Is The Ineffable an empty concept?

Suppose I have a very special dog. Unlike most dogs, which tend to have a definite form, a certain number of legs, and so on, my dog doesn’t have any qualities I can name. The only thing I know about him is what he is not- that is to say, he is not limited by any human conception of dogness, he is not in a particular place, and does not bark in a particular language that only certain dogs can understand. Add to this that my dog is invisible, and unbound by all physical limitations like location and time.
My question is, why does this dog matter? It may or may not act in the world, but even if it does, I have no way of knowing what events are acts of dog, and which are not. Since I know nothing about my dog, I don’t know if it’s him scratching at the window, or the wind. I don’t know if I should leave food out for him, call to him, or any of that, for my dog may not have any of these needs, and even if he did, I may not be able to satisfy them with with my limited human conceptions of dog food.
Is an ineffable god any different than no god at all?

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Pretensions and semantics.

Ineffable means not able to be expressed in words —> from Latin ineffabilis, “unutterable”. Which does not preclude the existence, rather makes words less than useful for describing. No different than, say, my personal experiences of the births of my children: I experienced those processes, but could never relate in words what those experiences were like, to you, so that there would be commonality of understanding.

“No god” means not existent.

The two are incomparably different. No basis for comparison.

My last sentence was dealing with a matter of practicalities, the body of the post should give you more of an idea of the thrust of my argument.
Honestly, I expected something like this (though not from you). A paragraph of negative claims about The Ineffable- it’s not able to be expressed with words, it does not preclude existence, it cannot be compared to atheism.
All of this I use to fuel the fire of my original point- as long as the ineffable can only be defined by what it is not, the ineffable is no actual concept. A concept cannot be defined totally by negatives. Consider a list of negative claims:

“It doesn’t have legs”
“It’s not orange”
“It was not present at the signing of the Magna Carta”

How many such statements do I have to make before you have any idea what sort of object I’m talking about? So far, it could be an apple, a battered copy of “Sense and Sensibility”, or a 13-year-old amputee. You will never ever get there, or even begin to zero in.
Proponents of God as the Ineffable have to be able to make some positive, non-analytic propositions about this Ineffable, or it’s simply a useless term.

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Nevermind, back to your thread then. My error.

Hi Ucc,

What took you so long? I’ve been waiting… :smiley:

I think that the first problem encountered is coming up with a definition of what is God? For some, God is the anthropomorphized “Our father who art in heaven”. God is seen as a specific entity, the creator of all, separate from that which is human. I think you have read my definition of this concept as the one-behind-many, or more irreverently, the “big guy in the sky”. Others see the manifest (sensed) universe as one of ordered patterns, of seeming equilibrium of the forces of nature. The universe seems to operate in an orderly fashion, and while one may infer that this orderly pattern of behavior has supernatural sentience, awareness isn’t knowing what that might be, or anything about the attributes of such a force other than to say that ‘something’ must be there. Whatever the personal experience of that something, it is personal and not expressible in language, and is therefore, ineffable. Either definition is based on faith, for there is no ‘proof’ of the existence or non-existence of anything we would call God.

No I don’t. :stuck_out_tongue: One has to make the assumption that whatever it is beyond the sensed universe is describable in words, and that is an attempt to lock up the conclusion in the definition. Whatever is is you would call God is beyond language. This is why all such discourse ends up null. We toss about our metaphors in an attempt to describe the indescribable, and all the while there is no sharable knowing. My understanding, your understanding of “God” remains personal and beyond all of the words.

Is ineffable a useless term? Not at all. It is the precise definition that explains all of our knowing of that which is.

Your turn.

JT

The ‘effable’ aspect of God presents as Truth and Idea; and the speaking becomes the doing. Catharsis (i mean ‘the flash,’ the catharsis of the Cathars) is an Idea that includes and encompasses you, as opposed to you encompassing the idea.

In as much as something is completely ineffible, then i agree with you.

tentative

 I don't want to make this about semantics, but as near as I can tell, [i]everything[/i] is a specific entity- everything real, anyways. I don't want to harp on this point if it's just a question of word usage, but if not, it goes to the very heart of my argument- everything real can be defined in terms of what it is, and what it is not. 
 The other thing about these definitions is that they succeed in point in a particular direction. Even if a definition of God can be defeated, it can be defeated because it lists some criteria for Godhood that are incoherent or demonstrably false. This is all possible because the definition gives some idea of what the person [i]means[/i]. 

