In part 2 of our book, we will turn to arguments for and against the very existence of God. Before embarking on such a study, however, it is necessary to have some idea of what the word “God” means according to the accounts of theists. It is not as easy to give an account of the theistic meaning of the word “God” as it might seem, for according to theists, God is infinite and the human mind limited: How is a lesser being supposed to understand a higher one? This question or problem has been with theism in all its forms from the beginning, and over the centuries a great many philosophically inclined theists have thought seriously about them.
Our explanation of the matter will have two parts: in this chapter, we will begin the analysis by considering just why understanding God is so difficult and exploring the so-called “negative approach” to God. In the next chapter, we will consider how some terms might be ascribed to God by means of a “positive approach”.
A. The Difficulty of Knowing God’s Nature
In chapter 1, we distinguished between “believing or holding a true opinion” about something and “knowing” something. We referred to a possible time in our lives when we believed that, for all right triangles, the sum of the squares of the sides is equal to the square of the hypotenuse; and we distinguished that time in our lives from the time when we grasped why that statement (that is, the Pythagorean theorem) was true. The difference between believing and knowing (or at least one very important difference) is that when we know, we know “why” or we know the “causes” for a statement’s being true. One of the reasons why a statement is true is that we can name the essence or the nature or the “whatness” of a thing. Before we can really “know” the Pythagorean theorem, we have to be able to grasp “what” a right triangle is.
This task is perhaps not so terribly difficult if we are simply talking about right triangles. By definition, a right triangle is a three-sided polygon with one right angle. The definition in this case names “what” a right triangle is. To be sure, in order to understand the definition thoroughly, we would also have to know what the terms “right” and “polygon” mean, for example; moreover, a person well-versed in mathematics would want us to specify that we are talking about Euclidean plane space as opposed to “curved” space. Let us, however, keep the example simple: let us say that a person who grasps that a right triangle is a three-sided polygon can be said to know what a right triangle is.
With respect to other finite beings in the world, the task of knowing “what” a thing is often seems equally simple. Even a child is able to do it. There is something in the backyard. “What” is it? It might be a cat or a dog or even, perhaps, a horse or (less likely) a giraffe. It is astonishing how early on a child can classify and distinguish these things and assert, correctly, that the “thing” in the backyard is a “dog”. Presumably the child has some sort of a working definition of a cat—some sort of basic grasp of what a cat is. Probably the child’s definition is not a very good one: a cat is a thing that slinks over the grass and has four legs, a long tail, a nose of a distinctive shape, and rather sharp, if small, teeth. In other words, the child’s definition of a cat might be based simply on appearance. What would the child do if, say, the cat had been in an accident and had lost a leg? Is being four-legged really part of the nature or essence or “whatness” of a cat?
The two-year old granddaughter of one of the authors of this book recently visited a zoo not far from her home. Upon approaching the lion exhibit, the two-year old suddenly cried out, “Kitty!” Her comment is amusing because of course there are profound differences between soft, cuddly “kitties” and large, dangerous lions. But her comment is also remarkable because of the even more profound similarities between house cats and lions. Any biologist would acknowledge that, at an important level, the two-year-old was right: house cats and lions belong to a common “whatness” or share a common essence. Biologists have developed far more sophisticated ways of classifying animals than the two-year-old, but their classification would, at one level, explain the common essence of the two kinds of felines and yet, at another level, explain their specific differences.
Notice that it was not especially difficult to give the cause or reason or the “whatness” that explains why right triangles are right triangles, and hence it was not too difficult to understand what a right triangle is, or to come to “know” what a right triangle is. It seems that it is harder, but hardly impossible, to give the cause or reason for cats being cats, and hence it is harder but still possible to come to “know” what a cat is. In both cases, though, we had to be able to limit what it was we were trying to know. We had to distinguish triangles from everything else that might exist in Euclidean space; we had to isolate cats from other animals that might be present in our backyards. We were trying to understand and hence to know finite realities.
But now we come to something much more difficult: in order to know or understand God, we are going to have to grasp God’s nature or essence. We are going to have to know “what” God is, to grasp for the reason or reasons that make God “God”. In short, in order for us to “know” God, we are going to have to be able to comprehend the essence of a reality that is said to be in every way unlimited, and we are going to have to do this by means of a human mind that we recognize to be qualitatively limited (and hence not perfect), spatially limited (and hence not infinite), and temporally limited (and hence not eternal). How, according to theists, will this be possible?
