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On Fixing the Reference Range Of ‘God’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Kai Nielsen
Kai Nielsen
Affiliation:
Professor of Philosophy, New York University
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Extract

It is fair enough to refer, as Father Clarke does, to the God of the Christians and the Jews as ‘the one infinite Creator of all other things’. It is reasonable to take ‘God’ as a term that has certain conditions associated with it. These conditions fix its meaning. The central conditions associated with ‘God’ are: being infinite or unlimited, eternal, self-existent, the creator of everything that exists other than himself, the being upon whom all other beings are dependent but who depends on nothing himself, being personal, good, loving and holy. These conditions determine our concept of God, determine what could count as a referent for the term ‘God’. In short, God, as John Hick remarks, is conceived in Western Religions ‘as the infinite, eternal, uncreated, personal reality, who has created all that exists other than himself, and who has revealed himself to his human creatures as holy and loving’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 2 , Issue 1 , October 1966 , pp. 13 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1966

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References

page 13 note 1 Clarke, W. Norris, S. J., ‘On Professors Ziff, Niebuhr, and Tillich’ in Religious Experience and Truth, ed. Sidney, Hook (New York, 1961), p. 224.Google Scholar

page 13 note 2 Hick, John, Philosophy of Religion (New York, 1962), p. 14.Google Scholar

page 13 note 3 Ziff, Paul, ‘About “God”’, Religious Experience and Truth, ed. Sidney, Hook (New York, 1961), pp. 195–202.Google Scholar

page 14 note 1 Matthews, Gareth B., ‘Theology and Natural Theology’, The Journal of Philosophy, vol. LXI no. 3 (01, 30 1964), p. 101.CrossRefGoogle ScholarFor Flew's own statement of his challenge see Flew, Antony, ‘Theology and Falsification’, New Essays in Philosophical Theology (London, 1955), pp. 96–99.Google Scholar

page 15 note 1 Fackenheim, Emil L., ‘On the Eclipse of God’, Commentary, vol. XXXVII, no. 6 (June, 1964), p. 55.Google Scholar

page 15 note 2 I added the qualification ‘certain of their very crucial putatively factual assertions’ because, as Klemke and Blackstone have pointed out, there are historical autobiographical and psychological religious statements that are plainly factually intelligible e.g. ‘Jesus was born in Nazareth’, ‘I believe Moses lived in Egypt’ or ‘People without religious convictions will fall into despair’. See Klemke, E. D., ‘Are Religious Statements Meaningful?’ in The Journal of Religion, vol. XLIX (1960)Google Scholar and Blackstone, William, The Problem of Religious Knowledge (New York, 1963), pp. 36–46.Google Scholar

page 16 note 1 Gareth B. Matthews, op. cit. p. 103.

page 17 note 1 Gareth B. Matthews, op. cit. p. 105.

page 18 note 1 Nielsen, Kai, ‘Can Faith Validate God-Talk?’, New Theology no. 1, ed. Marty, Martin E. and Peerman, Dean G. (New York, 1964), pp. 131–149Google Scholar and Nielsen, Kai ‘Religious Perplexity and Faith’, Crane Review, vol. viii, no. 1, (Fall, 1965), pp. 1–17.Google Scholar

page 18 note 2 Crombie, I. M., ‘Theology and Falsification’, New Essays in Philosophical Theology, ed. Flew, A. and MacIntyre, A. (London, 1955), pp. 109–130Google Scholar and Crombie, I. M., ‘The Possibility of Theological Statements’, in Faith and Logic, ed. Mitchell, B. (London, 1957), pp. 31–83.Google Scholar

page 19 note 1 Blackstone, William, op. cit. pp. 116–124.Google Scholar

page 19 note 2 Crombie, I. M., ‘The Possibility of Theological Statements’, in Faith and Logic, ed. Mitchell, B. (London, 1957), p. 34.Google Scholar

page 19 note 3 Ibid. p. 34

page 19 note 4 Ibid. p. 35.

page 19 note 5 Ibid. p. 37.

page 20 note 1 Crombie, I. M., ‘The Possibility of Theological Statements’, in Faith and Logic, ed. Mitchell, B. (London, 1957), p. 38.Google Scholar

page 20 note 2 Ibid.

page 20 note 3 Ibid. p. 40.

page 20 note 4 Ibid. p. 42.

page 20 note 5 Ibid. p. 43.

page 20 note 6 Ibid. p. 46.

page 20 note 7 Ibid. p. 49.

page 20 note 8 Ibid.

page 20 note 9 Ibid. p. 50.

page 20 note 10 Ibid.

page 21 note 1 Crombie, I. M., ‘The Possibility of Theological Statements’, in Faith and Logic, ed. Mitchell, B. (London, 1957), p. 56.Google Scholar

page 21 note 2 Ibid. p. 58.

page 21 note 3 Ibid.

page 21 note 4 Ibid.

page 21 note 5 Ibid.

page 22 note 1 Crombie, I. M., ‘The Possibility of Theological Statements’, in Faith and Logic, ed. Mitchell, B. (London, 1957), p. 59.Google Scholar

page 22 note 2 Ibid. p. 60.

