How can human language be used to correctly characterize an infinite God?

The question is old and serious: if God is infinite, how can finite words reach him at all? The strongest version of the objection, though, has a habit of refuting itself.

1. The verification principle refutes itself. If a sentence is meaningful only when it can be empirically verified, that rule cannot itself be empirically verified. It fails its own test. The sword that kills everything kills itself, and this one has.

2. Logical positivism is dead. Philosophers abandoned the verification principle because it could not be stated without contradiction. The objection survives mostly in popular anti-religious writing, not in the philosophy of religion, where the debate moved on decades ago.

3. There is a third option besides univocal and equivocal. If our words mean exactly the same of God as of creatures, God becomes an idol. If they mean something entirely unrelated, we are not talking about God at all. Thomas Aquinas argues for analogy: a real but ordered resemblance, where the word reaches God truly without containing him.

4. Analogy is grounded in creation. “So God created man in his own image” (Genesis 1:27). Creaturely goodness is a finite reflection of his, which is why calling God good is not a category mistake but an inference from maker to made. The image is the bridge the objection ignores.

5. God speaks, which settles the possibility. “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son” (Hebrews 1:1–2). If God intends to be known, he is able to use the language he created. “No one has ever seen God; the only God ... he has made him known” (John 1:18).

6. Limited knowledge is not no knowledge. I do not know the ocean exhaustively, but I know it is water, that it is deep, and that I can drown in it. We know God truly without knowing him fully — “the secret things belong to the LORD our God” (Deuteronomy 29:29).

7. Turn it around: it uses language to deny language. “God is beyond all human words” is itself a very confident statement about God, made in human words, and offered as true. The objection needs the referential capacity it denies. It also depends on terms like “infinite,” which are metaphysical rather than empirical.

8. Pure negation leaves nothing to worship. We can say much about what God is not, but Scripture also says what he is: “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger” (Exodus 34:6). “God is love” (1 John 4:8). A God about whom nothing positive can be said is not the God of the Bible.

9. Creation itself speaks without words. “The heavens declare the glory of God” — and the psalm adds, “There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard” (Psalm 19:1–3). The claim is that God communicates through what he made, which is why language about him is possible at all.

10. What we can and cannot say. We can say what God has revealed and what he has done; we cannot say what he is in himself exhaustively — “who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see” (1 Timothy 6:16). That is not language failing. It is language working correctly about its object.

The objection assumes that a word must either capture its object completely or not touch it at all. Those are not the only options, and we do not use that standard anywhere else. We speak truly of God because he made us in his image and chose to speak first.

Sources: Thomas Aquinas; Summa Theologiae; Edward Feser; Peter Kreeft; C.S. Lewis.

Related challenges:
• How can religious claims be meaningful if they are not empirically verifiable?
• How can religious claims be meaningful if they are not empirically falsifiable?
• Doesn’t the very concept of faith preclude the offering of evidence and argument? Isn’t that the whole point of “becoming like a child”?