What to believe? by John D Caputo is an interesting volume on radical theology. It is in the context of seeking (and never finding) words to conclusively 'explain' or 'define' God that Caputo writes. The following statements may be of interest.
REALITY IS A PLACE LANGUAGE CANNOT QUITE GO
Many people avoid the word "God" because the symbol is so easily misunderstood. Everyone means something a bit different by the word. It is always important not to fall asleep into religious argon. Religious language is a poetic attempt to capture in words what can often only be experienced in silence.
Whatever our source of being is, it is beyond the verbs and nouns of human thought. Words may lead us to the threshold of this experience, but only silence can truly experience reverence before a fitful ocean or starry night.
When biblical poetry said, “Be still and know that I am God,” perhaps it was reminding us that the word “God” is a symbol, not an idea or definition. The symbol “God” is a place marker reminding us there is always a mysterious infinity between our clearest distinctions, something infinitely deeper than our most profound value, and something infinitely larger than our vastest understanding
Language is incredibly important when it comes to communication but we must never forget that reality is a place language cannot quite go.
To reduce the symbol “God” to a mental image means to lose the awestruck experience to which the symbol may refer. The symbol refers not to a belief but to an awareness, not to linguistic understanding but to a sense of awe most reverently expressed by silence.
The Persian poet Rumi had a teacher named Shams Tabrizi who made this point very well I think:
“Most of the problems of the world stems from linguistic mistakes and simple misunderstandings. Don’t ever take words at face value. When you step into the zone of love, language as we know it becomes obsolete. That which cannot be put into words can only be grasped through silence.”
JIM RIGBY
“I have in lectures often described this interesting situation by saying: we never know what we are talking about. For when we propose a theory, or try to understand a theory, we also propose, or try to understand, its logical implications; that is, all those statements which follow from it. But this, as we have just seen, is a hopeless task : there is an infinity of unforeseeable nontrivial statements belonging to the informative content of any theory, and an exactly corresponding infinity of statements belonging to its logical content. We can therefore never know or understand all the implications of any theory, or its full significance.”
Karl Popper, 'Unended Quest', Chapter 7.
KARL POPPER
"We are now in a position to see why it is inherent in Popper's view that what we call our knowledge is of its nature provisional, and permanently so. At no stage are we able to prove that what we now 'know' is true, and it is always possible that it will turn out to be false. Indeed, it is an elementary fact about the intellectual history of mankind that most of what has been 'known' at one time or another has eventually turned out to be not the case. So it is a profound mistake to try to do what scientists and philosophers have almost always tried to do, namely prove the truth of a theory, or justify our belief in a theory, since this is to attempt the logically impossible. What we can do, however, and this is of the highest possible importance, is to justify our preference for one theory over another. In our successive examples about the boiling of water we were never able to show that our current theory was true, but we were at each stage able to show that it was preferable to our preceding theory. This is the characteristic situation in any of the sciences at any given time. The popular notion that the sciences are bodies of established fact is entirely mistaken. Nothing in science is permanently established, nothing unalterable, and indeed science is quite clearly changing all the time, and not through the accretion of new certainties. If we are rational we shall always base our decisions and expectations on 'the best of our knowledge', as the popular phrase so rightly has it, and provisionally assume the 'truth' of that knowledge for practical purposes, because it is the least insecure foundation available; but we shall never lose sight of the fact that at any time experience may show it to be wrong and require us to revise it.”
Bryan Magee, 'Popper'. (The US-edition of the booklet has the title 'Philosophy and the Real World: an Introduction to Karl Popper).
BRYAN MAGEE
