John Courtney Murray: Thomas Aquinas on The Three Ways of Knowing God. The dialectical method of the Three Ways, first articulated by Aquinas with regard to human knowledge, was later applied by Hegel and Marx to historical processes.

Comments by Peter Myers; update November 26, 2010.

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The greatest achievement of medieval philosophers was, not systematic theology, but the discovery that the more we know, the more we are aware of what we don't know.

Aquinas' formulation establishes a bridge between Western and Eastern concepts of divinity, the former "personal", the latter "impersonal" i.e. brahman, karma or tao, because even in the "personal" case, we cannot understand God's nature: daoist.html.

The material below is from John Courtney Murray's book The Problem of God, Yale University Press, New Haven 1964. Selection by Peter Myers, August 8, 2001; note that since Murray uses curly brackets ({}), my comments are identified [thus]. I had to put Murray's seminal material on this site, because readers had not heard of it, and could not find it anywhere else.

[p. 19] ... the noetic question: how is ... God ... to be known? Related to it is the onomastic question, how is this God ... to be named?

[Max Weber (a Jew) wrote in his book Ancient Judaism (George Allen & Unwin, London 1952): "In Israel, as in Egypt, the view was held that every name was somehow something real, of the essence of the thing or person. The fact that Yahwe will blot out the "name" of the transgressor of his "book" expresses the threat to destroy him forever (Ex. 32:32, 33f.)" (p. 142).]

[p. 58] ... the relation between the two basic modes of human thought, the descriptive and the explanatory.

[p. 60] The Eunomian Problem

The new question concerned the theological understanding of the scriptural answer.

The answer was contained in two series of texts. One asserts that God is unknown, hidden from men, "dwelling in a light unapproachable, whom no man has seen or can see" (1 Timothy 6:16). As no man has seen his face, so no man knows his Name. The other series asserts that God is known "not far from anyone of us" (Acts 17:27). His invisibilities, in St. Paul's phrase, are visible in the world of nature (Romans 1:20). Furthermore, he is known as Lord and Savior through the mighty deeds he did and the many words he spoke in history (Hebrews 1:2). In particular, his only-begotten Son, made man, has "brought news" of him (John 1:18). Man therefore knows God and does not know him. Man has no Name for

[p. 61] God, and he has many names for God. His condition is at once knowledge and non-knowledge (gnosis and agnosia are the Greek words whose assonance cannot be reproduced in English). But what can this mean and how is it to be understood? Is it contradiction or only paradox? In what sense is the Christian to be both gnostic and agnostic? The Scripture does not answer. It is not the kind of question that even arises in the historical-existential scriptural mode of thought. It is, however, a legitimate human question and therefore it inevitably had to come up for answer.

The man who raised it was Eunomius (d. 394), the leader of the radical Arian Left in the third and final phase of the Arian controversy. He was a disciple of Aetius of Antioch, a dialectician and a sophist like his master, and sometime bishop of Cyzicus until, as the historian Socrates tells us, "the people, unable to endure any longer his empty and arrogant parade of language, drove him out of their city."

Eunomius' answer to the noetic and onomastic questions was simple: "I know God," he said, "as God knows himself." On the face of it the statement seems silly. One must understand, however, that Eunomius was a nominalist. For him, as for his numerous posterity, knowledge has to do only with the names of things: a name either designates the essence of a thing or it is merely an empty sound. Eunomius said, I know the Name of God; it is Agennetos. (The Greek word can mean either "ungenerated" or, more broadly, "without origin." Newman translated it, "the Unoriginate.") As God knows his own Name, said Eunomius, so do I. And this, he added, is God's only Name. All the other many names scattered throughout the Scriptures are either empty verbalisms that say nothing about God or they are mere synonyms for Agennetos, the one divine Name.

The issue drawn by this facile dialectician was not academic.

[p. 62] His gnosticism and his agnosticism, both of them misplaced, made wreckage of Christianity. On the one hand, if God is known as he knows himself, he is not transcendenr to human intelligence. He does not dwell in the inaccessible light of mystery. That is to say, he is not God. "If you have comprehended," St. Augustine would later say, "what you have comprehended is not God." On the other hand, if God is not really known by the many names given him from his transparency through the sacred history and through the sacral cosmos, he cannot be known at all. Therefore he is not present with us and he is not our God.

The adversaries of Eunomius were Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, Basil's brother Gregory of Nyssa, and John Chrysosrom. In the patristic manner, they undertook first to witness to rhe faith affirmed in the Scriptures. They dwelt on the primary scriptural theme that God is, in the classic technical Greek term, Akataleptos, the Incomprehensible. They forbade the Eunomian type of "busy scrutiny," as they called it, of the divine mystery, and they recalled to the faithful their creaturely condition, which is that of ignorance (agnosia) of God. Second, the Cappadocians (as Basil and the two Gregories are customarily called) elaborated the subordinate scriptural theme that God is both knowable and known, as he shines through the web of history and the fabric of the world. They reminded the fairhful of their creaturely privilege, which is to have a knowledge (gnosis) of God and thus to have God present as the God-with-us.

To develop these two themes, however, was simply to echo the doctrine of the Scriptures. There was the further task of setting the two themes in harmony.

How and why is it that God is at once known and unknown? This question was put not to Christian faith itself, which

[p. 63] simply affirms the fact, but to the theological intelligence, to reason illuminated bv faith. The answer was found by the skills of reason, chiefiy by its high art of making distinctions. Aristotle had long since distinguished the two questions that direct all intellectual inquiry because they also designate the two acts of the mind. There is the question whether a thing is (the Latin an est, the Greek oti estin), which is answered by the act of affirmation or judgment. There is the concomitant question, what the thing is (the Latin quid est, the Greek ti estin), which is answered by the act of conception or understanding. With Basil this distinction first appears in the service of the Christian faith against the destructively misplaced agnosticism and gnosticism of Eunomius. We can answer the question of existence; we can affirm, make the true judgment, that God is. But we cannot answer the question of essence; we cannot understand, grasp in a proper concept, what God is. In the order of understanding, however, a negative knowledge IS available. Precisely because we affirm that God is God, we can know that he is not his creation.

In terms of this distinction, man's gnosis and his agnosia were rightly located. To the newly raised noetic question, how God is known, the patristic answer was given, that he is known in his existence but not known in his essence. I can affirm that God is and that he is all that Scriptures, or reason, say he is - eternal, omnipotent, wise, good, and so on. But I cannot conceive what it is for God to be and to be eternal, omnipotent, wise, good, and all the rest of what he is.

There was then the further inevitable onomastic question, the issue of the many names of God that designate what we call his attributes. Does each name singly, and do all of them together, express some sort of true conception or understanding of God, or are they simply the projection onto God of man's

[p. 64] understanding of himself and of his world in such wise that, when man undertakes to articulate his complex conception of God, he is merely fashioning an idol with the techniques of human intelligence? The problem is clear. The many names of God are taken from the order of human experience. How, then, can thev be names of God, who does not belong to this terrestrial order?

The Fathers found a clue to the answer in the source through which they were continually searching. The Scriptures say that God is totally unlike his creation and absolutely outside of it because he is the Holy One. "I am God, not man" (Hosea 11:9). But the Scriptures also say that the creation is somehow like God and he is not wholly outside of it because it is the work of his hands and his glory dwells in it. By the giory of God the Scriptures regularly mean God himself as he is present in the world and with his people, manifesting his power, and to that extent himself, in his mighty acts, creative and redemptive.

This was a small clue indeed, but it was enough to put the Fathers on the track of the doctrine that was later known as the analogy of being. It also put them on the track of the intellectual technique that was later called the three ways of knowing God. They did not systematically elaborate the doctrine or exploit the technique. They did, however, clearly distinguish the two radically different modes of being, uncreated and created, finite and infinite, each of them real and both of them therefore somehow united in the notion of being. And they laid down the essential structure of the three ways, the dialectic movement of intelligence from the created to the uncreated order of being. There is the moment of affirmation or position. I affirm that God is or that he is good (and so on for all his attributes). There is the moment of negation or removal. I deny that God is or that he is good in the mode of

[p. 65] being or of being good that is proper to the created order whence my notion of being and of being good was derived. There is also, supporting and pervading the dialectic of affirmation and negation, the sense of the divine transcendence. I am conscious, as I affirm and deny, that God is, and that is he what he is, in a mode of being that is infinite and, in the end, incomprehensible.

Thus, the Fathers carried the answers to the noetic and onomastic questions beyond the point where the Scriptures had left them. As a piece of systematic thought, however, their theology of the divine names was only inchoate. They did not fully explain how and why it is that the pale similitude between the world and God which is so completely overshadowed by the greater dissimilitude between God and the world can be made the starting point of a dialectic of understanding whose term is a true, though altogether imperfect, knowledge of the Unknowable. At that, their theology was adequate for its purpose, which was polemic and defensive rather than speculative or systematic. The patristic concern was to defend the scriptural faith not simply by reaffirming its paradoxical affirmations but also by seeking a deeper understanding of them so as to bring them into harmony. Until this latter, characteristically patristic, task was accomplished, the scriptural affirmations could indeed still be made, but in a vacuum of understanding that was dangerous, as the Eunomian impiety had demonstrated. In the things of God it is perilous to misplace either one's agnosticism or one's gnosticism. The risk is the loss of one's God, who is lost both when he ceases to be God, because no longer unknown, and when he ceases to be our God, because not known at all.

Only inchoate as a systematization, the patristic theology of the knowledge and names of God was nevertheless a complete

[p. 66] achievement in the order of religious thought. The achievement consisted in the transformation of one paradox into another, with the result that each of them illuminated the other and both of them together cast light on the common truth that sustained their paradox. The biblical paradox, that God is at once unknown and known was transformed into the theological paradox, that the knowledge of God is an ignorance. Cyril of Jerusalem summed up the patristic insight when he said: "In the things of God the confession of no knowledge (agnosia) is great knowledge (gnosis)." The transcendent truth that both paradoxes brought sharply into focus was that God is uniquely an object of knowledge because God uniquely is. "I am God, not man."

The Thomist Problem

In order to complete this historical survey of the problem of God, I must now deal briefiy with the medieval elaboration of the initial patristic treatment. The figure in view is St. Thomas Aquinas. Admittedly, he was not the typical medieval figure. He was a man of the university, a man of the city. On the view of his contemporaries he was the innovator, not the traditionalist. Not surprisingly, the view applies to his treatment of the problem of God. The more typical medieval figure was the man of the monastery, the man of the countryside, and within the monastic tradition the problem of God was not the understanding but the taste of him. What the monk sought was the "savor of God." In this sense, Hugh of St. Victor, for instance, would be the more typical medieval figure. I touch here a whole new subject, only to put it aside. We shall stay with the man of the university.

Arius and Eunomius transposed the problem of God, each

[p. 67] of them a different aspect of it, from the plane of the religious existence to the plane of theological understanding. The patristic answer to Arius, which was canonized by the Council of Nicaea, and the patristic answer to Eunomius, which was sanctioned by inclusion in the tradition, were adequate to the respective problems as they were stated at the time. But they served ta raise a new issue. It was the issue of the scientific systematization of these conciliar and patristic answers by the theological reason, that is, by the philosophical reason functioning under the illumination of the Christian faith.

The validity of this new issue had been implicitly afffirmed by the Council of Nicaea. It established the statute of the ontological mentality and its mode of conception and statement within the high mysterious province of the Christian faith itself. By so doing, it implicitly established the statute of the philosophical reason and its processes of analytic and synthetic thought within the distinct and inferior province, problematical rather than mysterious, of theology. I mean here theology in the strict sense, that is, Scholastic theology, the centuries-old discipline that is concerned, not with the certification of the truths of faith, whose truth and certainty are warranted only by the Church, but with their systematic understanding insofar as this understanding - analogical, imperfect, and always incomplete - is accessible to the resources of reason. Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) is commonly called the Father of Scholasticism, since he was the first to pursue systematically the implications of the axiom, derivative from Augustine, Fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking an understanding of itself.

In respect of our present subject, the achievement of Aquinas was that for the first time in history he effected the transposition of the problem of God into a state of systematic theo-

[p. 68] logical understanding. His instruments were a developed metaphysic of causality, an articulated gnoseology and psychology, and, above all, an adequately elaborated doctrine of the analogy of being. The achievement represented the culmination of centuries of collective thought, patristic and Scholastic. It was also the personal triumph of a uniquely penetrating intelligence.

The Nicene problem receives its definitive treatment in Questions 27-44 of the First Part of the Summa theologica. The issue is the ancient one, how is it that the Son who is from the Father, and the Holy Spirit who is from Father and Son, are equally with the Father the one God. Aquinas, however, does not reproduce the patristic argument. He begins where it terminated, with the dogmatic conception of the homoousion, and his precise question is whether the dogma is theologically intelligible, that is, in some analogical terms.

The insight of Augustine had first glimpsed the analogy. The human intellectual consciousness is somewhat like the divine intellectual consciousness, since man is the image of God. At the same time, the divine mode of consciousness is utterly unlike the human mode, since God is God, not man. Aquinas elaborates the analogy with the utmost finesse, and, using it as a unifying thread, he constructs a masterpiece of relentlessly systematic thought, flawless in its structure, finished with all subtlety in its details. I can say no more than this about it; no brief description could do it justice. The only point here is to illustrate the advance made by Aquinas over the work of the Fathers. The advance was along a different line. Their work had been to defend the affirmations of faith against the Arian errors, utilizing the resources of the Scriptures. His work was to pursue a systematic understanding of the faith that they

[p. 69] had affirmed, utilizing the resources of reason illuminated by faith.

The more general problematic of God is wrought out in Questions 2-13 of the First Part of the Summa. The basic structure is constituted by the two interrelated pairs of questions that had lain in a different form beneath the text of Scripture and that reappeared in new form in the patristic era. Now the questions are explicitly stated for the first time in an organized systematic pattern.

The first question to be asked about God, as about anything else, Aquinas says, is the existential question, whether God is. To this question he devotes the three articles of Question 2. The third article contains the classic statement of the five ways whereby it can be known that God is. The argument then continues:

[quote] Having answered the question, whether a thing is, the inquiry moves to the question, how the thing is; the purpose is to know what the thing is. In the case of God, however, we cannot know what he is, but we can know what he is not. Of him, therefore we cannot ask the auestion, how he is, but we can ask the question, how he is not. Hence we shall inquire, first, how God is not; second, how he is known by us; third, how he is named (I, q. 3, proem.). [end quote]

This statement of the problem of God seems so simple as to be entirely obvious. It requires some effort to realize that it took nearly ten centuries to work it out into this systematic form. The pattern of the problematic had always been there; in one form or another the four questions had always been asked. They are the questions that man must ask about God in one form or another. There are no other basic questions; all others derive from these. If you wish to argue the problem of

[p. 70] God, whether on the planes of the religious existence, theological understanding, or pure reason, you are obliged to argue it within this identical problematical structure, exquisitely discerned and stated with genially stark simplicity by Aquinas.

I shall not deal in detail with the substance of the argument he incorporated within this structure, but two general aspects of it require comment. Call them his agnosticism and his gnosticism or, to use the patristic terms, his agnosia and his gnosis.

First, throughout the whole of his probing inquiry into the problem of God, Aquinas' constant concern was to protect the mystery of the divine transcendence from prying scrutiny. He was not the Arian dialectician who, in Gregory Nazianzen's sarcastic description, discoursed on the generation of the Son as if he had been there as midwife. Aquinas was the Christian theologian. His thought was directed by a sense of the awesome biblical truth that God is the Holy One whose Name is ineffable. As a theologian he states this truth in metaphysical form: "One thing about God remains completely unknown in this life, namely, what God is" (Commentary on Romans, chapter 1, lesson 6). He states the truth so often and so uncompromisingly that some of his commentators have become a bit alarmed at the patent poverty of the knowledge of God he permits to man in this life.

He makes it utterly clear, of course, that we can answer the question of existence, whether God is, and whether he is wise, good, and so on. Hence we can make affirmations about God that are true and certain. This is indeed cardinal. It insures God's presence to us and our presence to him, for, unless we know that the Other is, we cannot say that the Other is-with us. On the other hand, Aquinas makes it equally clear that with the exercise of the primary act of intelligence, which is

[p. 71] to make affirmations or judgments of existence, the capacities of human intelligence in regard to God are exhausted. We cannot go on to answer the question of essence in its positive form, what God is. We cannot positively understand the God whose existence we have affirmed. We cannot, as it were, crowd him into a concept in his transcendence he escapes our concepts.

[In a more secular age full of pride in human science and technology, the same question might be rephrased: is it possible for us to get beyond partial knowledge of the universe?]

Aquinas does not pretend that his doctrine of the analogy of being does any more than rescue our discourse about God from sheer equivocation. It lets us know that, when we are thinking and talking about God, it is really about God that we are talking and thinking. It does not assure us that what we think and say about God is what God is. With his gnosticism of affirmation, Aquinas joins what Sertillanges has called an agnosticism of definition. To be a bit monotonous on the point, as Aquinas himself was monotonous, we can know that God is but we cannot know what he is. In the end, our presence to him, which is real, is a presence to the unknown: "to him we are united as to one unknown" says Aquinas.

The doctrine was not new. It was the echo, in another form of thought and language, of the awesome utterance in Exodus, "I shall be there as who I am shall I be there." The text had fo~nd an earlier echo in the patristlc era in the paradox that the confession of no knowledge of God is itself the great knowing of him. The further achievement of Aquinas was that he exploited all the rational resources of a sophisticated ontology and an elaborate theory of knowledge to enforce the conclusion that all human knowledge of God ends in ignorance. Where the Bible and the Fathers had asserted that so it is, Aquinas demonstrated why it must be so. He transformed the paradox of Exodus, which had been paraphrased by Cyril of Jerusalem, into a state of systematic scientific understanding.

[p. 72] The biblical doctrine that God's creation is somehow like its Creator and Lord is transposed into the gnoseological technique of the first of the three ways of knowing God - the way of affirmation. The biblical doctrine that God is wholly unlike his crearion is transposed into the second way, the way of negation. The biblical doctrine that God is God, not man, is transposed into the third way, the way of transcendence or eminence. As this third doctrine is decisive, so the third way is determinant. It determined Aquinas to a remorseless pursuit of the exigencies of the second way.

We must, he says, deny to God, remove from God, all similarity to the corporal and spiritual worlds as we know them. God is not what anything in these worlds is. In point of essence, God's unlikeness to the finite world is total. When we have done this work of denial, he goes on, "There remains in our minds only {the affirmation} 'that he is,' and nothing more. Hence the mind is in a certain confusion." Obviously. How can intelligence affirm that God is at the same time that it denies that he is what anything else that it knows is? But even this is not the end: "As the final step, however, we even remove from him this very 'is-ness,' as 'is-ness' is found in creatures. And then the mind dwells in the darkness, as it were, of an ignorance. It is by this ignorance, as long as this life lasts, that we are best united to God, as Dionysius says. This is the darkness in which God dwells." Thus the theologian echoes the prophet: "Truly thou art a God who hidese thyself, O God of Israel, the Savior" (Isaiah 45:15).

Perhaps a word of caution is needed here. For all his final agnosticism in what concerns the definition of God - the understanding of what he is - Aquinas demonstrated what the Fathers had implied, that the confession of our ignorance of God is not to be made effortlessly, at the outset of inquiry. In

[p. 73] that case our ignorance would be a sheer absence of knowledge and not itself a mode of knowing. There is nothing more disastrous, as someone has said, than a negative theology that begins too soon. Ignorance of God becomes a true knowledge of him only if it is reached, as Aquinas reached it, at the end of a laborious inquiry that is firmly and flexibly disciplined at every step by the dialectical method of the three ways. This method not only governs the search for the supreme truth but also guarantees that the search will end in a discovery. There is a knowledge of God, as there is a way to it. There is a valid language about God, as there is a true knowledge of him. "As who I am shall I be there." The way of man to the knowledge of God is to follow all the scattered scintillae that the Logos has strewn throughout history and across the face of the heavens and the earth until they all fuse in the darkness that is the unapproachable Light. Along this way of affirmation and negation all the resources of language, as of thought, must be exploited until they are exhausted. Only then may man confess his ignorance and have recourse to silence. But this ignorance is knowledge, as this silence is itself a language - the language of adoration.

This first aspect of Thomist thought about God - its definitional agnosticism - may possibly seem congenial to the contemporary mind, if perhaps for the wrong reasons. But a second aspect is normally repugnant. I refer to Aquinas' gnosticism with regard to the existence of God as a truth of the rational order.

The whole structure and content of the first thirteen questions of the Summa are formally derivative only from the datum of all human experience, "I-with-the-others-in-the-world." Unlike the biblical problematic, which came down from heaven in a theophany, the Thomist statement rises up out of the earth-

[p. 74] ly soil of experience. Moreover, the mode of argument wherewith each of the four questions is met and answered is formally philosophical. Behind both the position and the resolution of the problem of God stands Aquinas' resolute and altogether serene assurance that it is within the native powers of the human intelligence, if it be trained in the discipline of philosophy, to make and to demonstrate the highest of metaphysical affirmations - to posit and to prove the judgment that God is; that it is further possible for reason to go on to articulate a complex conception of what God is not - a conception that, despite its negative form, is of positive cognitive value.

