GOD'S EXISTENCE
Here is the conception of classical philosophical theology: of Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, and other such thinkers.
God is not an object or substance alongside other objects or substances in the world; rather, He is pure being or existence itself, utterly distinct from the world of time, space, and things, underlying and maintaining them in being at every moment, and apart from whose ongoing conserving action they would be instantly annihilated. The world is not an independent object in the sense of something that might carry on if God were to “go away”; it is more like the music produced by a musician, which exists only when he plays and vanishes the moment he stops. None of the concepts we apply to things in the world, including to ourselves, apply to God in anything but an analogous sense. Hence, for example, we may say that God is “personal” insofar as He is not less than a person, the way an animal is less than a person. But God is not literally “a person” in the sense of being one individual thing among others who reasons, chooses, has moral obligations, etc. such concepts make no sense when literally applied to God.
Aquinas’s famous doctrine of analogy, on which the language we use to refer to God is not used in the same or “univocal” sense in which it is applied to things in this world (as might describe a fire engine and Stop sign as being “red” in exactly the same sense), but neither is it used in a completely different or “equivocal” sense (the way that a tree has “bark” and a dog has a “bark” in entirely different senses,). Rather, it is used in an analogical sense, as when you say hat you “see” the tree in front of you and also that you can “see” that the Pythagorean theorem must be true. Obviously you don’t see the truth of the theorem in exactly the same sense in which you see a tree, but there is an analogy between vision and intellectual insight that makes the use of the term appropriate in both cases. Similarly, God is not personal, or good, or powerful, or intelligent in the same sense in which a human being is, but He can nevertheless correctly be described in these terms if they are understood analogously.
We can know which terms apply by examining the arguments for God’s existence and their implications.