You’ve got a kind of ‘wave’ pattern going on here, that I see a lot with talk about the ineffable. First your wave rolls in with a series of positive claims that DO narrow down the nature of God- the universe operates in an orderly fashion, implying that God both prefers order, and has the capabilities to impose it on the universe. You go on to use the term supernatural sentience- Outside of nature, and possessing of intellect. Combine that with the Creator/Ordering properties you describe immediately before, and you’ve got something very close to the god of theism- all that’s missing is goodness and interest in human affairs (which may amount to the same thing, really). But then your wave rolls back out again, as you say

And try to insist on unknowability again. The point of my argument here is precisely that you can't have it both ways. If there is something about the universe that indicates to you that there is 'something out there', those signs also tell you (in a limited way) what that something is like. Conversely, if you literally have no idea what something is like, then no evidence could ever be appropriate to suggest it is there. 
This is a seperate, but related issue that Mastriani hits upon above.  Yes, the direct experience of God can be mostly unexpressible by language, if the goal is to describe it in terms that appeal to other means of perception. You run into the same problem trying to describe vision to those born blind. This does not mean that vision is ineffable, or that vision has no real qualities we can describe.  Since perception of God is a faculty of it's own, not reliant on memory, vision, and so on, it cannot every be completely described in terms of those things. 
 Yes, and whether your realize it or not, you've already done so. When you gave your reasons for supposing that there is something beyond the sensed universe, the examples you gave were order, equilibrium, and the sense of a sentience behind things. You picked out those things because you have a preconcieved idea of what sorts of things to look for, and what's appropriate to consider Godly. Otherwise, you would have been just as likely to cite the commoness of blackness and spherical shapes in the universe as evidence that God is like a magic 8 ball. 

 Simply put- if God is not [i]like[/i] anything, if you will not make any positive statements about what God is or what He does, why would any one characteristic of the universe point to His existence more than any other? It wouldn't.  
  If I find tracks in the snow outside my house, and upon reflection form the belief that they were made by a fox, I cannot turn around and say that I know nothing at all about this fox- at the very least, I am committed to the claim that it has four feet of a certain size, that it has enough weight to depress the snow just so, the number of toes it has, many other things as well. If I deny those things, then I deny the very reason why the tracks suggested 'fox' in the first place.

Hi Ucc,

I mentioned a seeming order or equilibrium and from the a possible inference of supernatural sentience. I didn’t say that was how I ‘see’ or understand that which is. Again, my understanding of that which we call God has nothing to do with words, or reasoning. It is an indescribable awareness. Sorry, but that is as close as I can get.

And it doesn’t. no different than anyone else examining their spiritual nature, I rely on faith. I’m here, and things seem to operate quite well without the least bit of help from me. That I can say “I don’t know” may be a bit unusual in the world of religion, but it is a carefully considered POV.

I think that the ineffable is not an “empty” subject, it is an over-flowing subject that needs to be “disected” and understood piece by piece, like a sequenced DNA strand.

Hello Uccisore, how is Maine?
The example used is invalid. You bring us a common concept to begin with:“Dog”. How special that dog might be does not change the fact that, as a dog, he must share a set of qualities or a single quality with what is denoted similarly elsewhere by the word dog. If a dog trancends all dogishness, then he has ceased to be “dog” and is something other than.

You also said:“Proponents of God as the Ineffable have to be able to make some positive, non-analytic propositions about this Ineffable, or it’s simply a useless term.”

My question is, why is the existence of something attached to it’s utility? Proponents of the ineffable do not need and cannot make positive assertions about the ineffable or else the ineffable is instead…effable, utterable. That is a contradiction they better stay away from.
Proponents of the ineffable, also, have no need to use the “term”, because their position is, if honestly held, non-linguistic. They do not use words for what is beyond words; they have a belief that any term about what they feel is useless.

There are more potent objections to tentative’s position.
That which is taken to be beyond language is taken to be within the comprehension of one’s mind, one’s inner world. That one’s feelings are a valid source of epistemology.
Sure, one’s inner world has an essential truth to it that lies beyond the verification of others. But if what is true is exactly what you feel individually as true, which may differ from how I feel, then we cannot speak of “true”.
By denying the ability to talk of this idea, we have also denied the possibility of that idea, or ideas that emerge from within, to be true. Every qualification of what occurs within you is limited by that quality. If it is true, it is true for you, it is real for you, it is undescribable…for you.
Not that the God is beyond description, ineffable, in-itself.

