The Language of God

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
1

In talking about the god, and defining what the term ‘god’ means, we use words that are pretty well understood as applied to people and things. God ‘exists’; god ‘knows’; god ‘loves’; god ‘wants’; etc. But when applied to god, these terms lose critical parts of what makes those terms understandable.
-As a finite being with limited means, it makes sense for me to ‘want’ things. The same can’t be said of an all-powerful god: this must be the the world that god ‘wants’, becuase otherwise it would be otherwise. Even the idea of competing desires couldn’t be coherent in a god that designed the universe and all its limitations.
-When a human ‘loves’ another human, there are a number of things that that could mean, but they all seem to hinge on humanity (or biology): romantic love is related to copulation; familial love is related to biological similarity; and platonic love is related to common interests and social connections. Perhaps it can be said that familial love could apply to god, as he ‘wants’ to see his creation succeed, but this merely pushes the question back to the first point, of god ‘wanting’.
-When we come to know things, we do so do in two ways: experientially, such as hearing a noise and knowing that you hear it; or deductively, such as hearing a noise and knowing that the water is boiling in the kitchen? (I mean knowledge in a more colloquial sense, because the problems I mean to raise are not epistemological problems, but reference problems when we ascribe the same colloquially accepted language to god) But god, who has no physical sensory apparatus and thus cannot experience (as well as being atemporal, and thus cannot easily be labelled by temporal words such as ‘experience’) and who knows everything always, and thus cannot truly be said to deduce (as well as being temporal, deduction seems to put some knowledge above or before others logically), cannot be said to know in a sense in any way similar to our own knowledge.

All this provides deep problems for creating a description of a supreme being that is meaningful, leaving problems of coherence aside. If the words we use cannot be meaningfully applied to god, the statement ‘god exists’ cannot mean anything even if we take ‘existence’ to be an attribute that could otherwise meaningfully be applied to god (although I don’t think that it is, for reasons similar to those listed for other concepts).
The simple solution to the problem might be to say that in our use of these concepts, they are analogous to those we mean to ascribe to god. For instance, when we say ‘god loves us’ we mean 'god feels about us similar to the way that we feel about our children (or family members, etc.). But this still misses something crucial of god’s other characteristics: god’s position with respect to us is significantly different from our with respect to anything. As such, the analogy is necessarily an exceedingly weak one, and that is for the concept of ‘love’, likely the concept about which our understanding of god is most comprehensible. When we look at words like ‘want’ or ‘know’, the situation is significantly more dire. Our understanding of knowledge cannot begin to capture a knowledge that is not subject to the epistemological worries I mentioned earlier.

This critique is in the direction of a positive disproof of ‘god’, but by itself it is more of an extreme agnostic position: not only can we not know whether god exists, but we cannot coherent apply concepts enough to god to know what it means to not know whether or not god exists.

2

Thats the problem with quasi propositions.

3

Interesting! I think your success of your argument depends a lot on how we define words, and I’m seeing the influence of a scientific mindset on your approach. I think some, if not all of the differences you propose between God and man are valid, if I were going to disagree with your argument, it would be in the move from those examples to the conclusion that we can’t meaningfully apply the concepts discussed to God. This is true especially in the case of knowledge. I think a similar argument could be made for your examples of love and wanting, but I also think there’s an easier way to address them.

