Theology and human knowledge of God

In Medieval philosophy, the compatibility of the capacity of human knowledge with spiritual faith was perhaps the most essential issue. Because of the human nature of rationality, relying on pure faith alone was not adequate in justifying one’s belief. Likewise, depending on reason and forsaking the condition of faith was insufficient. The Medieval thinkers needed to discover a credible method for establishing justification for belief in the existence of God which embraced both faith and reason. In order to accomplish this, philosophers explored the conditions of human understanding, confronting the questions of how and what we could know, and if anything could be known with absolute certainty. Some Medieval thinkers upheld faith as paramount over reason. Thinkers such as Bonaventure, emphasized theology, an analysis of one’s faith towards clarity of its understanding, over reason. Others, such as Averroes, held that philosophical reasoning was superior to theology. Still others, such as Aquinas, believed that both faith and reason were equally essential towards acquiring any understanding and knowledge of God. Whatever the approach, the problem of knowledge was highly significant towards establishing justification of belief in God.

The questions of what can be known, how things can be known, and can anything be known with certainty, have plagued the mind’s of philosophers of all ages, and continues to do so. However, at no other time were these questions more imperative than during the Medieval age. Because the majority of philosophers during this particular era were believers in God, and Christianity had become dominant in the lives of many, the Medieval thinkers were compelled to find solutions to these problems of knowledge in order to justify faith. So, before one can discover knowledge of God, it must first be determined what the human mind can comprehend and the methods towards this understanding. Before this era, ancient philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle confronted these questions, with Plato believing that humans were capable of understanding abstract concepts and Aristotle holding that we could know immaterial and material objects through universal ideas. The Medieval philosophers inherited these questions and modified them to take into account spiritual faith, which was not a concern, or at least was not as much of a concern, for the ancient thinkers.

Different ideas were formulated to this problem, but it was largely held that humans could obtain some level of knowledge of God, either through an affirmation of God’s existence, or the nature and attributes of God. Some felt we could only possess this knowledge through the application of reason, such as Averroes, yet others, such as Tertullian, held that only faith could bring us such knowledge. Aquinas drew a compromise between the two, claiming that knowledge of God was possible by both approaches. Augustine thought that God was the source of our ideas through illumination. The conflicting positions between superiority of faith or superiority of reason was primarily activated from the establishment of affirming the possibility of knowledge of God, as it was essentially concerned with the methods towards understanding rather than proof of the knowledge itself.

It was paramount for the Medieval philosophers and theologians to deny the impossibility of God’s existence. They needed to supply evidence for God’s existence being necessary. Any dependence on metaphysical chance was disregarded by these thinkers. The logicality of the idea of an all powerful and perfect being also ruled out the impossibility of God’s existence. This led to the necessity of God’s existence in the minds of the Medieval thinkers. If God’s existence is not impossible and not a matter of chance, then it must be necessary. If God’s existence is indeed necessary, then this means that God exists. The faith in God’s existence is the origin and foundation to the argument that seeks to provide evidence for the existence of God. These thinkers needed to justify their beliefs through firm evidence by way of reason.

The attainment of knowledge through purely rational methods or through the senses alone seems to disregard the imperative nature of requirement for each faculty. The very idea of human beings possessing both qualities and the nature in which they acquire and process information reveals a sufficiency in asserting that we come to knowledge of things through the application of each, according to circumstances and particular observations. The problem of faith as a means to know something arrives in the idea that in order to believe in a thing, it would seem to be essential that one must first have sufficient knowledge of it. If something is known, then it follows that it must also be believed, but the reverse cannot be the case. Belief, no matter how potent or apparently justified, fails to provide justifiable propositions for evidence of knowledge in what is believed. Belief cannot be tangibly measured, as it is empty of any degree of certainty that can be apprehended from the non-believer, or the one whose belief functions on what appears to be differing levels. Belief, in its full capacity as possessed by the believer, can only truly have its complete range comprehended by the believer, since no other can so completely have access to the entirety of details and experiences that have led to the formulations of the belief. Seen through this manner, faith cannot easily be submitted as an adequate method for the acquiring of knowledge. Knowledge must come first before any true belief can be formed in confidence. This is because belief is an essential condition of knowledge, and only true belief with justification is required for knowledge.

