It’s a line from Shelley Duvall, in Annie Hall.
Ironically, the follow-up fits here: Woody replies that “I can think of another word,” and gets disregarded because she’s already on about how the guy is GOD! I mean, this man is GOD! He’s got millions of followers who would crawl all the way across the world just to touch the hem of his GARMENT! (“Really? It must be a tremendous hem.”)
rationalism? empiricism? humanism?
I’m going to go out on a limb here and agree with Thudlow that if the word has not appeared yet, then the word probably does not exist, at least not with the properties OP described.
I can picture a serene nun simply saying “beyond”. So you lay out a big fine rational argument, and she replies that God is beyond us; beyond logic; beyond comprehension, beyond human understanding; beyond space and time, beyond the universe: “beyond”.
Ok. I thought it was Leopold & Loeb.
I asked my mother in law, who happens to be up late like me. She grew up Catholic and went to Catholic school.
She says Mystery with a big M or The Faith with a big F. Specifically, “Capitalized things that aren’t normally capitalized mean God stuff,” she said as she walked away with her ice cream cone tripping over my pug.
Hope that helps.
Hubris? (False pride?) I’m more familiar with its usage in the context of studying Greek Tragedy, but I didn’t spend much time around nuns growing up.
Again, the Catholic Church has a long history of philosophy and theology based on reason. Aquinas’ “Summa” would be a mere pamphlet if his teachings boiled down to “believe this without questioning it and don’t attempt to apply reason.” The Church has always taught that reason and Revelation should never be in conflict… and that, if they DO seem to be in conflict, we must not be reasoning correctly.
Sure, exasperated nuns or Sunday School teachers may snap “It’s a mystery” or “Just take it on faith,” but that isn’t a command from the Pope. Catholics can and should ask tough questions.
“worldly” ? “She said she would otherwise be a believer but she had worldy reasons to stay away”.
“academic”. Usually it means that you are talking about the past and the fact is now contrary to that possibility… “If you had gone east you would have”… done something academic.
BUT it can be taken more literally… “Its academic that you can transmute lead into gold, the bible says that alchemists are sinners.”
“Intellectual pride” is how the old-school Baltimore Catechism Catholics expressed the concept.
My resident theologians finally got back to me. As said above “fideism” or the same root in a different part of speech is a good bet.
An alternative phrasing originating from Aquinas is the idea that some bits of knowledge “come only from revelation” and cannot be derived from reason. Which might be rendered in nunnish Latin as something close to “solo revelatio”.
The one thing that puzzles me is:If God is a being then he would first need a place in which to exist. Who or what created that?
It is pointless to even go there.
Aquinas is often slotted in as some theological genius but his Summa is one massive exercise in dodging that particular question and many others besides. He starts with the assumption that god exists, retrofits the world to match that expectation, then extrapolates from there. Hence the linguistic gymnastics needed to obscure and confuse.
If a god can come from nothing or have always existed then a universe can come from nothing or always have existed. The god part is an unnecessary (but psychologically comforting) complication.
Induction? Uniformitarianism? Empiricalism?
Such principles of logic are often attacked as being arbitrary (when people don’t like particular conclusions), when really they are a formalization of the basic foundation of how we all reason.
Why do you assume this? As far as I know, most monotheistic theologians claim that God is not limited/located in any specific place.
In any case, it’s reasonable and logical that, if God is so much greater than we are and in fact created us, that there may be things about God that are beyond our ability to understand, and/or things beyond our ability to figure out for ourselves (“solo revelatio” as per LSLGuy’s post).
But the notion that there may be things that are beyond human capability to understand is not just a religious notion nor something only theists believe. See for example cognitive closure (“the proposition that human minds are constitutionally incapable of solving certain perennial philosophical problems”).
which is handy isn’t it? saves them having to explain how it could exist before there was any “place” that it could exist within. Of course, “the universe has always existed” or “the universe was created from nothing” is a simpler explanation which is always to be preferred.
asserted without any evidence for a “god” in the first place
asserted without evidence
and how handy that such unknowable things include some rather fundamental and contradictory elements of the nature and behaviours of god. No need to explain, hand-wave it away, mysterious ways don’t you know?
Which may well prove to be true, it also means that religion, as a man-made construct, cannot do so either.
How about the word miracle. Totally discounts reason and more likely to be used by a nun than magic.
There is a difference between universe and existence. To exist even the universe would have to be in existence. Thousands of years ago the word God meant anything or person that could inspire awe or show strength, so there were sun Gods, Gods of Thunder < lightening, moon, etc.and even the Pharohs and in pre dynasty times Osiris was called a god and many of the Pharohs were thought of as Gods. The idea of God as we think of it today as creator of sll things came centuries later.
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In order to exist anything must be in existence. If God is nowhere or any where it isn’t rational; all that exists is in existence.
Non-secular?
I can remember the kids at bible camp using secular like a dirty word, “Oh, you go to secular school. Oh that’s secular music…”