page 22 note 3 Ibid. p. 61 italics mine. If we take Crombie literally here, we will have to say that his conception of what theological terms and utterances mean is unsatisfactory in much the same way Schleier macher's claims are. If religious utterances merely express what we antecedently feel, then—given Crombie's remarks about this—‘There is a God’ or ‘God is our creator and redeemer’ come to mean something to the effect that people have feelings of contingency and finitude and come to feel a sense of absolute dependence and a dissatisfaction with the world conceived in purely materialistic terms. But this fits ill with what Crombie says in the first few pages of ‘The Possibility of Theological Statements’ and, as Hägerström, MacIntyre and others have shown, such a claim is open to devastating objections, for after all, this would mean that God's existence would be dependent on, because identical with, human beings having certain feelings. Hägerström, Axel, Philosophy and Religion (London, 1964), pp. 229–259Google Scholar and MacIntyre, A., Difficulties in Christian Belief (London, 1956)Google Scholar. I am indebted to Lynn Boyer for the suggestion about Schleiermacher and Crombie.

page 23 note 1 Richard Taylor has argued this point very well in his Metaphysics (New York, 1963), pp. 22–32.Google Scholar

page 24 note 1 I. M. Crombie, op. cit. p. 62.

page 25 note 1 John Wisdom argues convincingly in his ‘The Modes of Thought and the Logic of God’, that an obscure concept is not for all that meaningless. See Wisdom, John, ‘The Modes of Thought and the Logic of God’, in The Existence of God, ed. John, Hick (New York, 1964), pp. 275–298.Google Scholar

page 25 note 2 I. M. Crombie, op. cit. p. 65.

page 25 note 3 Ibid.

page 27 note 1 Many of us, or at least many of us who become intellectuals, have had in our childhood a rather minimal or mild form of religious indoctrination. There is a sense in which we lack a real participant's understanding of these forms of life. To get a sense of such an indoctrination read C. D. Broad's account of its effects on Axel Hägerström's life. (James Joyce, The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man is a rather more standard source here.) As I read of such forms of life, I feel a very considerable disinclination to think that all such forms of life are all right, are in good conceptual order, just as they are. See Broad, C. D., ‘Memoir of Axel Hägerstrom’, in Axel Hägerström, Philosophy and Religion (London, 1964), pp. 15–29.Google Scholar

page 28 note 1 Blackstone, WilliamThe Problem of Religious Knowledge (New York, 1963), pp. 116–124.Google Scholar

page 29 note 1 Crombie, I. M., ‘Theology and Falsification’ in New Essays in Philosophical Theology, ed. MacIntyre, A. and Flew, A. (London, 1955), p. 118.Google Scholar

page 29 note 2 Ibid. p. 124.

page 29 note 3 Crombie, I. M., ‘The Possibility of Theological Statements’, Faith and Logic, ed. Mitchell, B. (London, 1957), p. 71.Google Scholar

page 30 note 1 Wittgenstein has well remarked ‘…. in ethical and religious language we seem constantly to be using similes. But a simile must be the simile for something. And if I can describe a fact by means of a simile I must also be able to drop the simile and to describe the facts without it’. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, ‘A Lecture on Ethics,’ The Philosophical Review, vol. lxxiv (01, 1965), p. 10.Google Scholar In spite of Wittgenstein's emotional disquietude about this, his conclusion seems unassailable. If we have a putative non-literal or figurative mode of speech (as a simile or metaphor) and cannot possibly say what it is a simile or metaphor of, then what at first appears as a non-literal expression ‘now seems mere nonsense’. If we cannot in some literal fashion assert what facts stand behind what appeared to be a metaphor or a simile then we are, in using such expressions, talking nonsense. That it is ‘deep nonsense’ expressive of a powerful human drive does not make it any the less nonsense.

page 30 note 2 Williams, Bernard, ‘Tertullian's Paradox’, New Essays in Philosophical Theology, ed. MacIntyre, A. and Flew, A. (London, 1955), pp. 187–211.Google ScholarNielsen, Kai, ‘Can Faith Validate God Talk?’ New Theology, no. 1, ed. Marty, Martin E. and Peerman, Dean G. (New York, 1964), pp. 131–149.Google Scholar

page 30 note 3 Nielsen, Kai, ‘Eschatological Verification,’ Canadian Journal of Theology, vol. ix (1963), no. 4, pp. 271–281.Google Scholar See also Bean, William ‘Eschatological Verification: Fortress or Fairyland,’ Methodos, vol. xvi, no. 62 (1964), pp. 91–107.Google Scholar

page 30 note 4 William Blackstone, op. cit. pp. 123.

page 31 note 1 Crombie, I. M., ‘Theology and Falsification’, New Essays in Philosophical Theology, ed. MacIntyre, A. and Flew, A. (London, 1955), pp. 124–5.Google Scholar

page 31 note 2 Crombie, I. M., ‘The Possibility of Theological Statements’, Faith and Logic, p. 72.Google Scholar There is a clash here between the two essays. In his later essay Crombie sets conditions that are open to disconfirmation while in ‘Theology and Falsification’ they are not. In ‘Theology and Falsification’ Crombie speaks of ‘suffering which was utterly, eternally and irredeemably pointless’ (p. 124 italics mine) while in ‘The Possibility of Theological Statements’ he only speaks of ’utterly and irremediably pointless suffering….’ (p. 72).

page 34 note 1 Crombie, I. M., ‘Theology and Falsification’, New Essays in Philosophical Theology ed. MacIntyre, A. and Flew, A. (London, 1955), p. 127.Google Scholar

page 34 note 2 Ibid. p. 130.

page 34 note 3 Hepburn, Ronald, Christianity and Paradox (London, 1958), pp. 50–90.Google Scholar