page 25 note 1 In these interpretations, in the interest of English grammar, I have treated ‘God’ as a proper name. A less grammatical but philosophically superior analysis, deriving from Russell, would require us to treat ‘God’ as a disguised definite description, abbreviating ‘the supreme being’ or some equivalent phrase. Then (a) would become: ‘There is a supreme being, and only one, and he is omnipotent’, and (b) would become, ‘Of all things, if there is one who is supreme and only one supreme being, then that being is omnipotent’; (b) is still a universal quantification, devoid of existential import, and analytically true.
An alternative analysis would persist in treating ‘God’ as a proper name, but would admit that it is possible for proper names not to designate anything. There are numerous versions of this alternative, but I do not find that any of them are helpful in analysing the logic of religious discourse. If one admits non-designating singular terms, like ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Apollo’, then one is duty bound to provide a criterion for distinguishing designating singular terms from non-designating singular terms. The usual recourse is to say that designating singular terms designate spatio-temporal entities, and non-designating singular terms fail to designate since they do not name anything in space and time. But by this criterion, the most reasonable one within this analysis, we would reach the conclusion, a priori, that ‘God’ does not designate anything since it does not apply to any entity in space and time. Ironically, only the Russellian analysis does not rule out the existence of God a priori.
