How To Be An Agnostic

Bad Faith

is is static. If he says that, whatever God may be, he could

not suffer together with (sympathise with) his creatures, he

is taken to mean that God must be by nature unsympathetic,

apathetic, indifferent, even callous. It is almost as though

if Aquinas had said that God could not be a supporter of

Glasgow Celtic, we supposed that he was claiming God as a

Rangers’ fan.

All that, though, would be wrong. Aquinas is merely but pro-
foundly insisting what God is not. A thought experiment devel-
ops the idea further. Consider someone who decides to count up
all the things that exist in the world. Calculator in hand, they
start on everything they can see around them – trees, insects,
people, buildings, books and so on. Eventually they reach a
number, let us call it N. But just as they are sitting down, they
realise they have missed something out. It happens that they
believe in God. So they conclude, there must actually be N+1
things in the world.
This is wrong, says Aquinas. The answer is, in fact, N because
God is not a thing at all. If that was the case, then the divine
being could not also be the creator of all other things – some-
thing that is a minimal requirement for God to be considered a
worthwhile deity. As Turner sums the thought experiment up:
‘although the word “God” is not the proper name of an individ-
ual, but a word we use in the way in which we use descriptions,
still we have no proper concept which answers to it. Having no
proper concept of God, we have no way of identifying God as
an instance of any kind.’

Proofs of God

This is also the meaning of Aquinas’s fi ve so-called ‘proofs’ for
the existence of God, which are better referred to as ‘ways’ as
that is the word he uses: they represent the ways the think-
ers of his time tended to talk about God, and he is going to
explore them, to establish what they mean. They can be put