Reading God's divine nature Part II; more Feser (The nature of a \'Creator\')

by David Turell , Wednesday, November 27, 2024, 20:42 (16 days ago) @ David Turell

Negative theology:

https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2024/11/poppers-via-negativa.html#more

"Negative theology (also known as apophatic theology) is an approach to the study of the divine nature that emphasizes that our knowledge of God is (either largely or wholly, depending on how far one wants to take this) knowledge of what God is not, rather than what God is. There is an interesting parallelism between this idea and Karl Popper’s account of the nature of scientific knowledge.

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"Note first that negative theology is not a kind of atheism, nor even agnosticism as that is usually understood. The negative theologian does not deny that God exists, nor even, necessarily, that we can know that God exists. The claim is rather that God’s essence or nature (as opposed to his existence) is opaque to us, so that a sound theology must characterize it mostly or entirely in negative terms.

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"As Aquinas says in De Potentia:

"Moreover the idea of negation is always based on an affirmation: as evinced by the fact that every negative proposition is proved by an affirmative: wherefore unless the human mind knew something positively about God, it would be unable to deny anything about him. And it would know nothing if nothing that it affirmed about God were positively verified about him. (Question VII, Article 5)

"All the same, Aquinas emphasizes that because of the dependence of human cognition on the senses, our positive knowledge cannot extend as far as the divine essence. We can say that God is not caused, not changing, not in time, not material, and so on, but lack the capacity for much in the way of a positive characterization.

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"Popper’s confinement of certain scientific knowledge to negative claims about the natural world is analogous to the apophatic theologian’s confinement of theological knowledge to negative claims about the divine nature. It has a similar source in the idea that knowledge must be grounded in experience (where the Humean has a much thinner conception of “experience” than an Aristotle or Aquinas, which is why Humeans are bound to think we can know much less about even the natural world than Aristotle or Aquinas did). Popper also rejects essentialism, so that he thinks we cannot know the essences of natural phenomena (in a way that is analogous to how Aquinas, though an essentialist, thinks we cannot strictly know the divine essence).

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"Yet Popper is a realist and an objectivist. He does not deny the reality of the natural world or that our cognitive faculties are capable of making objectively true judgments about it. It’s just that our knowledge of it is largely negative. This is analogous to how the apophatic theologian does not deny that God exists or that we can know that he does, but only that we can have much in the way of positive knowledge of his nature.

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"Popper himself was certainly critical of certain aspects of modern empiricism, but he nevertheless worked within its broad, very modest conception (and, from the Aristotelian point of view, excessively modest conception) of what experience could reveal about nature. Hence, where the Aristotelian negative theologian would say that we can have little or no positive knowledge of the divine essence but can have such knowledge about the natural world, Popper denies we can have it even about the natural world. In both cases the view is (or at least sometimes is, in the case of negative theology) grounded in a view about the limits of empirically grounded knowledge, but in Popper’s case the limits are more severe."

Comment: I view this as an important contribution to theology. I find elements of my thinking in negative theology. I view the natural world as evidence of God's works, but that does not reveal who God is. And that explains my problem as I develop thoughts about God. I continually recognize what we do not know. And I match that to the God-form I prefer, an especially non-human, selfless, intellectually powerful being. dhw's very human God created as much evil as my God does.