 Well, I said I had an argument against the existence of the ineffable, and that's as close to success that I'm likely to get- you believe in something for no reason, that cannot be expressed with reason, and there are no signs or suggestions in all of reality that there should be such a thing, and there never can be any such signs. That's an extremely strong defeater for belief in something, and I'm satisfied with it.  
 I don't think you disagree with my claim, or can disagree with it. If we claim not to know anything about a subject, there is no evidence (either physical evidence or reasoning) that can point to the reality of the subject. This includes your intuition, spiritual sensations, even whatever subjective experiences you have (which I accept you cannot describe) that lead you to belief in the ineffable. Without a positive claim in this Ineffable's ability and affinity to creating these experiences, even these don't count as a reason to believe. 
 It's vastly different. In ordinary practice, people have faith [i]in[/i] something. From what I can tell, 'believers' in the ineffable have faith because they enjoy the sensation of having faith- there is no actual object of it.

I believe that all things are eventually explainable or expressable.

Uccisore, some people “want” what they do not “understand” or mentally “comprehend”, but they do emotionally “comprehend” it.

If I had to guess, those with “faith” in the ineffable have taken on a paradigm/world-view, which produces certian effects upon that person’s life.

Unless you have personally taken on this mentality, it is hard to judge its value. I would, by estimation, figure that this mentality is a form of prepetual inspiration.

Does anyone agree with me here?

Maine is fine, it’s a little rainy right now, but in general we’re enjoying the summer weather.

Omar

If it pleases you, replace the term “Dog” with the term “Actual Entity” and see how this reads. The Ineffable God doesn’t mean any of the qualifications of one of those, either. :slight_smile:

It’s not the utility of the Ineffable God, it’s the utility of the term that I’m concerned with here. As I said, it’s a useless term. If one can say nothing at all about the Ineffable to describe what it might be, then saying “I believe in the Ineffable” is functionally the same as saying “I believe in Grobble-dee-Gree”. Is the existence of Grobble-dee-Grees attached to the meaning of the term ‘Grobble-dee-Gree’?

Also, expressed language is an obstable that can be overcome. If such believers can develop the word “Ineffable” to refer to something that they apparently have common belief in, they could develop other terms for whatever it is they allege to be unable to describe. Depending on how you view language, the mere fact that they cannot put their beliefs into words may be enough to say they ought not hold those beliefs. But even if you don’t agree with that (and I’m not sure I do), there can be no reason to hold a belief in something about which nothing is claimed.

   Does this require the verification of others through language, or can one do it by themselves? For example, if a person believed in the ineffable because of sensation they feel from time to time, they could find themselves trying to predict when these sensations would occur. Would their success or failure in that function as a sort of verification, without use for other people or language?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but are you saying that the best someone with tentative’s position can do is say “I cannot describe this thing,” and must grant that other people may be quite capable of describing it?

Hello F(r)iends,

Uccisore, your original post was very amusing and asked an important question in an interesting manner. Actually, it was borderline brilliant in pointing out the confusion with the concept of ineffableness…

I think that there is nothing that cannot be expressed though I think nothing can be expressed in its fullness. I can detail how my experience with the birth of my daughter was life changing. I can describe many things about it in fine detail. I can relate how special and significant it was to me and how much fear, anxiety, happiness, and lightheadedness I felt. I can relate how I was short of breath and panting. I can provide many, many details about that experience and you will never “know” what I felt of what it was like… but you will have some idea, some concept, some understanding of it.

God is not the ineffable. If that means that god’s qualities are unrecognizable, or that god’s qualities are not understood, not experienced, nor expressible. If there is a god, then we can express what we feel, believe, understand, experience with god.

-Thirst

This post is both funny and perceptive. An ineffable God is just another way of saying “I don’t know”. The problem becomes when someone believes that it is actually a valid statement of belief when actually it is a statement of agnosticism.

Main Entry: ag·nos·tic
Function: noun
Etymology: Greek agnOstos unknown, unknowable, from a- + gnOstos known, from gignOskein to know – more at KNOW
: a person who holds the view that any ultimate reality (as God) is unknown and prob. unknowable;

Omar writes:

Thank you, Thank you. And that is precisely the point. That which I am calling ineffable can only be ‘known’ in silence.

I’ve been hammering on this for the last several weeks as I have read about the one “true” god, all about knowing of this God and what I am supposed to believe, to do, and to feel as if that which is can be contained in words. I love to talk about how shall we live, but the constant knowing of God wears thin. I would wish all to have their spiritual understanding, but to declare it as ‘fact’ that others should attend to is the line drawn in the sand.

Ucc,

Oh but there is! I’m here and I participate fully in all that is. What is there to not have faith in? That it can’t be expressed in signs and symbols doesn’t invalidate the experience… unless I’m a butterfly’s dream… :astonished:

Hi thirst,

Yes, we can express what WE feel, believe, and understand, but it says nothing about all that we would call God, does it?