From all this, the contemporarv mind, particularly within the company of professional philosophers, somehow instinctively draws back. Its inclination, on reading the lengthy argument of this section of the Summa, would be neither to agree nor to disagree with it. More likely, the contemporary mind would feel that in the intellectual climate that sustains such an argument it can only gasp for breath. The fixed philosophical attitude today is to say that a natural theology is impossible, that it is impossible for human reason, beginning only with the data of experience, to construct a valid doctrine of God, to effect a purely rational resolution of the quadriform problematic. This philosophical disposition is furthermore the common Protestant theological disposition [and the Jewish?]. A philosophy of religion is indeed possible but not a philosophy of God. Between the order of rational affirmation and conception, which is the order of philosophy, and the order in which the notion of God is conceived and his existence affirmed, which is the order of religious faith, an impassable gulf is fixed.

This contemporary conviction has most serious consequences. If this great gulf exists between faith and reason, it follows

[p. 75] that the philosopher, who must stand by reason, should also stand for atheism. If the universe of reason and the universe of faith do not at any point intersect, it is unreasonable to accept any of the affirmations of faith, even the first, that God is. The atheist denial is the reasonable position.

This is the position against which Aquinas firmly stands in the opening questions of the Summa, both in the name of his faith and also in the name of his reason. There may be argument about the precise intention of the famous Article 3 in Question 2, where Aquinas outlines the five ways of answering affirmatively the question whether God is. There may also be argument about the import of the cryptic phrase in which Aquinas states the conclusion reached by the different ways: "and this is what all men understand by 'God'"; "to this all men give the name 'God.'" In any event, it is obviously within the intention of the five ways - and of the whole Summa, for that matter - to demonstrate that reason is not atheist, that atheism is not the reasonable conclusion from the data of common human experience, that the twin universes of faith and philosophy, distinct as universes of knowledge, are not utterly divorced, that their cardinal point of delicate intersection is in the crucial instant when reason affirms, what faith likewise affirms, that God is. The issue here, which is formally philosophical, is of vital religious import. It concerns the statute of reason in religion. If reason has no valid statute in religion, it follows that religion has no reasonable status in human life. Therefore it is unreasonable for a man to be religious. The reasonable man is the atheist.
[end of selection]

For a more modern statement of similar ideas, see perspectivism.html.

Surely Aquinas' formulation establishes a bridge between Western and Eastern concepts of divinity, the former "personal", the latter "impersonal" i.e. brahman, karma or tao, because even in the "personal" case, we cannot understand God's nature: daoist.html.

The word "atheism" has been hijacked by the Dogmatic Sceptics: it has come to mean something like "nihilism"; to return it to its original meaning, it needs to be replaced by the word "non-theism", which allows for Religious Non-Theism.

Martin E. Marty, Varieties of Unbelief (Holt, Rinehart and Winston: NY 1964) identifies both anti-religious and religious kinds of non-theism. He writes,

{quote} Because the word "atheism" has taken on pejorative tones and because it often implies a moral condemnation, it has become an all-purpose word for the many forms of unbelief. In an important interview, "Is the modern world atheist?" Friedrich Heer has cautioned against lumping all forms of misbelief, disbelief, nonbelief, and unbelief under this single heading. "The word 'atheist' is a harmful and dangerous term." Christians were seen to be atheist by the Romans, and in the Reformation era the various church parties called each other atheist. "There is consequently in Europe a long tradition of treating as 'atheists' those whose faith differs from one's own." ... The term "atheist" is here applied only to the integral form, the closed-system definition, which roots out God and the idea of God from human existence. It denies his transcendence and his action in history. Since it is surrounded by beliefs in gods, to preserve its identity it must also be antitheist; that is, it must reject the idea of God as a threat to human freedom. {end quote} http://virtual.chattanooga.net/atheisms/atheisms/marty.html.

Buddhism as a Religious Non-Theism: buddhism.html.

Atheistic Judaism as a Religious Non-Theism: philos.html.

The dialectical method of the Three Ways, first articulated by Thomas Aquinas, in his Three Ways of Knowing God (affirmation, negation, analogy), was later applied by Hegel and Marx to historical processes (thesis, antithesis, synthesis). Marx renamed analogy "negation of the negation".

Write to me at contact.html.