The Question

Excerpts from Karen Armstrong's 'The Case for God: what religion really means'. Interesting and thought-provoking reading. I do warn this is not light reading and should be read in parts, if read at all :)

Of God, faith and the silence

Thomas tells his students that because of God's absolute unknowability, we cannot define what it is that we are trying to prove.

"When we know that something is, it remains to enquire in what way it is, so that we may know what it is. But since concerning God we cannot know what he is but only what he is not, we cannot consider in what way God is but only what he is not. So first we must ask in what way he is not, secondly how he may be known to us, and thirdly how we may speak of him. "

Having made this crucial apophatic proviso, Thomas briefly - indeed, somewhat perfunctorily - sets forth his five 'ways' of arguing from creatures to 'what people call God'. These five arguments are not original. The first is based on Aristotle's proof of the Prime Mover: all around us, we see things changing; and because every change is caused by something else, the chain of cause and effect must stop somewhere. We thus arrive at the First Cause, itself unchanged by anything. The second proof, closely allied to the first, is based on the nature of causation: we never observe anything causing itself, so there must be an initial Cause, 'to which everyone gives the name God'. The third way is based on Ibn Sina's argument for a Necessary Being, which must of itself exist, owes its being 'to nothing outside itself', and is 'the cause that other things must be'. The fourth via is a moral argument derived from Aristotle: some things are better, truer and more exalted than others and this hierarchy of excellence presuppposes an unseen perfection that is best of all. The fifth proof is drawn from Aristotle's belief that everything in the universe has a 'Final Cause' that is the 'form' of its being.

Thomas was not trying to convince a sceptic of God's existence. He was simply tying to find a rational answer to the primordial question: 'Why does something exist rather than nothing?' All the five 'ways' argue in one way or another that nothing came from nothing.

...but no sooner has Thomas apparently settled the matter than he pulls the rug under our feet. He immediately goes on to show that even though we can prove that 'what we call God' (a reality that we cannot define) must 'exist', we have no idea what the word 'exists' can signify in this context..We simply cannot imagine an 'existence' like this, so 'We cannot know the "existence" of God any more than we can define him,' Thomas explains, because 'God cannot be classified as this or that sort of thing.'

The question 'Why something rather than nothing?' is a good question, human beings keep asking it, because it is in our nature to push our minds to an extreme in this way. But the answer - 'What everybody calls "God" - is something that we do not, indeed cannot, know. Thomas shared Augustine's view of intellectus. In these proofs, we see reason at the end of its tether, asking unanswerable questions and straining towards its 'cutting edge', its divine 'spark'. Pushed to the limit, reason turns itself inside out, words no longer make sense and we are reduced to silence. Even today, when they contemplate the universe, physicists pit their minds against the dark world of uncreated reality what we cannot fathom.This is the unknowable reality that Thomas is asking his readers to confront by pushing their intellects to a point beyond which they cannot go.

Thomas would say that we know that we are speaking about 'God' when our language stumbles and fails in this way. As a modern theologian has pointed out, "This reduction of talk to silence is what is called "theology". Unknowing was not a source of frustration. Thomas did not expect his students to 'believe' in God,; he still uses credere to mean trust or commitment and defines faith as 'the capacity to recognise (assentire) the genuineness of the transcendent', to look beneath the surface of life and apprehend a sacred dimension that is as real - indeed more real, than anything else in our experience.

...Thomas made it clear that all our language about God can only be an approximate, because our words refer to limited, finite categories. We can speak of a good dog, good book or a good person and have some idea of what we mean; but when we say that God is not only good but Goodness itself, we lose any purchase on the meaning of what we are saying. When we say that 'God is good' or 'God exists', these are not factual statements. They are analogical because they apply language that is appropriate in one field to something quite different. The statement that 'God is the creator of the world' is also analogical, because we are using the word 'creator' outside its normal human context. It is impossible to prove that the universe was created ex nihilo or that it was uncreated: 'there is no proving that men and skies and rocks did not always exist', Thomas insisted, so 'it is well to remember this so that one does not try to prove what cannot be proved and give non-believers grounds for mockery, and for thinking the reasons we give are our reasons for believing (credens)'.

For Muslims

"The Qur'an has no interest in 'belief';indeed, this concept is quite alien to Islam. Theological speculation that results in the formulation of abstruse doctrines is dimissed as zannah, self-indulgent guesswork about matters that nobody can prove one way or the other but which makes people quarrelsome and stupidly sectarian."

"In the Qur'an, the people who opposed Islam when Muhammad began to preach in Mecca are called the kafirun. The usual English translation is extremely misleading:it does not mean 'unbelievers' or 'infidels': the root KFR means 'blatant ingratitude', a discourteous and arrogant refusal of something offered with great kindnesss. The theology of the kafirun was quite correct: they all took it for granted that God created the world, for example. They were not condemned for their 'unbelief' but for their braying, offensive manner to others, their pride, self-importance, chauvinism and inability to accept criticism. The kafirun never give serious consideration to an idea that is new to them, because they think they know everything already. Above all they are jahili: chronically 'irascible', acutely sensitive about their honour and prestige, with a destructive tendency to violent retaliation. Muslims are commanded to respond to such abusive behaviour with hilm ('forbearance') and quiet courtesy, leaving revenge to Allah. They must walk 'gently on the earth' and whenever the kafirun insult them, they should reply: 'Salam' (peace)."

"In these early days, Muslims did not see Islam as a new, exclusive religion but as a continuation of the primordial faith of the 'People of the Book', the Jews and Christians. In one remarkable passage, God insists that Muslims must accept indiscriminately the revelations of every single one of God's messengers: Abraham, Isaac, Ishmael, Jacob, Moses, Jesus and all the other prophets. The Qu'ran is simply a confirmation of the previous scriptures. Nobody must be forced to accept Islam, because each of the the revealed traditions had its own din; it was not God's will that all human beings should belong to the same faith community."