Religion
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In reviewing the writings of Thomas Aquinas and Gordon Kaufman on the difficulties of using words to signify or represent the existence or meaning of God, we see that both philosophers argue that words can never equate to the actual referent known as God. As Kaufman notes, there are two types of metaphysical grounding, if-you-will, that either try to argue in favor of God’s existence on theoretical grounds or those that attempt to argue in favor of his existence based on blind faith despite obstacles of such blind belief. In doing so, both schools of thought make a mistake because God cannot be signified or referred to by a word that is man-made “They take the central problem to be the existence of a being with such and such properties called ‘God.’ But this is to focus attention primarily on the theoretical question of the real referent for ‘God’, a question that is in principle unanswerable” (Kaufman 107).We see that this position is quite similar to the one adopted by Thomas Aquinas when he discusses the fact that any words we might use in a metaphysical manner to equate to God apply primarily to creatures and secondarily to God. What he means by this is that we can never use words that are self-referential (either to man or other creatures) to refer to God because there is no word devised by creatures which act as a referent to God “But from the point of view of our use of the word we apply it first to creatures because w
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Approximate Word count = 1080
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page)
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