Whoever says he believes what he does not at all understand, knows not what belief is, knows also not what he believes; and therefore, he believes in fact nothing, but it only seems to him [he believes]… Certainly nobody can believe something other than what he considers true… If reason is not necessary to grasp the articles of faith, then consequently it follows that the articles of faith should be presented to irrational animals… especially those which can imitate the human voice like parrots.
– Andrew Wissowatius (a.k.a. Wiszowaty), Die Vernunfftige Religion [1703 German translation of his Latin Religio Rationalis of 1685], quoted in and translated by Maria Rosa Antognazza, Leibniz on the Trinity and the Incarnation, p. 270 n. 18
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Belief is a judgment. It presupposes that we know what some terms signify. Faith might involve knowing the terms (well enough), but being unable to judge them together by our own reason. We can know what “man” means, and what God means well enough (notice you can’t believe what man means, or what God means) but to judge “this man is God” is quite another thing, and this is what the act of Faith consists in, as Christianity understands it.
In the quote, notice the words “at all” – those are important. If I come up to you and say “Froop ak paslet hie foretnor boox na’p.” You *cannot* believe what I say, though you may well parrot my words, prefaced by “I believe that:”. In contrast, if I say “God is kind of like a Father, and kind of like a Mother”, perhaps you can grasp *enough* of what I’m asserting to believe it, or maybe something in the ballpark of it. But what about this: “God is sort of like a tree, and sort of like a herring, and sort of like a Tphroiue.” There, I’d say, you could grasp (and so believe) part of what I’m saying, but not the whole thing (assuming I was using that last term meaningfully).
Is the upshot then that we can find some theologian who can tell us what ‘God’ means? But suppose we get conflicting reports, then what?
Saying that I don’t understand what an elm is is just being obtuse.
No one said you did not know what an elm is. I didn’t; certainly Putnam didn’t. I said you don’t know what ‘elm’ means. The fact that you can find something that instantiates the property of being an elm doesn’t entail that you have the slightest idea what the word means. I can know very well where to find a chiropodist without having a clue what ‘chiropodist’ means.
In
Don’t forget the sense in which the eyes see darkness and the ears hear silence. In this sense, a brain or imagination might know the immaterial and spriritual.
I’d argue that we know God as unknown. sometimes by a direct judgment about a negation of physical things, otehr times as a negation of our way of understanding. In other words, we can have it both ways. We can know because we don’t know, if we are careful to distinguish the senses of the terms.
Putnam is wrong about the elm, and Dummett is right (see “Social Character of Meaning”). Saying that I don’t understand what an elm is is just being obtuse. I know what it is. I just can’t define it.
I suppose the big question here is what we would mean by ‘understanding’. After all, there is a perfectly straightforward sense in which I don’t understand time dilation in the gravity well of a black hole, but I believe that time dilates in the gravity well of a black hole, and for defensible reasons.
Nevertheless, we understand the word “elm” because we know how to find out what it means
I doubt it. I know how to find out what the word ‘saccade’ means, but I don’t now understand the word. Putnam was talking about achieving reference with the word ‘elm’ without knowing its meaning, not understanding the word without knowing its meaning.
Indeed, to think that we’ll ever as mortals understand the meaning of “God” is complete folly. Even in the next life, there will be limits to our understanding of the word’s depths.
Completely wrong. Most of us are unable to define the word “elm” except to say “a kind of tree.” Nevertheless, we understand the word “elm” because we know how to find out what it means (ask a botanist). Similarly, people can believe in the Trinity without knowing the exact definition of it.
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