With knowledge, it seems to me that your argument is essentially that knowledge works like [i]X[/i], in all cases that mankind is aware of. God, because of some of His alleged attributes, would not or could not ever perform many of the essential steps in [i]X[/i], and therefore, we're abusing language to say that God [i]knows[/i]. 
  Now, some theists would agree with you and say that all claims about God are analogous- when we say that God knows, we're really saying that God does something we can't understand, that corresponds in some way to our act of knowing, which we can understand. I don't like this position and I'm not going to defend it, but I think it's common enough that you might want to take it apart yourself. 
 My argument would be that X isn't essential to our meaning or understanding of the word 'knowledge' at all.  Knowledge is, in it's most simple, easily known (heh) form, something like a sensation- it's a mental event that we experience with respect to some state of affairs.  The most accessible instance of knowing is that which we'd express by saying "I know that," and we're able to use that sentence in a useful, essentially correct way before we know any epistemology or science whatsoever, because what it is to know, is before anything else, an easily recognizable mental phenomenon.  Let me go on to say that I'm NOT reversing my position on epistemology- I don't think that knowledge is actually a completely or even primarily internal affair [i]in fact[/i]. My entire point is that the ultimate nature of things is not relevant to our usage of their labels. 
  Let me abstract one more level before I bring it home. Water is H20.  Suppose, though, that tomorrow it was discovered that through some colossal and ongoing scientific blunder, the stuff in our lakes, rivers, and bodies was *not* H20, but rather H2X. Furthermore, the chemical compound H20 is probably exceedingly rare in the universe, and were one to encounter it, it would certainly NOT be wet, clear, good to drink (or drinkable at all) or any of the other traits we associate with H2X. There is certainly no H20 on Earth- perhaps it can only exist in the center of a rapidly expanding supernova. 
  Now the question is, have we just discovered that the world contains no water, and have given ourselves a reason to stop using the word 'water' for that which we're drinking, bathing, and swimming in? The point is debatable, but I would say no, and the reason why not is that "being H20" was never essential to our definition of water in the first place- water is that stuff that fills the lakes and oceans and such, that we drink and so on. That's all the word was ever meant to indicate, and it does it just fine with or without radical discoveries in chemistry. 
   So to bring it home, I think that when we say God knows X, all we mean (or at least, all we need to mean) is that God has that characteristic relationship towards X that I have towards the itch in my nose, my being hungry, it being Wednesday, etc. If God gets there in a completely different way than we do (which seems likely as you have pointed out), that's certainly of some theological and philosophical interest, but I don't think it takes away from each other's ability to 'know what we mean' when we say God knows, and that's what's important to your argument, from what I can tell.

Very briefly, I think your criticism of God wanting and loving is a successful criticism of a Calvinist, determinist take on things. If one believes in libertarian free will, however, then as long as God’s alleged wants are wrapped up in states of affairs that MIGHT be brought about by free agents, we have a good way to understand what it is for God to want. From there, obviously, it is characteristic of love to want the best for the object of our affections, with a workable understanding of God’s wants, we can then understand His love as well, seems to me.

4

I think that part of what makes your hypothetical useful is that it cuts ‘water’ into two very differently valued parts. Most people don’t have much stock placed in water being composed of oxygen and hydrogen, so few people would insist that H2O keep the name ‘water’. But if we cut the concept differently, it would present more of a problem. Suppose instead that we discovered that the stuff in lakes and seas was H2O, and the refreshing drink was H2X. Wild as it seems, only H2X is benign, H2O is actually highly toxic. Somehow in the filtering process, the O floats away and is replaced with X.
Now the question of where to stick the word ‘water’ is harder. Both ‘filling the lakes and seas’ and ‘a refreshing drink’ are deeply significant parts of the meaning of water. Where before we could simply toss aside some letters, now we have a real dilemma. (A similar dilemma can be shown by pointing out that, in your hypothetical, a chemist might well want to hold on to water as a label for H2O).

So, is god’s knowledge different from ours because of something like not being H2O (NH difference), or is it because of something like not being refreshing to drink (NR difference). I’m going to want to say the latter, and it seems I need to do more to make that case.

“When we say God knows X, all we mean (or at least, all we need to mean) is that God has that characteristic relationship towards X that I have towards the itch in my nose, my being hungry, it being Wednesday, etc.” First, it’s not clear that my knowledge of the itch in my nose isn’t NR different from my knowledge of the day of the week. The day of the week is a fact that is verifiable by others, which means that it is something about which I can be mistaken. On the other hand, I am the final arbiter of the itch in my nose. The day of the week can change without my knowledge. However, if I don’t know that my nose is itchy, it’s hard to maintain that my nose is, in fact, itchy. The difference between knowledge-of-facts and knowledge-of-feelings seems NR different.
Second, it seems clear that God cannot have the same sort of relation that I have towards objective facts. God’s knowledge of objective facts is complete, and mine is limited. His is certain, mine is tentative and fallible. The standard problems of epistemology simply don’t apply to the thing god has that we call knowledge, which makes his knowledge and our NR different, it seems. The only way to retain god’s knowledge is to say that god has knowledge-of-feelings about facts: God can know that today is Wednesday that way that I know that my nose itches.

