As our prior post went over, St. Thomas has plenty of reasons to take the position that univocal concepts and terms are not properly predicated of God and of creation. He also rejects the opposite extreme, that is, that terms predicated of both God and creation are entirely equivocal. St. Thomas likewise has reason for these.
Equivocation exists when only the term, name, or word (and not the concept behind it) is common. So the concepts are different, though the terms are the same. Thus the term "Big dog" (really Canis major) can mean both a constellation and a big canine, such as perhaps an Bull Mastiff. Other than the imaginative ascription to the constellation to dog-like shape, there is no conceptual relationship between the two uses of the word Canis major.
Canis Major (Big Dog) Used Equivocally as a Constellation and a Pet
St. Thomas Aquinas's reasons for rejection equivocation include:
- If our terms were all equivocal when speaking of God and of creatures, we would have utterly no knowledge of God whatsoever through creation. Any reference to God extrapolating from things known in creation would be fallacious: they would suffer from the fallacia aequivocationis, the equivocational fallacy. The boy is bright. Things on fire are bright. Therefore the boy is on fire.
- Equivocation works in a sense both ways. Not only would we be unable to travel from the knowledge of creatures to a knowledge of God, but the likeness of creation to its Maker--man as the imago Dei and the the cosmos as vestigia Dei--would have to be abandoned. If there is no likeness, then it must be because there is no causal connection between God and the world, which be tantamount to saying that the world does not exist.
- If there is no link between God's essence (and the knowledge of his essence, from which the idea or ratio of the world is to be found) and the world, then God's knowledge of his essence would not yield creation, and so it follows that God would have no knowledge of the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment