Ed Feser has an interesting post about
Christians,
Muslims, and the reference of “God”.
Nearly 300 comments, including some very bad philosophy. The issue is
essentially a linguistic and semantical one, not theological. Ed correctly points
out that a speaker’s erroneous beliefs don’t entail that he is not referring to
the same thing that speakers with correct beliefs are referring to, mentioning
the example made famous by Keith Donellan. He points out that it is “perfectly coherent
to say that Muslims are “importantly” and “crucially” wrong precisely because
they are referring to the very same thing Christians are when they use the word
“God,” and that they go on to make erroneous claims about this referent. That the errors are “important” or “crucial”
is not by itself sufficient to prevent successful reference.
But then Ed claims (in a comment
on his own post) that Jews, Christians and Muslims also use “God” to mean “the
uncaused cause of everything other than himself, who is omnipotent, omniscient,
perfectly good, etc.” “
Why? By ‘God’ don’t they all just
mean the being referred to at the beginning of Genesis “In the beginning GOD
created the heavens and the earth”, and who is referred to continuously
throughout the old Testament? When any
of them uses the name used in the Bible, they are using it with the same
reference as the Bible, the text from which they learned the name.
So it is perfectly rational for a
Christian to deny that God (i.e. the being referred to in Genesis et al) is the
uncaused cause of everything other than himself. I.e. the proposition ‘God is
the uncaused cause of everything other than himself’ is synthetic rather than
analytic. But it is contradictory to
say that God is not the being referred to at the beginning of Genesis, at least
if the use of ‘God’ is intended to continue the chain of reference begun in
Genesis and which extends throughout the Bible.
4 comments:
But the word 'god' seems to be a descriptive term. Otherwise there wouldn't be such a thing as polytheism. Or monotheism for that matter. The proper name of the God introduced in Genesis is YHWH. 'YHWH is God' is not like 'Cicero is Tully'. Elijah on Mt. Carmel said, "How long will you waver between two opinions? If YHWH is God, follow him; but if Baal is God, follow him." He's not using 'God' as a proper name there.
The LXX translates 'Elohim' as 'ho theos', and the NT follows suit. The definite article vitiates against reading it as a proper name, right? I don't deny that English speakers can and do use 'God' as if it were a proper name. But surely they also can and do use it as a singular descriptive term, equivalent to 'ho theos'. And might it not in many circumstances be indefinite which use is intended? If I say "Let's worship God," is my meaning that we should worship the character in the Bible, or is my meaning that we should worship the one being who has a divine nature? In a context where you and I both hold that the character in the Bible is the only being who has a divine nature, it hardly matters which thing I mean, and I might not have decided which thing I intended when I said it.
Chris,
Thanks for this comment, and welcome to Beyond Necessity!
The discussion at the other place was confusing as people were using terms like 'reference' in a loose way. Strictly speaking, if a definite description expression used in 'the F is G' is a Russellian description, then it is really an indefinite description that can be be satisfied by no more than one thing. It means something like 'some x is uniquely F and x is G'. So for Russellian descriptions, we should ask whether they are satisfied or not, rather than whether they 'refer'. If it is referential, by contrast, then there is some relation implied between the referring term and the referent. And, strictly speaking a referring term must have a referent whether or not its proposition or its negation is true. I.e. whether 'a is F' is true, or its negation 'not: a is F' is true, 'a' must refer if it is a referring term or 'logically proper name'.
>>He's not using 'God' as a proper name there.
Agree, despite the capital 'G'.
>>The LXX translates 'Elohim' as 'ho theos', and the NT follows suit. The definite article vitiates against reading it as a proper name, right?
I didn't know this. I looked at the Greek NT, and doesn't it translate 'elohim' as 'kyrios' or something like that (not looking right now).
>>But surely they also can and do use it as a singular descriptive term, equivalent to 'ho theos'.
Again, do we mean Russellian descriptive term, or referring descriptive term? I don't believe Russell's analysis is much good in any case.
>>If I say "Let's worship God," is my meaning that we should worship the character in the Bible, or is my meaning that we should worship the one being who has a divine nature? <<
My view is the former, against Bill and others.
>>In a context where you and I both hold that the character in the Bible is the only being who has a divine nature, it hardly matters which thing I mean, and I might not have decided which thing I intended when I said it. <<
We should talk about 'intention' later. My fundamental area of disagreement with Bill is that he thinks that intentions have something to do with reference and semantics, I think that they have nothing to do. My reason is that intentions and thoughts and stuff are invisible, unless we are clairvoyants, and that the purpose of language is to express ourselves to others. Thus, either the intention is visible from the outside, as it were, by the use of visible or audible signs, or not. If the latter, then it cannot be communicated by signs, and is irrelevant to semantics.
My paradigm is sentences like 'John was in the party but he left early'. I say that the back-reference of 'he' is wholly independent of my intention, and that it is guaranteed by grammar and the semantics and customary use of pronouns. I might have intended to refer to Susan, or hamburgers, but then my intention failed. I referred to John.
>>doesn't it translate 'elohim' as 'kyrios' or something like that<<
No, elohim = theos; adonai = kyrios. YHWH is also translated by 'kyrios'. The history of this translation choice, as I understand it, is found in the fact that Jews, in order to avoid breaking the commandment, "Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain" avoided pronouncing 'YHWH' altogether. When reading from Scripture they would say 'Adonai' whenever they came to an instance of 'YHWH' in the text. (As a reminder to do this, scribes put in the vowel-points from 'Adonai' in 'YHWH', and the attempt to pronounce that amalgam phonetically resulted in the word 'Jehovah'). Hence the LXX's choice of 'kyrios', the Greek equivalent of 'Adonai', for 'YWHW'.
Thanks Chris, much appreciated.
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