[64] And this is my first answer to this question: you NEVER can say that God^a is completely unknown if you say "God" AT ALL. If you speak of ANYthing in the world, you can never say it is completely unknown because you know at least about it enough that you can ask this question. And that is already very much. Now the further answer is that this is not the position I take at all. I didn’t speak about God directly here, but I spoke about religious language^b, i.e., the language of our ultimate concern. This language, I said, is symbolic. Symbolic knowledge is not less, but MORE, than ordinary knowledge! Of course, symbols^c can be true, and they are true if they express the actual relationship in the religious experience between man and that which he wants to symbolize in his symbols. Therefore, "God" can be a true symbol, He can be a demonic^d symbol, He can be a divine symbol. In any case, the question of the TRUTH of what is expressed in the symbol is always open, and one cannot speak of "completely unknown." Then the other element of this question, "the fact of ultimate concern is grounded in God." This is a complete reversal of my kind of arguing. I never said that, but I said there is an ultimate concern about the Ultimate. And this is simply a statement of the only thing which is certain, more certain than we ourselves are [probably: "more certain than we are of ourselves"?--Ed.], that the question of the meaning of our existence is beyond all our lives and expresses itself as passionate concern in many ways. Therefore, I cannot turn the argument around and have, first, "God^e," and then say the ultimate concern is grounded in it--this is just what I want to avoid. This brings me to a statement which is perhaps illuminating for the whole [course of] lecture[s]: the method of a philosophy of religion^f--and of course if you speak about religion and culture, you give a philosophy of religion, implicitly, and largely explicitly. It is always wrong if you begin a philosophy of religion with the statement [that] you believe in God and then give arguments for His existence. This can never lead to an understanding of the phenomenon of religion. But you must always start the opposite way: you must start with the human situation in which there is the experience of ultimate concern--or, as one also could call it, the experience of the holy^g.