Religious language as analogical- Aquinas

• aquinas starts from the view that god is spaceless and timeless and so completely different from the world of human experience.
• he rejects as limiting the use of univocal language to refer to god
• he rejects as meaningless the use of equivocal language to refer to god
• he adopts the language of analogy, applying it in two forms.
• what were the two forms that aquinas used analogy

  the analogy of attribution and the analogy of proportionality.
• the analogy of attribution

  • despite god's essential difference from the universe it is possible to say something about him
  • when god created humans, he created then with the capacity for goodness, wisdom, etc
  • that goodness, wisdom, etc, are not identical with god's nature, but we can say that god is good, wise etc.- that is to say, he possessed the qualities necessary to facilitate goodness, wisdom, etc in humans.
• the analogy of proportionality

  • starts from idea that created things have qualities proportionate to their nature. so humans have goodness, wisdom, etc proportionate to their nature as human beings. hick gave as an example of proportionality the faithfulness of dogs as compared with that of humans, which was not the same but not totally different
  • god is totally different from created things
  • in saying that god is good, wise, etc, humans cannot know what that means to god. their goodness is a remote approximation to his. gods goodness is proportionate to the absolute perfection of his nature
• who developed models, qualifiers and disclosure situations?

  Ian Ramsey
• why did Ian Ramsey develop models, qualifiers and disclosure situations?

  it was a twentieth-century attempt to present aquinas' theory on a more contemporary way.
• a model is a term from out experience that can be applied to god, e.g. good.
• a qualifier results from the recognition of god's essential difference from us, e.g. the adverb 'infinitely'
• a disclosure situation is twofold:

  • the use of the model together with the qualifier encourages in the person concerned an attitude of adoration and commitment
  • god's corresponding disclosure means that everyday experiences take on a new meaning.
• strengths:

  • it avoids the issues caused by the use of univocal and equivocal language
  • its use of observable experience makes the language cognitive
• weaknesses:

  • what can be said of god is very limited, since god is essentially unknowable
  • hick's analogy doesn't work because neither dog nor human contains the idea of infinity
  • many don't agree with aquinas' view that evil is negative, a defect, so a counter-response on these lines wouldn't work.
• strength & response

  S: it encourages the believer to push beyond the limited meaning of goodness, etc. that relates to everyday experience

  W: the same approach could be used to argue for negative language about god, e.g. that god is evil.