutions to the problem of religious language. The medieval Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides argued that while we can’t say anything positive about God we can say what God is not. If you can say that God is not petty, or cruel, or vindictive, then that gives you some picture of some of the moral truths about God. If you can say that God is not weak, that gives you some idea of his power. Maimonides thought that we could relate to God by this ‘negative way’, building up a picture of the divine out of negative space.
Thomas Aquinas thought we could go further than this. Relying on a few key principles (chief among them that God created the universe and that it thus must bear some kind of relation or similarity to its creator), Thomas thought that we could use words about God analogically. When we say that God is morally good, that doesn’t mean quite the same thing as our kind of moral goodness (for example, there is no possibility that God could fall into evil). But God’s goodness is something like ours because our goodness is an echo of his. God’s goodness exceeds ours rather than falling short of it, and so we can say that God will never act in a way that’s morally worse than a human. Thus even our mortal concept of goodness is much closer to what God is than our concept of evil.
God analogically
The possibility of speaking about God analogically in this way is enough to get much of religious language off the ground. Our concepts of ‘power’ and ‘knowledge’ can be applied to God analogically, so we can meaningfully say of God that he is omnipotent and omniscient. It also opens a path for God to meaningfully reveal himself to us. The Christian account of salvation history is only possible because God can reveal something of his nature to us in a way that fits inside our understanding. We might never be able to completely understand God. But we can understand him to some extent. Enough to trust him, to worship him, and to love him.