All knowledge must be said to be true, as there can be no such thing as false knowledge. There is only knowledge or lack of knowledge. Anything that was thought to be known at some time, such as the "knowledge" that the earth was flat, cannot be said to have been known, but rather that there was an absence of knowledge about the true proportions of the earth. It was a false idea, but it was not any kind of knowledge, in the true sense of the term. However, beliefs that are held to be "certain" can be proven to be false, such as when a proposition of a stated belief can be doubted. Such beliefs are founded on insufficient principles and no matter how much desperation goes into the dedication to the belief, it remains false in the presence of natural reality if all of its propositions cannot conquer whatever legion of doubts arise in confrontation.

We have established now that in order to have proper knowledge of a thing, the truth of that thing must be affirmed before any sufficient belief can be formulated, and the grounds and justification of this belief must function in accordance with the truth of what is known. For just as belief is a condition of knowledge, truth is yet another, and indeed the first and most essential condition. Now truth can only be established when propositions and facts correspond with each other, which leads to a belief that is based on factual information beyond all doubt to sensible observation. The statement of beliefs which seek to bear some truth must agree with the facts of reality in order for true belief to be established.

Once it is determined how one can gain knowledge of things, the method can then be applied to the problem of knowledge of God. As mentioned, among the Medieval thinkers, there were various formulations of acquiring knowledge of things. Two of these thinkers, Moses Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas, presented particularly interesting methods of understanding and knowing God, though both function in the recognition that we can never have complete knowledge of God due to human cognitive limitations. But they believed that we could have enough of an understanding of God to provide useful ideas concerning relations between God and his creations and interpretations of scriptures. Though both Maimonides and Aquinas thought that we can have some knowledge of God, there methods towards that knowledge, as well as the extent and specific substance of that knowledge, had their differences.

In the case of Maimonides, we can possess some knowledge of God by way of applying negative or active attributes to Him. Maimonides felt that to say that God is something, by way of using definitions in the positive, could not capture the true nature of God, and in fact, was demeaning to God. Further, our language structure does not make it possible for us to communicate the true nature of God. All that we can say about God is that he is not something, because God is beyond all of substantiative nature that humans can encounter in the world, which sets it out as impossible to relate God to His creations. Under this form, the more negations one supplies to the nature of God, the closer one comes to knowing Him. Maimonides also thought that humans can know God through his actions. For instance, Maimonides held that God is the agent which brings into existence all forms, so it is allowable to say of God that he is a creator. Only through these definitions of negative attributes and attributes concerning actions can we know anything of God. Maimonides also presents faith in God, exercised through love and fear, as dependent on any knowledge that can be attained of him. This faith can only be acquired through the understanding of the natural world, which Maimonides recognizes as brilliant symbolic design that reveals the power and wisdom of God in a way that can be understood and appreciated by humans. In this, we see Maimonides embracing faith as an essential element in knowledge of God.

Maimonides reasons that there must be a first cause, or what Aristotle termed an "unmoved mover", that has set the entire universe in motion, and that this mover must contain a superior intelligence and be essential to all creation. He also holds that the nature of this being must be existence, and it invests this existence throughout the world. This being for Maimonides is God, who is the provider of all life and generator of arrangement and function in the world. Through this reasoning combined with faith, Maimonides believes that we can know something of God. There must be an origin to all creation, and this origin is necessarily a miraculous and omniscient being whose wisdom is manifest through the grand design of our world. Our faith in this deity is qualified on our knowledge of this being, and awakened by our awareness through observation of our world.

Highly influenced by Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas modified this influence along with Christian theology to arrive at the position of God being absolute form. For Aquinas, we understand God’s existence by observing the truths of creation. He shared a similar viewpoint to Maimonides in that he believed the ultimate source of motion must necessarily be unmoved, and that this was God. Aquinas saw the universe as a revelation of relations between things through a fixed, ordered series of existence, with lower forms at the bottom and objects of perfections at the top. From this, Aquinas derived ultimate perfection in the form of God occupying the pinnacle of this scale. The first and last cause of universal energy for Aquinas is God, revealing himself through creation and governing the world through a perfection of will. But Aquinas believed that this revelation of God must be ultimately accepted through faith. Even though humans cannot know God’s essence, we may become acquainted with it by its representation through the perfection of his creations. For Aquinas, we can know God’s existence through the process of natural reason, but faith presupposes natural knowledge.