And is that NH or NR different from our own experience of knowledge? In the alternative construction of the dilemma, we take the perspective of a chemist, who deals with water all the time and employs the fact that it is H2O in her daily chores. Just like the incredulity we experience when we consider that the stuff in rivers and seas is toxic, so too does she experience extreme incredulity when she considers that H2O might only exist in the center of stars.
If you have this very unfamiliar concept of what knowledge is, and that’s the only way for god to possess knowledge, people that analyse knowledge, like the chemist who analyses molecules, should find that to be more of a problem than the average person. While, at the colloquial level, saying god is a ‘person’ who ‘knows’ is all well and good, we picture old man river in the clouds with his hand on his chin. But the terms become confused when we look at them closely, which is what philosophy is all about.
I know that might come off as unfair, and I don’t mean for it to be the simple accusation that “you’re not a real philosopher” or any such thing. Rather, your argument seems to rest on avoiding any in depth account of what knowledge is, and referring instead to knowledge’s “most simple, easily known form”. Is it not the job of the philosopher, and the theologian, to understand the terms we’re using beyond the simplest and most easily known forms? You refer to an 'easily recognizable mental phenomenon", and I have no problem with that when I’m referring to myself knowing about my itching nose. But it is less easily recognizable and more often mistake when it refers to exterior facts, and even moreso when it refers to external knowers. In the case of God, God’s knowledge, if we call it knowledge, is the least easily recognizable form of it, as it is a form we do not experience and one that it is difficult to observe in God. (And I assume we mean a personal, non-universe god, becasue a pentheist stating that ‘god knows everything’ could be saying something tautological depending how they mean ‘know’: god contains all the information that exists).

Returning to the general problem at hand, I’d like to draw out the general lesson. Your response is an example of a counter argument that I did not consider, which is an appeal to first definitions. The meaning of the words that I’m alleging to have problems can be taken at face value, and when we apply them to god in this way there is no problem. My response to this here, and my avenue of response generally, is that we are chemists, and as chemists we need more than face value. If a consequences of our previous explorations (a better understanding of knowledge, personhood, thought, time, etc.) is a dilemmas (like a person who exists, thinks, knows, outside of time), we still need to apply them. It’s not useful, let alone justified, to say “Right, a person is all these things excpet in this case, where a person being all these things creates problems. There we’ll use the colloquial understanding of a person.”

Briefly, to your brief point: I thought Calvin had it right. An all-knowing, atemporal god knows how I will act, ‘free’ as my will may be. That makes free will a matter of perspective, which I’m fine with; I’m a materialist compatiblist by the same logic, so I can’t consistently fault a religion for those same conclusions. But God wanting seems to imply that it could be otherwise, which implies that God doesn’t know the future. It follows from his other attributes that God already must have the future he intended, so it is inconsistent for him to want it to be otherwise.

5

Carleas,

Given the subjectivity, how does one decide that part of god’s knowing isn’t the same situation man finds? Is it possible that god’s “knowing”, is that he does not know? On purpose? Is it possible for a creator to know that, in creating the bag of marbles, most will be white but a few will be black and not know which will appear in what order? A god that knows everything to the last detail would be rather bored since he has no one of his “knowing” to play with. While obviously an anthropomorism, what is to prevent a god from playing hide and seek with himself? I could like that sort of god…

6

There are all sorts of ways to reengineer gods to get around the problems with the one that people believe in. A god that made a universe that he doesn’t know about, and the happenings in which therefore cannot be god’s perfect will, is simply not the god of the major world religions, and probably wouldn’t be that satisfying for the religious aspects of mind. The ancient Greek gods had human foibles like ignorance, and they died out. Ultimately, as it becomes obvious that human knowledge is probably going to continue growing exponentially, only an omniscient god satisfies the requirements for something greater than us.

At least that’s my position, as a non-religious person looking to hold religious truths against themselves. I’m sure Uccisore has a better developed and less agenda-ed (or differently agenda-ed) take on that suggestion.

7

What if God is the stuff of the universe and the forces that organize it? Then the knowing would be the result of experience. What if God were asleep in rocks and minerals, awaking in plants and animals, to know self in man? That is what if we are God consciousness?

In the beginning there was logos (the word/reason). Kind of like radio waves, reason might need a receiver, before it is manifest as reason/consciousness.

8

Well put athena, i have similar feelings, and so do the Hindus.

Ram Shanker Misra in “The Integral Advaitism of Sri Aurobindo” -

"Brahman is full of all perfections. And to say that Brahman has some purpose in creating the world will mean that it wants to attain through the process of creation something which it has not. And that is impossible. Hence, there can be no purpose of Brahman in creating the world. The world is a mere spontaneous creation of Brahman. It is a Lila, or sport, of Brahman. It is created out of Bliss, by Bliss and for Bliss. Lila indicates a spontaneous sportive activity of Brahman as distinguished from a self-conscious volitional effort. The concept of Lila signifies freedom as distinguished from necessity."
9

The problem I have with those kinds of explanations is that they seem simply to anthropomorphize a process without adding anything. When we’re talking about a personal god that does al the the things the Abrahamic god does, we seem to be positing something else. When we anthropomorphize, we seems instead to be saying “hey, let’s call all this other stuff ‘God’”.

