Analogy and Aquinas

Analogy and Aquinas

1. Analogy

   • Univocal Language
     • God is good in the same way that humans are
     • Aquinas rejected its use as God is perfect. Therefore, humans can never be good in the same way God is.
   • Equivocal Language
     • God is good a completely different way to humans
     • Aquinas rejected its use as it would mean that we could not claim to know anything about him
   • Overview
     • An attempt to explain the meaning of something which is difficult to understand by comparing it to something else that is more in our reference frame
     • Aquinas' doctrine of analogy follows from his rejection of both univocal and equivocal language to describe God
     • He explained this by asking "What happens when we use good, loving, merciful, to describe God?" - neither are much use

2. Describing God

   • Aquinas believed that God should be thought of analogically
     • Making comparisons with God in order to describe his nature
   • Analogy of attribution
     • The view that God is the cause of all good things in humans
   • Analogy of proportion
     • all good qualities belong to god are in proportion to humans

3. Analogy of attribution

   • A quality is given to one things because it caused by another
     • The bread is good, the baker is good
       • the word 'good is used in both cases, with similar but not the same meaning. Bread can be good - soft tasty or light. The baker isn't soft or tasty but has the qualities of a good baker
   • Aquinas
     • gain an understanding of God by considering his role as his creator
     • If God made the world then we could expect the world to reflect God's qualities in some way
     • If we know what it is to call a human being 'good', we must assume we can use the term 'good' to describe Him
     • We do not have an exact idea of what God's goodness is, we can deduce from the world that God is good.
     • The medicine is healthy, the urine is healthy
       • the medicine being healthy is the cause as to why the urine is healthy
       • Urine is only healthy because health comes from the medicine
       • Medicine is healthy not just because it promotes health, but also it is in itself healthy

4. Analogy of Proportion

   • words relate to objects which are different in proportion
   • a clever dog and a clever scientist,
     • the word 'clever' is used in proportion
       • the dog is clever as dogs go, the scientist is clever in comparison with other people
   • Aquinas
     • We can use terms such as 'loving' and 'faithful' when we speak about God
       • We have to recognise that God's love and faithfulness are on an infinitely vaster scale than our own
         • 'God is good', 'good' is used to indicate that God measures up to what is for God to be God
     • John Hick
       • Baron von Hugel's example of 'faithfulness'
         • A word that we might use of a dog, a human or God
           • Comparing faithfulness that humans have to that of a dog, the dog's faithfulness is limited
             • we assert that God is faithful, we use the word in a way that makes our faithfulness tiny by comparison

5. Strengths

   • avoids the problems of using univocal and equivocal language to describe God
   • helps humans to speak meaningfully about God by comparing him to contingent things
   • helps to preserve the mysterious nature of God
   • closely resembles how theists speak about God (as opposed to the Via Negative)

6. Weaknesses

   • leaves us with a limited understanding of God
   • may not be possible to make a comparison between necessary and contingent beings
   • wouldn't it be easier to just accept that God's transcendent nature means that not even analogy could describe him?
   • Theists normally make religious claims literally, not analogically