Unlike Maimonides, Aquinas believed that we can say things of God in affirmative ways just as we can in negative ways. Through his doctrine of analogy, Aquinas explained how terms predicated of God can mean something similar to what they commonly mean. His analogy of proportion demonstrates how we can draw relations between what we observe in the world and God’s attributes, such as an artist being to an artwork as God is to the world. Through these kinds of relations, we can apply certain characteristics to God, even though we can never truly know his essence. Faith and reason are both essential to Aquinas in the acquiring of knowledge of God, but he seems to place a higher importance on faith, which appears as the foundation upon which his demonstrations of knowledge attainment are based. In any case, Aquinas doesn’t share the same strictness as Maimonides according to what we can say of God, or the ways in which we can gain some insight to at least some degree of his nature.

When comparing these two approaches, Thomas Aquinas seems to acknowledge the greater range of knowledge attainment than Maimonides. This makes the method of Aquinas an easier one to embrace, since it does not set as much limitation towards knowledge as Maimonides does. The extent of human capacity for knowledge can never allow us to truly know some things, but the narrow guidelines set forth by Maimonides forsakes the full range of how humans can know something. Aquinas provides a broader application of knowledge for understanding through his doctrine of analogy and when taken into account the vast spectrum of human methods towards knowledge, this view possesses a stronger appeal in the hopes of knowing God in some degree. A more accurate assessment of human capacity for knowledge is made by Aquinas, and even though the discussions concern perhaps the most unknowable of all things, this approach gives human understanding a more positive outlook and the respect of a greater fighting chance towards this knowledge.

But does either position prove that we can have knowledge of God, or that God even exists? At the core of Medieval thought on this matter, there is a strong reliance on faith. These thinkers must prove that God exists for their philosophies to hold ground, and even in the positions that champion reason over faith in the attainment of knowledge, there exists a powerful core of belief that in some cases appears driven by a sense of desperation. There is a powerful desire to believe fueling these theories, and this longing to believe seems to provide the motivation for this faith. This motivation for faith in turn supplies the reason for that faith, and this reason for believing goes to provide the evidence for the belief. Even in the most clever and brilliantly reasoned ideas of such thinkers, not enough irrefutable evidence is supplied to prove that God does in fact exist. Wonderful arguments have been offered by Anselm, Augustine, and Aquinas, but if one does not come into these positions with some degree of faith, these arguments can only reach insofar as their reasoning can appeal to the mind of the interpreter.

Maimonides and Aquinas agree that the world must have a cause, and that God is this cause, as he is the creator of all things. Yet, it seems that if the world must have a cause, then everything that exists must also have a cause. How can God not have a cause if this is the condition of things? If time and the universe are infinite, then why must there necessarily be, or even how can their be, a first cause? If there is no first cause, there is no God. It is imperative to Medieval thought that God exists, and to suggest that God has a cause is to severely weaken the arguments to prove his existence. So faith must come into play with reason here to assert that God is the first cause, yet the infinity of time and space seems to conflict with there being any cause at all. If this is true, that there is no beginning just as there is no end, there is no cause, which must mean that there is no God.

All aspects of reason must have an origin, and given this, it follows that these aspects rely on an unsupported premise. Taking this into account, one is led to determine that knowledge is unattainable, because it suggests that human thinking is founded on bare suppositions. This is where skepticism takes control and where faith becomes imperative. As we established earlier, belief is only one condition of knowledge. The other is truth. We must have both conditions working in conjunction to establish certain knowledge of anything. It is not enough just to believe, and belief seems to lie at the bottom of all attempts to prove knowledge or existence of God. The faith in these arguments comes through with great conviction, but the truth of God’s existence remains debatable. We’ve been provided some clever and even beautiful methods that seek to establish this truth, but none of them can undeniably prove God’s existence.

In the end, it appears that we can never truly know if God exists or not, let alone have any knowledge as to God’s nature. Perhaps such knowledge is simply beyond our framework for understanding. The truth of this question may not be revealed to us until we cross the threshold of this life into death, but that will do nothing for the living. Perhaps this knowledge is not beyond our capacity, but we simply have not discovered the means to which we can know the truth of God’s existence. Many things that we know of the universe today were thought unknowable in years past. We simply did not have the resources by which to know them, and through advancements in technology and science we have been able to discover things that were impossible to know in previous ages. Even so, at this current time, we still seem to be far away from establishing whether or not there is a God, with any kind of undeniable proof at least. It appears that this question of the existence of God and what we can know of him will continue to plague human minds for many years to come.

Allen Donaldson 11/30/06