Talk of God and the Doctrine of Analogy

TALK OF GOD AND THE DOCTRINE OF ANALOGY If then we take the divine attributes one by one and and ask whether each of them is to be found in God, we must reply that it is not there, at least as such and as a distinct reality, and since we can in no way conceive an essence which is nothing but an act of existing, we cannot in any way conceive what God is, even with the help of such attributes. E. Gilson The world requires as its cause a being totally transcending it in every respect; but how can we even affirm the existence of such a being, if our experience of the world gives us no words by which to define him? E. L. Mascall I T HE CLASSICAL DOCTRINE of analogy has been used to try to show how terms involved in God-talk have an appropriate meaning even if the key statements involving God-talk are not verifiable even in principle. Someone who 1) accepted the verifiability principle as a criterion for what is to count as factually meaningful and Q) who took the intent of the normal use of most indicative God-talk sentences to be to make factual statements, would assert that for ' God loves His creatures ' to be properly meaningful, we must show what implications for our experience would or at least in principle could count for or against its truth. Some defenders of the doctrine of analogy present an alternative account of the meaning of such utterances, an account, which, if correct, would, for much of God-talk at least, supply an answer to the challenge that non-anthropomorphic God-talk is devoid of factual significance. I shall consider the merits of such views. ANALOGY TALK OF GOD--A NEGATIVE CRITIQUE 33 Father F. Copleston and Professor James F. Ross provide us with distinguished contemporary statements of such a position.1 They both claim that where we are speaking of a transcendent and infinite being-the object of a religiously adequate Godtalk -the terms predicated of this being must be used analogically if they are to have any meaning at all. We need such an analogical account to escape the following dilemma. If, on the one hand, the terms are used with the same meaning, say in respect to God and to man, then God becomes an anthropomorphic being. That is to say, if God's intelligence or love is like man's intelligence or love, then God becomes simply a kind of superman, a being that is a part of nature, and not an infinite, non-spatio-temporal being, transcendent to the world. Yet, on the other hand, if ' intelligence ' and ' love ' are said to have a completely different sense when applied to God, they lose all meaning for us. The meaning-content of terms such as ' intelligence ' and ' loving ' is determined by our experience of human beings, by our experience of human intelligence and love, "and if they are used in an entirely and completely different sense when predicated of God, they can have no meaning for us when they are used in this way." 2 'Intelligence' as applied to dogs and men could have (I don't say it does have) a completely different sense and still 'intelligence ' could be intelligibly predicated of a dog's behaviour as well as a man's because we could ostensively teach how we 1 F. C. Copleston, Contemporary Philosophy (London: Burns and Oates, 1956) and James F. Ross, "Analogy as a Rule of Meaning for Religious Language," International Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. I (1961), pp. 468-502. In his later "A New Theory of Analogy," in Logical Analysis and Contemporary Theism, ed. by John Donnelly (New York: Fordham University Press, 1972), Ross uses work in structural linguistics to give the outline of a new theory of analogy which he believes to be compatible with the classical theory. His account there (where it applies to analogy of proper proportionality) is vulnerable to most of the criticisms I level at his earlier and more detailed account. I shall concentrate my discussion most extensively on his earlier and more detailed account, but I shall in...