|
What Does It Mean to Talk about God. A Catholic View.
Dr Peter Vardy, Professor of Religious Studies,
University of London
If a human being is said to be good, this means that the person has some characteristics which are regarded as admirable when they might have been otherwise. A person who is kind, gentle, forgiving, compassionate, who gives to the poor, visits the sick, and acts unselfishly might well be regarded as good and might be praised for these virtues when so many other people are selfish, impatient, cold and indifferent to the needs of others. In this case good is being used in a moral sense.
In Plato's Euthyphro, Socrates is portrayed in dialogue with a young man, Euthyphro, and the issue is whether the gods will what is good independently of their willing it, or whether what they will is good just because they will it.
The Euthyphro dilemma
This gives rise to the Euthyphro Dilemma:
does God only will the good when measured by some external standard, or
is God the source of morality so that whatever God wishes is good just because God's wishes are the final arbiter of goodness.
Whichever option is chosen gives rise to difficulties:
If there is an independent standard against which God can be measured, then there is something to which God is subject and which God did not create.
However, if God's wishes are the final arbiter of goodness, then goodness is not a reason for worshipping God since whatever God wants is good.
Aquinas' answer to the problem was to reject both horns of the dilemma and say that God's goodness is not to be considered in moral terms at all. Instead it should be looked at in a totally different way. Aquinas considered that it is possible to prove the existence of God through the Five Ways--these he held demonstrate that there is a being 'X' such that 'X' explains the existence of the universe. To this 'X' Aquinas gave the name 'God.'
Aquinas maintained that this God is wholly simple and therefore timeless, spaceless, bodiless, and totally unchangeable. But if so, how can language drawn from our spatio-temporal universe be applied to God? One of the hallmarks of Aquinas' genius was to respond to this challenge.
Aquinas rejected two options. Language about God cannot be:
Univocal. If language about God has only one meaning (univocal), it would mean that language can be applied to God in broadly the same way as language is applied to things in our universe. Hence God would be part of the universe, a view utterly rejected by Aquinas.
Equivocal. If language about God was equivocal, it would mean that the same words were being used in totally unrelated ways when applied to God and when applied to the universe. (e.g. the word pen is equivocal when applied to a pen we write with and a pig pen). So if language about God was equivocal, it would be devoid of meaningful content.
Aquinas' solution is to show how language about God can be used analogically. There are two types of analogy of which the first is analogy of attribution. Some examples will help explain this form of analogical language, but first a little background will help. At the time Aquinas was writing (13th century), doctors were not allowed to cut open human bodies. One of the few ways they could tell what was happening inside a human body was to examine the urine. Doctors were experts at the smell, taste, color, etc., of urine and they could determine, by these signs, whether urine was healthy or not. Taking another example:
The bull is healthy
The bull's bellow is healthy
Again the bellow is linked to the bull because the bull produces the bellow, but the bellow is healthy because of its sound and this is different from the health of the bull. Now a further example
Ellie is, per Aquinas, created by God. Just as the bull produced the urine and the bellow, so God produced Ellie--there is a causal connection between Ellie and God. It is therefor true that God is good because God has what it takes to produce goodness in Ellie but this does not mean that the goodness of God is in any way similar to the goodness of Ellie. Brian Davis OP has an excellent example that illustrates this.
The baker is good
The bread is good
|
|
