Just Who Is This God You Speak
of?
by Jonathan Bellot
It is easy to forget that “God” is a proper name. For most theists and some deists, God, after all, is supposedly in some sense personal, if not a person outright; it’s only convenient he, she, or it have a name one can refer to. But while it may seem convenient for this thing, this deity, to have a name, it’s ultimately more problematic than convenient. A name, after all, should refer to someone or something one is in some way aware of, acquainted with. To use a name that does not clearly refer to someone or something is a bit odd. In a talk entitled “What’s Next for Atheism?” A. C. Grayling put the problem like this: if we replace God’s name with something more common, like “Fred,” the oddity of our claims becomes pretty apparent. If I say that Fred went to the 7-11 on Friday, and, once pressed, must admit that I do not know much about this Fred—what he looks like or sounds like, how old he is, where he lives, even if he is truly a “he”—you would be right to ask me how I can say that “Fred” went to the 7-11, since “Fred” has no clear meaning in this context. No Fred could be identified by me or anyone else on a security camera, either, since no one has the faintest idea what Fred looks like, assuming Fred looks like anything.
It is easy to forget that “God” is a proper name. For most theists and some deists, God, after all, is supposedly in some sense personal, if not a person outright; it’s only convenient he, she, or it have a name one can refer to. But while it may seem convenient for this thing, this deity, to have a name, it’s ultimately more problematic than convenient. A name, after all, should refer to someone or something one is in some way aware of, acquainted with. To use a name that does not clearly refer to someone or something is a bit odd. In a talk entitled “What’s Next for Atheism?” A. C. Grayling put the problem like this: if we replace God’s name with something more common, like “Fred,” the oddity of our claims becomes pretty apparent. If I say that Fred went to the 7-11 on Friday, and, once pressed, must admit that I do not know much about this Fred—what he looks like or sounds like, how old he is, where he lives, even if he is truly a “he”—you would be right to ask me how I can say that “Fred” went to the 7-11, since “Fred” has no clear meaning in this context. No Fred could be identified by me or anyone else on a security camera, either, since no one has the faintest idea what Fred looks like, assuming Fred looks like anything.
Or, as Grayling put it: “Who made the universe? Fred. I
have a deep personal relationship…with Fred.” By humanizing God, by making this
indistinct person seem more intimate by nothing more than the change of a name,
you might suddenly realize how empty the space seems beneath the word “God,” in
the sense that it’s not clear who or what should go there. If I were to say I
have an intimate relationship with Melissa, but have no idea what she looks or
sounds like, no sensory details at all, indeed don’t even know she’s a
“she”—well, you’d be right to look at me with raised eyebrows and start
stepping back.
The same, you may be about to say, goes for God. While
it’s true that some speakers will provide specific definitions and traits of
“God,” it’s also true that many people use the name to refer to whatever
“supreme” being they have in mind, regardless of whether or not that being’s
characteristics may accord with someone else’s. Thus, a Christian, a Muslim,
and a deist who do not know each other’s respective beliefs can all say “I
believe in God” and think they are speaking about the same being, though each
one of them may have a being with different properties in mind. It’s not unlike
if we imagine that there are two people chatting in a café, and each has a
friend named Brian; without asking for further identification, each assumes
that the “Brian” the other person is talking about is the same Brian, when, in
fact, each is talking about a different person who simply happens to have the
same name. This can easily lead to misunderstandings. One need only turn to
various American conservatives’ attempts to claim that America is a Christian
nation because the founders (such as, say, Jefferson and Paine) believed in
“God” to see how easy it is to make mistakes, if not simply deceive the
simple-minded. Jefferson and Paine, after all, were deists; Paine, in
particular, took pain to emphasize the fact that he was not a Christian by
ridiculing Christianity in an infamous pamphlet of 1807 (in its final form), The Age of Reason. Yet he spoke of
believing in God, and misunderstanding—or manipulating—such passages might lead
one to believe he was talking about the same “God” fellow as the founders who
actually were Christians. The same, of course, is true for Einstein and
Spinoza—and Spinoza famously equated God with “Nature,” thus revealing a
singularly different being from the God of the Abrahamic faiths.