Ned,

Very perceptive. It takes me back to my first few months in ILP. Ummm, I’m not quite sure how that becomes a ‘problem’ unless we’re talking strictly a religious POV. My statements are about our spiritual nature and our personal understanding of that which is - for ourselves.

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Mr. Flanders,

You must certainly be making a jest here?

Agnosticism is far removed, and ultimately separate from a stance of ineffability. The remarkable thing about an agnostic is that they generally are unsure, uncertain, as to believing period.

Ineffable only means, not expressable in words. Plainly, not interchangeable, at all.

There is something that is experienced by my person, that I am absolutely certain about, know from personal experience is existent. But, I am also fundamentally aware of the failure of my human abilities to describe to another that which is greater than either of us.

Making a choice to not put crude limiters upon that which stretches beyond sight and perception, does not make of one an “unbeliever”. Trying to use words to describe anything that exceeds in all directions greater than any language or symbol can encompass, is the same as trying to bite one’s own teeth.

I do thusly invoke the venerable Sagesound:

Ye, would that the damaged ego be selfish enough to destroy itself?
Sagesound

O- Very much so. But this cut both ways. If I deem the internal experience as experience of the ineffable, I must decide when I feel it and when I am not and exclude all other possibilities. Maybe I am high, but maybe it is the ineffable within me. Maybe I am sick, but it seems certain that this is the Ineffable. I can switch the Ineffable for God and the same idea prevail.
Externally it gets no better. For years the Catholic Church has sent experts out into the houses of visionaries and prophets because the Ineffable or God etc, is ultimately a judgement. We lack any definite measure because we are not emotionally detached from this concept and this attachment carry like the ocean the boat that carries the meaning of this word, or words, in all directions.

Again, with the wave. That there is an experience obligates you to thinking the experience is like something, and that the experience has a source, which is like something as well. Granting that you can’t describe this experience, can you at least,

  • Relate that you’ve had this experience more than once, and that you can recognize these experiences as being similar to each other (and different from the experiences associated with eating pizza or playing tennis)? If so, these experiences have the potential to be describe by language- you recognize them for what they are, discern when they are present and when they are not, and are able to group and distinguish them from other experiences. This categorization is really the only work behind language, now you just need the labels, which are arbitrary anyways.

  • Explain to me what it is about this experience that leads you to talk about it exclusively (or almost exclusively) in the Religion forum, as opposed to Natural Science, Psychology, and so on? Is there something about these experiences, indeed, something about the Ineffable, that makes it ‘hook up’ with religion in a way it does not ‘hook up’ with Social Science? That you even consider the Ineffable a spiritual matter and not a scientific matter says much.

    These two things together would lead a person dangerously close to making claims about the nature of the Ineffable. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
    Again, if there is nothing you are prepared to say about the Ineffable, then there’s no reason for you to suppose that this Ineffable is connected to this experience you mention. I don’t need to know a thing about the particulars of the experience to know that.

Omar:
We get enough summer to get the potatos in the ground and back out again, and get the firewood cut. All you can ask for from weather!

Well, what I would say is that comparison to the Ineffable has already broken down at this point. If you're willing to [i]present [/i] something, and show that it has qualities which commit or exclude it from a group, you've already gone a step further than the Ineffable. The Ineffable may well [i]be[/i] a dog, or an actual entity, or neither of these things, for all that is claimed about it.

Literally, yes, that’s all it means. But of course it really means much more than that. If the above were all that mattered, ‘ineffable’ could be used to describe a peculiar stomach cramp. There are particular occurances that come with talking about the ineffable that are not coincidence. This talk happens in religious discussion, and not scientific discussion. I have not yet heard someone claim to believe in the Ineffable, and also to believe in God as a seperate entity. The unspoken assumption is that one takes the place of the other, one is instead of the other. This is huge, this is substantial. If we really know nothing about the Ineffable, why is it assumed to fill the ‘God’ slot in someone’s philosophy?

Well, yes, that’s been in the back of my mind for this whole time- that belief in the Ineffable isn’t a move in the game, it’s a refusal to play.

 Even in this though, there IS universal agreement. You said you hated Picasso, and I immediately understood you to be indicating that you didn't find Picasso to be [i]beautiful[/i], because we don't hate what is beautiful. And this isn't just semantics, because of course I know what hate is like, and I know what appreciation of beauty is like.  Since we're both human, eventually we get to common experiences we can relate with labels.  The agreement isn't to be found in the particulars- defining beauty like that is a job for poets and not me, I suppose.  Saying "You know that feeling you get when blah blah blah? Beauty is like that," is a perefectly valid way of building language.