God is often perceived as many things that God is not. God is often assigned a gender and called ‘He’, which is not necessarily correct. Society has been continuously building a mold that it believes God fits into. In Catholicism, Father Barron uses the ideas of Thomas Aquinas, who he identifies as “arguably the greatest theologian in the Catholic tradition” (Barron 62), to face a very popular but untrue classification of God when he says, “…God cannot be defined or situated with any genus, even the genus of ‘being’” (Barron 63). Basically, society cannot know what God because God does not take any form of any species that society is able to recognize. Although it is often said that humans are created in God’s image, it is not correct to think…show more content… Barron clarifies that this is no longer the accepted belief when he states, “…the mainstream of the Catholic Theological tradition has tended not to refer to God as a being, however supreme, among many” (Barron 62). This is explained rather simply. Referring to God as a supreme being goes against two very important beliefs of the Catholic Church. The first belief being that God is unlike anything else. Saying that God is the most Supreme Being indicates that there are other beings similar to God, which is not true in the catholic tradition. Nothing is like God and by saying that God is the most supreme, God is then placed into a group, which is wrong no matter how high the placement is. The second with this statement is as follows: God is referred to as a being and not what God really is, which is “being”…show more content… One may understand God better by releasing the idea of God one may have in one’s head. God is not contingent upon any other reality. Everything that exists around people is contingent upon something else. We may think of one thing and realize that its existence is only fleeting in the universe. It comes into being and exists for a certain time and eventually dissipates from being and no longer exists. God is not like this. God is continuous and is not subject to time as everything else is. Barron introduces this argument of contingency to further reiterate that God is not one single being that is above all else but rather being itself that is perfect and content and not contingent upon the existence of anything else. Barron takes this idea further when he suggests, “The contingency of earthly things…indicates something of great moment, namely that such things do not contain within themselves the reason for their own existence” (Barron 64). It is not necessary to look further than God for the cause of God. It is both as simple and as complicated as that. Barron captures this perfectly when he explains,
