Some theologians say that God doesn't exist--God is beyond being. Here is one way to make sense of their claim: Non-relational claims with "God" as the subject term have the word "God" functioning like the "It" in "It's raining" (we should think of "It's raining" on this reading as a nullary predicate). In other words, what we are really expressing are subjectless claims. When the vulgar believer says "God doesn't exist", that's not literally true. What is literally true is something like: "It's Godding". And when the vulgar believer says "God is wise", what's literally true is: "It's Godding wisely" just as "The rain is intense" really means that it's raining intensely. Relational claims can be similarly handled. "The rain falls on me" is more precisely expressed as "It's raining on me", and "God creates the earth" is better said as "It's Godding creatively with respect to the earth." A theologian of this stripe can then talk with the vulgar, but she has a preferred explication of what is being said.
I think this story fails when we talk about love between God and humans. For love is essentially relational. An account of love that eliminates either the subject term or the object term is automatically not an account of love in the proper sense. (There is an extended sense in which someone might be said love a non-existent person. But I think it's more proper to say that she seems to love. If presentism and no-afterlife are true, then in this example, Sally does not love Fred—she only thinks she does.)
I'm not sure I would want my preferred explication to end in something analogous to "It is raining," since surely that has an explication. Suppose it's "Rain is falling." Then in the analogous case we go from "God is wise" to "It is godding wisely" to, what? Back to "God is wise," right?
ReplyDeleteThere is the difficulty of what the verb "to god" is supposed to mean, and how one would come to learn or understand it, and what would be its truth conditions. I can't imagine any good answers to those questions, and I doubt this is solely due to the poverty of my imagination.
ReplyDeleteYeah, these are problems, but maybe they're just species of the general problem of how language matches up with reality?
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ReplyDeleteI kind of have sympathy for this line of thought. After all, some types of metaphysics are supposed to include multiple ontologies, and if two things truly belong to a separate class of ontologies can they really both be said to be "existing" even if they are both "real" (not fictional)? Also, to say that god is godding instead of existing might remove the some of the difficulty of conceiving of a necessary being. Because with existing things it is really easy to think of that same thing not existing as an alternative, but God is supposed to not have "not existing" as an alternative. But maybe godding, unlike existing, simply does not have an alternative like "not godding" available (that probably sounds incoherent... sorry for that).
ReplyDeleteAlso, I am not sure all forms of love are necessarily relational. Maybe only our imperfect realization of love is necessarily relational? The only reason this comes to mind is because "God is Love" and if love is necessarily relational than somehow God has a relation as a "real" property, and usually I think of relations more like Cambridge properties. Just a thought though.
"Because with existing things it is really easy to think of that same thing not existing as an alternative"
ReplyDeleteIt's not *easy* to think of time, space, or numbers as not existing.
That's a good point, but I think that the theologians who say things like "God doesn't exist" aren't talking about the existence the way we talk about numbers, they are talking about something similar to Aristotelian actualization. Like when I say a dog exists I think I am saying something a little different than what I am saying when I say numbers exist (unless I am a Platonist, but I think even Platonists think that forms have a different mode of existing than regular stuff).
ReplyDeleteThat said, space and time don't necessarily exist (after all, God had a choice in creating the universe, and therefore space and time), so I'm not really sure why you brought them up as examples of things that probably have to exist.
I didn't say that time and space have to exist. I said it's hard to *imagine* them not existing. :-)
ReplyDeleteOh ok. That makes sense.
ReplyDeleteIt's pretty interesting how the "conceptual imagination" and the literal imagination are separate. Even though it's easy to make the concept of a spaceless universe (after all, some types of string theory argue for that sort of thing being possible), it's practically impossible to "imagine" a spaceless universe. I wonder if that could work as an argument for people having immaterial souls.
Nice post, Alex. I think the point about love is important. It seems to require more than the mere existence of God though. You can't love an abstract object, a hole, or a property, right? Love is an I-Thou relation. But then, arguably, God must be a self (and so, a substance). http://trinities.org/blog/archives/5644
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