Is God Beyond Words?

I had a conversation with a professor of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, a professor of physics. And I was about to give an address that night on the adequacy of human language to speak about God. And this gentleman was there something as a skeptic and was being cynical, and we had dinner beforehand and he said to me, "I don't envy your task." And I said, "What's that?" He says, "Having to get up there and talk about God." He said, "Because you can't say anything meaningful about God because God is beyond the scope of science and beyond the scope of real language and so on." He said, "It's a tough thing to do, isn't it?"

And I said, "Well, yes." I said, "But surely you can understand my dilemma. And he said, "Why?" I said, "Well, because you have the same problem with categories that you guys use in physics." And he says, "Like, what?" And I said, "Well, like energy." And he said, "What do you mean?" I said, "Well, what is energy?" And he said, "Well, everybody has energy." I said, "Well, what is it? He says, "It's ability to do work." I said, "I don't want to know what it can do, I don't want to its function. I want know what it is because you people keep telling me that ultimately the world is made up of energy. You speak of energy in terms of amounts. So what is it?" And he said, "Energy's MC squared." I said, "I don't hear it's mathematical equivalency, I want to know what it is."

It's is-ness. See, what I was pushing for was an ontological definition of energy and calling my friend to task and the fact that people ascribe being to energy all the time. I want to know what kind of a being it is, if it has being or if it is being. It's difficult, really, to speak meaningfully about such concepts as it is to speak about God. I think it's far more difficult to speak about energy that is to speak about God. But in any case, ontology asks the question, what is ultimate reality?