Describing God.

Abstract

The first few chapters of this dissertation examine traditional explanations of the problem of religious discourse and finds them to be inadequate for a variety of reasons. The traditional explanations are either founded on a problematic metaphysical system or they are internally inconsistent.

The philosophical difficulty with religious discourse centers around the problem of applying descriptive predicates to a transcendent God. This is contrary to most contemporary accounts of the problem of religious language which claim that the problem is within the peculiar genres of religious language, i.e., analogy, metaphor and narrative.

The final two chapters look to metaphor and narrative as answers to the problem of predication. Neither is found to solve the problem and the notion of predicative history is introduced as a way of understanding the application of descriptive predicates to God.