Feigned madness can be a valuable asset. King David once used it to escape from the Philistines (I Sam. 21), and a twentieth century king, Pirandello's Henry IV pulled much the same trick on a modern philistine culture. Thrown from his horse and struck on the head while on his way to a masquerade party dressed as the Henry of Canossa's chill repentance, he had for twenty years insanely identified himself with the eleventh century monarch. At least this is what his family and the court they provided for his humour thought. As the play opens they are unaware that he has returned to sanity, but has continued to play Henry IV for the last eight of the twenty years, preferring the mad world in which he had lived to the sane world to which he would have to return.

The relation between I and my bodily behaviour does not provide an apt analogy for the relation between God and I, or between God and any of the many particular ‘mores’ of particular observables. The relation between the one divine ‘more’ and the many particular ‘mores’ needs another kind of analogy if it is to be at all intelligible. Ramsey seems to be hinting at another kind of analogy, another kind of approach to the use of the word ‘God’ as a unifying key word, in his essay ‘Paradox in Religion’:

‘The word “God” is a unique and ultimate keyword dominating the whole of a theistic language scheme, an “irreducible posit” to which the theist appeals as his end-point of explanation.’

In several essays published recently, Professor Geach argues against the thesis that ‘God’, in its Christian use, is a proper name and produces considerations in favour of ‘God’ being a ‘descriptive, predicable, term’; a nomen naturae in Aquinas's vocabulary: a ‘concept’ in Frege's sense (Begriffswort). I have no dispute with Geach concerning ‘God’ not being a proper name, but there seems to me to be a serious difficulty in one argument which he uses to establish his positive thesis. This argument appears in all the essays mentioned; I give the appropriate quotations:

(i) ‘Only because of this (i.e. “God” being a descriptive predicable term) can the heathen say that his idol is God and the Christian contradict him and both be using “God” in the same sense: if “God” were a proper name it would be a logically impossible, not a lying, wicked act, to predicate it of sticks and stones (Ia q 13 art. 10).’

(ii) ‘When St Augustine and his companions landed in England they found the English paying latria to Woden, Thor, and other imaginary beings to each of whom they applied the word “God” and the missionaries taught them not to apply this word any more to Woden and Thor and the rest, but solely to the Blessed Trinity.… This makes it clear that in the mind of the Church the word “God” is not a proper name, as the word “Woden” was meant to be, but a descriptive term, true of the blessed Trinity and not true of Woden.’

(iii) ‘The name “God” as thus introduced is regarded by Aquinas, not as a proper name, but as a general term (nomen naturae) so far as its mode of significance goes … Aquinas rejects the idea that “God” is necessarily used equivocally by polytheists and by monotheists: he holds the view that the polytheists may be using the word “God” in the same sense when he says his idol is God, as the missionary when he says that the idol is not God but a senseless block.’

Norbert Wiener has recently pointed out that the relation between God and man, according to orthodox Jewish and Christian theology, is analogous to the relation between men and ‘intelligent’ machines. God is supposed to have created man just as man has created (or ‘manufactured’) machines. And just as God has endowed man with intelligence, creating him in his own image (although the Imago Dei admittedly involves more than this), so man has endowed the machine with intelligence—i.e. with problem solving capacities of a high order. Moreover, just as the endowment of man with intelligence led to unintended, if not unforeseen developments (i.e. the Fall), so the development of sophisticated computing machinery raises the possibility that some unintended and unwanted consequences may be forthcoming in the man-machine domain. Just such a possibility is realised in the recent film 2001: A Space Odyssey, where a quasi-human computer is represented as having both emotions and purposes of its own. Even though this particular film may be regarded as a bit far-fetched, in some respects, there are nonetheless many who, like Wiener, wonder whether the machines we have brought into being will always behave with reasonable predict ability, and in ways that will promote rather than frustrate human purposes.

In his article ‘A Critique of the Doctrine of Universal Salvation’, J. D. Bettis criticises the argument that all men will be saved because ‘God's love is both absolutely good and absolutely sovereign’ (p. 330). I would like to argue that either some of Bettis's criticisms are confused, or else that he is not using ‘love’ in anything like its ordinary sense. I will not attempt a full defence of universalism here, however. In particular, I will not try to defend it against the sort of criticisms Bettis says an Arminian might raise (p. 336).