Theists, however, have never said that it was possible to understand the divine essence. Perhaps in an eternal life to come, God will somehow miraculously make it possible for us to do so, but in this life, at least, understanding the divine nature completely is just not possible. The Hebrew Bible has a very nice way of stating this. In the Book of Isaiah, the prophet says, “ ‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord’ ” (Is 55:8).
B. Saying What God Is Not
Over the centuries, a number of thoughtful and reflective theists have taken the suggestion of the prophet quite seriously and have developed what is sometimes referred to, in Latin, as the via negativa, or “negative way”, to try to understand God. This via negativa is sometimes referred to as apophatic theology (“apophatic” comes from a Greek word meaning something like “to deny”). Within the Christian world, an early group of texts attributed to Dionysius, a man whom Paul is said to have converted in the city of the philosophers, Athens (Acts 17:34), is especially associated with the via negativa. Scholars today are not sure who the author of these texts really was, so they attribute them to an unnamed “pseudo-Dionysius”. In the world of Judaism, the great scholar Moses Maimonides wrote extensively on this apophatic approach to God, and the theme is widespread also within Islamic theology.
What is this approach? How can we draw nearer to an understanding of God by saying what God is not? Perhaps the following example will help us understand this approach to God: when we were children, perhaps we played a game that we used to call “Guess what I am thinking.” One of the participants in the game would look around the room and pick some object to “think about”; the other participants would take turns guessing what that object was. If one of the “guessers” asked a question and the answer was “no”, that guesser had to stop asking questions and it became the next player’s turn to ask. The player who eventually guessed the answer was declared the winner. Let us say that our mother was playing the game with us to keep us amused on a rainy day, and let us say that she had decided to “think about” the glass vase on the mantle above the fireplace. Children just learning to play the game often tried to guess the object being thought about immediately. A younger sibling, for example, might ask, “Is it the clock on the wall?” Since most rooms in which the game would be played had lots and lots of objects in them, this was not a very good game strategy. To be sure, the guesser might just get lucky, but usually the answer to the guess was simply “no”, and it would become the next sibling’s turn. Perhaps the next sibling was a little older and had thought about a suitable game strategy a little more. Looking around at the room and noticing that there were quite a few wooden objects in it, he might ask, “Is it made of wood?” He would have a greater chance of getting a “yes” answer and then would be able to ask a subsequent question.
Notice what is happening in the game, though. We are trying to identify an object; we are trying to “know” what it is our mother is thinking. The younger sibling asks the sort of question we might expect from a beginner, but even this question should help us begin to identify the object: well, the object we are looking for is not that; we know what the clock on the wall is, and now we “know” that what we are seeking is not the clock on the wall. We “know” something, it seems, about what we seek. The question of the older sibling is probably a little more helpful. The answer to this question, let us say, is also “no”, but now we can eliminate a whole group of things from what we are looking for. We still have not identified the object, but we are getting closer. By saying what the object is not, we are getting closer and closer to guessing—or stating—what it is.
This analogy should help us begin to understand how the via negativa, or negative way, to God works. Instead of trying to find the divine essence directly, one begins by saying what God is not. Notice, for example, that many of the objects around us seem to have a material basis. Well, God is not that. Notice that the things with which we are familiar usually exist within space and time. Well, God is not that, either. By contemplating the limitations that exist in our world and then eliminating them from our idea of God, we begin an ascent—however slowly—toward the essence of God. By eliminating limitation after limitation from our ideas about God, we hone in on what God is. We presumably will never actually know God perfectly according to this approach, but we are drawing nearer.
C. “Negative” Attributes of God
This apophatic approach to knowing God has very important implications for understanding the meanings of some of the traditional attributes that theists ascribe to God. This can perhaps most easily be seen if we consider that theists say that God is immaterial. Clearly, this word means “not material”; thus, the phrase “God is immaterial” simply tells us what God is not. God is not material, but, rather, immaterial.
Notice, however, that fundamental to the notion of matter is extension in both space and time. If we take the notion of space, we can imagine a portion of space as bounded or limited. The coffee table in front of us as we write this, for example, can be measured with a tape measure, and indeed we find that it is 48 inches long, 18 inches wide, and 16 inches high. Because it has these boundaries, we can say that it has limits or is finite. We might attempt to define infinite as something extended in space but, unlike our coffee table, without boundaries. Although Buzz Lightyear’s saying—“to infinity and beyond”—does not strictly make any sense, perhaps what he means with his definition of infinity is this: extended in space but without limits or boundaries. This is not, however, what theists mean when they speak of God’s infinity with respect to space. Rather, they mean that God is a being not extended in space at all. Thus, according to the via negativa, what we are doing when we say that “God is infinite with respect to space” is simply saying what God is not: God is not something extended in space. This follows directly, of course, from saying that God is immaterial, for if God is not material, then God is not something extended in space, either.