But, that’s really a debate for another thread. I don’t think the argument I make above comments of gods other than personal, ‘Heavenly Father’ type gods.

10

Well, this is true, but I don’t think those circumstances are related to knowledge- or at least, not in the sense of the word that we use in common with us and God. Verification and such seem, again, to be leading towards the external or explanational qualifications of knowledge, and all we need to concern ourselves with is the experiential.
This all sounds dangerously close to positivism, to me; attempting to use specific philosophical criteria to convince ourselves that there’s no meaning in statements that, in fact, we all understand perfectly well. I have an experience of the relationship of knowing something, God is in that same relationship with many things that I am not. I don’t see why it’s any more complicated than that, but I will read on!

I think you’ve got a slight conflation here of two senses of ‘certain’. In the sense that you are right, I don’t see why it matters. In the other sense, we all know full well what it’s like to ‘be certain’ of something, and so we speak clearly to say that God is like that in all things. That. mechanically, our knowledge can’t achieve a standard of justification that our philosophers have invented, and God’s can (or maybe in some cases it can’t, these are man-made conceptions, after all) seems a little more like the H20 kind of definition to me.

Well, only because I see your argument as being one about language, and not epistemology. You’re pointing out that understanding how it is that God can know things and what it’s like for God to know things is very difficult, perhaps impossible. I have no problem agreeing with that. I’m simply saying that resolving those issues has nothing at all to do with our being able to say “God knows” meaningfully, in precisely the same way that a non-philosopher can say “I know” meaningfully, without having given any thought or attention to the deeper matters of what it is to know. If you were asserting that it is impossible that God should know anything, then that would be a different matter, and an in depth analysis of what knowing is would be required to resolve it.

Well, and that brings us to the other major flaw in my analogy. If there was anything like an agreed-upon explanation of knowledge in philosophy that compares to the H20 explanation of water, then you might be right. But the issues are so controversial - forget God for a moment, do we have a firm enough understanding of the term ‘knowledge’ to permit you to say that even I can know in the way that you can know, and have it stand up to your same criticism? How simplified would we have to make our definition of knowledge in order to even come to consensus on what it was? I think you’d find that the most detailed definition of knowledge that you and I could both agree to would be a fairly simple one, that wouldn’t be all that hard to apply to God, but I may be wrong.

Then I don’t think we have a problem- we both see issues concerning divine knowledge to be a fatal flaw in Calvinist theology; we differ in that you see Calvinism as the strongest representation of theism despite that. Probably a good subject for another thread one of these days?

11

Sorry for the delay, I’ve been. . . occupied :blush: .

This line of criticism isn’t entirely about language. Yes, it attacks the language that we use to discuss God, but the issue is that ordinary language is applied to extraordinary concepts, and thereby glosses over the issues that should come up. Clearly, if we go no further than the common-sense application of words to God, we find no problems. If there were problems at the surface, the words would be dropped almost immediately. But the criticism all along has been that the application of these words fails upon an inspection that goes deeper than the surface.
I’ll concede that the criticism has hints of positivism, but I don’t see that as a danger. Sometimes upon examination we find that statements we think we understand perfectly well do, in fact, have no meaning. We can’t take for granted that because we can string together a sentence that is gramatically correct, we have therefore expressed an idea that is coherent. The comparisson I’m drawing is between a “colorless green idea” and a “loving personal god”; the difference is that the notions involved in the latter are more complex, and so need more investigation to show their meaninglessness.

(I discovered inadvertently that this criticism is something that has come up from within Christianity in the form of Negative Theology, which holds that our limited understanding cannot capture god positively, but we can say what god is not. “The Dao that can be described is not the Dao.” I don’t know if negative theology as completely unproblematic, but it does avoid a number of the issues I’ve raised earlier.)

Returning to language, and knowledge language in particular, there is a certain amount of meaninglessness that attends when a non-philosopher uses words like “knowledge”, “proof”, and “evidence”. The non-philosophical conception of these words is by and large sloppy, which is why the world is so rife with false ‘knowledge’ (superstition, folk science, and deliberate political misinformation, to name a few). When we tighten up the definition, a lot of what we called knowledge before turns out to be false belief, not knowledge at all. If that’s the standard by which we can say that God knows, then fine, but I’m still going to maintain that upon inspection it will turn out to be not knowledge at all.