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To: Cicero

Yes, there are kinds. Can you share?


244 posted on 11/01/2006 2:04:45 PM PST by cornelis
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To: cornelis; betty boop

Not sure exactly what you mean, but I'll give it a quick effort.

I don't seem to be able to put my finger on McInterny's book at the moment, which is pretty hard to summarize anyway (that quotation above is from a review I once wrote of it), but he moves toward the view that analogy is the best way to understand the relation between God and the creation, or eternity and time, or the eternal forms and their phenomenal shadows (probably not a very accurate way of putting it).

To take an instance, can you say that "God is good," using the word "good" in any human sense? God is completely other, and therefore human goodness really is not properly descriptive of Him. But you can't say that "God is not good" either, nor does it make much sense to say that "God is super good." Perhaps it is better to say that God is real goodness, and that whatever goodness we see in this world is a pale shadow or analogy of that divine goodness. So God is not like our goodness, but our goodness is like God.

Similarly, one could ask, what is truth. The Thomistic answer, following Aristotle, is that truth is that which is most real, that which IS. But that which is most real is God. "I AM that I AM." So, if science is the pursuit of truth, of that which is, rather than something else, then how can science leave God out of the equation, if He is the most real of all? Maritain makes a good case that Thomas went a step further than Aristotle in defining the nature of reality as a kind of verb, to be.

The relation of the created world to God, Who is ultimate Truth or Reality, is analogical.

I'm afraid that's a very brief and rough account of some ideas that require a book full of philosophical development to tease out, and even that is only a start.


246 posted on 11/01/2006 2:59:05 PM PST by Cicero (Marcus Tullius)
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