Tag Archives: analogia entis

(Beyond Merely) Talking About God

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Today we conclude our discussion on the difficulty of talking about God. After noting in part 1 that attempts to speak about God were hard, and that our language about God was often rather weird, last week, in part 2, we explored two approaches to talking about God that seemed to have promise: analogy and apophasis. (If you haven’t read parts 1 and 2 yet, I recommend you do before continuing!)

At the end of part 2, we found ourselves in a strange place: we found we could talk about God through analogical statements and also through apophatic (negative) statements, though each have their limits. But this results in a strange situation: we can say both that, for example, “God is a mother” (so long as we mean this analogically!) and also “God is not a mother”. But how can this be? In saying this, are we in violation of the law of non-contradiction?

As I said at the outset of part 1: talking about God is weird, and talking about God is hard. To see how it could be the case that God both is and is not a mother (or anything else), let’s employ some more analogy.

Click here to keep reading on my substack: https://phenomenologyeastandwest.substack.com/p/beyond-merely-talking-about-god

Talking About God

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Last time, we encountered a curious conundrum: when we try to talk about God, our words shift around on us, and we find that we can’t really talk about God the way we talk about basically everything else. (This post is Part 2 in a 3-part series; if you haven’t read that post yet, I recommend you do before continuing!) When we say that God is the creator or that God is good, we saw that we don’t really quite mean creating or being good in the way that humans might create things or be good. (And the same limitation applies to things like calling God a father, or mother, or a castle, or anything else: for God to do the basic things we think God does, God can’t actually be a father or mother or a castle.)

In other words, we discovered that one way we might talk about God—univocal or unequivocal language—probably won’t work. When we use words that we use to describe things other than God to talk about God, our words will mean something different from what we mean when we talk about that non-God stuff. That’s confusing—and annoying—but I hope that in my last post, I showed that it is nevertheless the case.

Today, though, we get to move on to some good news. Though we probably shouldn’t ever talk about God unequivocally, that doesn’t mean we can’t talk about God at all. But we will need to figure out how we can use language to refer to something (or someone) who seems to defy normal description.

Read the rest of the article on my new substack, Phenomenology, East & West