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In the End, God
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
Extract
It has been said that nonsense talked about God is still nonsense. To some, this may seem a simple reminder that it is easy to lapse into nonsense when discussing the sublimities of religion. Of late, however, there has been voiced a suspicion on the part of many philosophers that the situation is worse than this. There are those who claim that it is impossible to avoid incoherence when speaking of God. It would be a mistake to place Michael Durrant, one of Britain's more respected philosophers of religion, in the camp of those convinced that God-talk is necessarily a species of nonsense. For one thing, he identifies himself as one who continues to wrestle with the philosophical problems generated by theistic discourse, from within the Church.1 Nevertheless two recently published books by Durrant2 illustrate nicely the view that God-talk appears, at least, to be riddled with fatal, logical infirmities.
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- Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1976
References
page 101 note 1 Durrant, Michael, The Logical Status of ‘God’ (London: Macmillan Press, 1973), p. 110.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
page 101 note 2 The Logical Status of ‘God’; and Theology and Intelligibility (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973).Google Scholar
page 101 note 3 Summa Theologica, Ia, q.I, a.I.
page 101 note 4 Theology and Intelligibility, p. ix (cf. Summa Theol. Ia, q.I, a. I, and Ia, q.I, a.8).
page 102 note 1 Theology and Intelligibility, p. 40f.
page 102 note 2 It is perhaps worth mentioning here a point not made explicit by Durrant. Aquinas maintains (S.T., IIa, q.I, a.2) that there are two ways in which a thing may act for an end. First, it may be ‘self-directed’, as men usually are. But second, it may be directed by some other agent toward an end, as the irrational creation is held by Aquinas to be. The notion that God is the last end of all men is explored by Durrant in the context of the first of these possibilities; and it is true that Aquinas at most points discusses the idea in the same context. But it is presumably the case for Aquinas that man is also directed toward God as last end in the second sense also. The relevance of this point emerges further on in our discussion.
page 103 note 1 Durrant goes so far as to produce arguments for this; one of them based on the view that states of affairs and state are temporal, while God is not. It is by no means clear that the latter assumption is essential to orthodox Christianity (it seems far from the biblical view). In any case, Durrant's point that God is not a state of affairs may be granted independently of such dubious arguments as this.
page 103 note 2 Theology and Intelligibility, p. 24.
page 104 note 1 Theology and Intelligibility, p. 27.
page 105 note 1 ibid., p. 37.
page 105 note 2 Our statement of Durrant's second conclusion is slightly more permissive than his own. (See Theology and Intelligibility, p. 40, quoted earlier.) We believe Durrant is led to an unduly negative statement by his conflating of the questions concerning God as a last end, and God as the last end.
page 108 note 1 cf. King-Farlow, John and Christensen, William, ‘Faith and Faith in Hypotheses’, Religious Studies, VII 2 (1971), pp. 112–124Google Scholar and Faith and the Life of Reason (Reidel, 1972), chapters I, IV, X.
page 111 note 1 Another alternative is suggested by Aquinas in the Summa Contra Gentiles, Bk. III, Pt. I, Ch. 19; where he contends that ‘the ultimate end of all things is to become like God’. (Quoted from the Image Books edition of 1956; our emphasis.)
page 112 note 1 Theology and Intelligibility, p. 38.
page 113 note 1 e.g. ‘It is necessary to fix one last end’, quoted in Theology and Intelligibility, p. 16.
page 113 note 2 The believer may usefully distinguish what are conceptual and necessary truths when words are used conventionally from what are conceptual and necessary truths when words are used wisely. This distinction tends to make quick sense of necessities in theology: see King-Farlow, John and Christensen, William N., Faith and the Life of Reason (Reidel, 1972), pp. 78–126CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Cf. Aquinas, S.T., I, q.II, a.I.