Clearly, then, it matters what person—or thing—we mean
when we say “God.”
But it’s interesting to note that this seeming emptiness
behind the word “God” doesn’t only extend to potential ambiguity; it extends
even into the more complex definitions of God one may run across. The Reformed
Epistemologists, like William Lane Craig and Alvin Plantinga, for instance,
have made—though they did not invent the definition—a certain description of
God infamous: God, we are told, is spaceless, timeless, eternal, immaterial,
changeless, enormously powerful (if not omnipotent), omnibenevolent, and
metaphysically necessary (uncaused). On the surface, this sounds great; God has
finally been pinned down. But on closer examination, the matter is hardly
clear—or perhaps it’s all too transparent. Taken literally, these definitions
inform us that God takes up no space, consists of no matter (appropriate,
really, given that he takes up no space), and exists outside of time. One could
stop there. God, if we take this literally, is theoretically indistinguishable
from nothingness—or, at least, frighteningly close. Mind you, like Parmenides,
I don’t quite know what nothingness is, not having ever experienced anything
but something; as Wittgenstein said
in a 1929 Lecture of Ethics, “it is nonsense to say that I wonder at the
existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing.” But God here is as close as I can get.
Of course, there is another way to take these words,
which is to invoke the possibly apocryphal medieval exercise of counting how
many angels could fit on the head of a pin. (Such exercises did exist, but it’s unclear whether or
not this specific one did or was created later as a caricature of the exercises
in general.) It is possible to think, intuitively, of something taking up space
without taking up space (and that was the answer to the pins question—angels
take up no space, not being material, so an infinity of them could fit on the
head of a pin). A mind, Craig likes to assert, is not material and does not
take up space as material things do. And, as for time, Craig asserts—though
more shakily—God might have created the universe at the exact same moment he
desired to do so, since the desire cannot have preceded the creation of the
universe, or God would have been acting in time—and time, according to the Big
Bang model, cannot meaningfully exist at the moment of the Big Bang (and thus,
there isn’t really a “before” the Big Bang, since relativity means that time
loses all meaning when the universe is bunched up altogether at once in the
point of the Big Bang, the singularity). Mind you, all neuroscience currently points to the mind being a product of the brain and not independent of it, as the dualists would
assert (and Craig is not unsympathetic to dualism). Moreover, while we can say that things can take up space
“without” taking up space, it’s not actually clear that this is either possible
or even a meaningful statement. What is actually beneath those words? What does
it mean to take up no space or to be “beyond” space—or, worse, time? (On the
assumption that time even is even real, that is, more than just a convenient
illusion, which I’m unsure of, somewhat alongside Julian Barbour and J. M. E.
McTaggart.) At this point, someone might retreat into saying we can’t
understand these concepts, just as a negative theologian—someone defining God
by what he isn’t—might say that God can exist without existing. And I don’t
deny that it’s possible that we just can’t understand these things but that
they may be possible. I don’t believe in a deity, but I’m well-aware of the
fact that I do not know everything, and there may be much more out there to
learn. Hell, I can’t even disprove solipsism—and you—some irony for
kicks—can’t, either. Perhaps God can exist and not-exist at the same time, not
unlike Wittgenstein’s parody of Freud’s notion of the unconscious: “Mr.
Nobody,” Wittgenstein called it.
Or, as Samuel Beckett asked in the addenda at the end of his novel Watt,
who may tell the tale
of the old man?
weigh absence in a scale?Or, as Samuel Beckett asked in the addenda at the end of his novel Watt,
who may tell the tale
of the old man?
mete want with a span?
the sum assess
of the world's woes?
nothingness
in words enclose?
And mystery, indescribability, can be beautiful, in a deep way, as Einstein and Gabriel Marcel knew so well. Perhaps there are names we cannot speak because we will never have the words.
