Thursday, April 06, 2006

Q13 A1: Whether a name can be given to God?

Yes. God can be named by us because we can give a name to anything insofar as we can understand it.

As Aristotle realized, because words are signs of ideas, and ideas the similitude of things, it is evident that words relate to the meaning of things signified through the medium of the intellectual conception.

We have minds capable of knowing something about God by reasoning with our intellect from His manifest physical effects to the concept of their first cause.

Of course, His essence is above all that we do understand about God and signify in word.