Something similar is argued by theists with respect to God and time. The material things we know are extended in time as well as space. Whereas space separates “here” from “there”, time separates “now” and “then”. But again, just as there are two possible definitions of infinity with respect to space (extended in space but without boundaries and not extended in space at all), so are there two possible definitions of infinity with respect to time (extended in time but without limits and not extended in time at all). The Energizer Bunny would seem to be extended in time without limits: it just keeps going and going. It is eternal in the sense of everlastingness. But God, theists say, is eternal in the sense of being atemporal. The category of time simply does not apply to God, so when we say that God is eternal, theists understand the word “eternal” to be a negative or privative word. Again, it is a word telling us what God is not.
D. Change and Passion
If God is not a being extended in time, however, and if the word “change” means something like “modification over time”, then God does not change. Hence, most theists say that, properly speaking, God is not “changeable”. To be sure, the Bible often speaks as though God were changeable. God is said to grow angry or to repent of his anger or to reject someone or to remember his people. In the view of philosophically inclined theists, however, this is simply a way of speaking about man’s experience with God. If we tried to understand such passages in a literal sense, we would necessarily have to impute temporal modifications to God, and that would constitute a form of anthropomorphism, or ascribing human characteristics to God.
But if God is immaterial and, hence, not extended in space or time and, hence, unchangeable, it also follows that (again, strictly speaking) God is not passionate. This conclusion has been hotly debated among theists and their critics, and while there may well be a real argument involved in the debate, much of it concerns a misunderstanding of what is meant by the terms involved in the discussion. When classical philosophy speaks of passions, it does so in terms of changeability. For example, we say that we “become” angry. We were not angry before, but as time passed, we became angry. But to become angry we have to be extended in time to begin with, and then we also have to have the capacity for a part of us to be changed into something else. Theists generally do not want to say that God is extended in time, nor do they want to say that God has a capacity to become something else, for that implies an incompleteness or imperfection in God.
To say that God is not subject to passion—is impassible or possesses the attribute of impassibility—perhaps does not strike us as that controversial in itself, and perhaps we are willing to accept that the Bible sometimes uses figurative or nonliteral language and that that is what the Bible is doing when it says such things as “God became angry”, and so we do not see what all the fuss could be about. We have to remember, though, that theists, or at least those theists who belong to a revealed religious tradition such as Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, also say that God is love, and love is often classified as a passion.
The word “love”, of course, has a great many meanings. We are used to a definition of love that implies incompleteness, for loving can imply longing and desire—a quest for something that one needs terribly but does not have. Such a definition of love clearly implies that the lover is incomplete as well as changeable or moveable by the object the lover seeks. If we try to apply such a definition of love to God, we will clearly have to say that God is not complete, not perfect, subject to change, and, in short, that God is a being very much like human beings. We would wind up, again, in anthropomorphism.
There might be a different understanding of love, however, an understanding that grasps love as something that can be separated from yearning and longing and needing. Perhaps love in its purest sense, then, does not imply all the imperfections that human love does. Perhaps there is a divine love that does not include our human notion of passion, which seems to entail our human notion of change. At least that is the assertion that theists make when they say that “God is love”, and we will try to explore such statements in the next chapter.
E. Conclusion: Appropriate but Insufficient
As we already mentioned, a great many theistic thinkers have found the “negative way” to God to be a way worth pursuing. Indeed, most theists assert that it is definitely a part of how we might begin to understand God, and they would classify it as part of what we called “philosophical theology” in the previous section of this book. Some theists think that negative theology is the only way to approach God. They admit that it does not tell us all we might wish to know about God, but they would say that by pursuing it we will at least avoid idolatry, and, besides, it just is not possible to go any farther in understanding God. If we want to know more about God, we will have to turn to what God has revealed about himself to us. In other words, they say, philosophy alone can only tell us what God is not. If we want to go farther, we will have to turn to faith.
Many theists, however, think that reason can take us farther before we need to turn to faith. Indeed, some theists suggest that apophatic philosophical theology just does not take us very far at all, or even that it results in a sort of agnosticism about God’s nature. They therefore want to supplement the via negativa with a via positiva, and it is to this approach that we turn next.