But at the same time, we should be careful. If we say something doesn’t take up space, maybe it doesn’t—and maybe that’s all it means, and there’s nothing there. As Julia Kristeva writes in The Feminine and the Sacred, those Christian mystics who went very far in negating God’s existence while affirming it may simply have been avoiding the fact that they were saying there was no God. Kristeva uses the example of Angela of Foligno, who described the divine as “an ‘abyss,’ ‘a thing that has no name.’” For Kristeva, this “thing without a name may betray…a suggestion of disbelief…[t]he latencies of a mystic atheism.” In so negative a theology, God may well vanish if one presses hard enough. Perhaps we cannot escape from this disappearance by using words to cover them up, to cover up the terrifying emptiness and ambiguity behind the very name of “God.”
But the thing is, I love these discussions. I want to be
challenged, to have my world and my beliefs spun on their axis by a new
argument or new evidence. I want to hear and have these discussions in the
islands—and, believe me, there are people from the Caribbean who are having
them. But the average person there (and not only there, of course) does not
choose to examine who “God” is or if God is truly Mr. Nobody. We revel in a
simple, childish Christianity and, in some cases, Islam. We do not elevate the
discussion; we assume that God is as obviously what we think he is as it is
obvious that we breathe—and thus to assume God may not exist or may be other
than we think may well be tantamount to being a fool or mentally ill (both of
which skeptics are routinely called by fanatics, should the topic of skepticism
even come up). We need something more. We need to be questioners, to be proud
of ourselves for stepping away from simple answers and asking questions.
The
world we find behind those questions may not always be pretty or comforting; it
may well be bleak and depressing. Or it may be glorious and marvelous. Or
depressing. But we will have found it ourselves. And that is the journey—the
never-ending journey, like Jose Saramago’s tale about a man searching for an
unknown island—we in the Caribbean should be happy to be on. Instead, we tend
to attack others for asking too many questions.
Let us
make our voices and questions heard—now and not forever after, but for a good
long time.
Taking the word 'God' literally it simply means a figure of worship. So literally anything (animate or inanimate) can be one's God from themselves to their car to their pet dog. The thing that they worship - not necessarily literally. Taking this definition: every single human being have a god/s whether they know it or not. They don't necessarily have to bow down or pray to it. Just see where they spend the most time it'll guide you on to it.
ReplyDeleteNow that is has been established that there can be infinite gods it is thus utterly foolish to assume that when two individuals mention the word God they are automatically talking about the same object.
Nice analogy about replacing the word 'god' with a name but considering that as you mentioned most religions have a 'name' for their god and it still maintains the same 'aura' and that when your talk about 'traits of god' you're actually talking and expecting about the traits of a 'human' not a god make the logic sort of fuzzy.
A friend can establish a relationship with a pen-pal without actually knowing his physical attributes but what attributes are there to know about god? You then have to specify which determine the attributes or 'traits' he/she/it possess. You speak about sensory details but is it possible to contact all gods with your five senses or are there other means of contacting and accessing his attributes. I can't say authoritatively but for non-Catholic Christianity that MAY be the case.
So as you may see by now in order for the logic to not go all fuzzy and skewed there is need for more specialization and understanding of god as a whole. Contrary to popular belief - understanding the concept of God is not for the 'simple-minded'. Its way more complex than we currently understand.
This is getting too long so i'll just touch on one other topic. Time
No one have experience the absence of time or existence in a system where time and space are not coexistent dimensions.
So in the hypothetical context of 'eternity' whilst it 'may' be true that there is no past nor future only present, does it also implies the necessity for the lack of sequence. Could it be that although sequentially things may occur in consecutive intervals(taking a time analogy), could it be in perception to only exist in the present. Is time dependent on the systems that define it and our perception of it on fact that we actually are bound by time? Our every existence and our biological clock ticking from birth. In a absence of the time dimension is it perception based.
I'm sure by now you realize my point. Ourselves, very much like Craig are attempting to make definite(factual) statements based on assumptions of systems over which we have to experience or understanding. That in itself is very very foolish. We need to understand that only assumptions can be made based upon assumptions. The summation of the error in each assumption may lead us with a error that is as large as our assertion itself.