Are the Christian and Muslim Gods the same? Why not settle this in short order with a nice, crisp, Indiscernibility argument? To wit,
a. If x = y, then x, y share all intrinsic properties. (A version of the Indiscernibility of Identicals) b. The God of the Christians and that of the Muslims do not share all intrinsic properties: the former is triune while the latter is not. Therefore c. The God of the Christians is not identical to that of the Muslims.
Not so fast!
With no breach of formal-logical propriety one could just as easily run the argument in reverse, arguing from the negation of (c) to the negation of (b). They are the same God, so they do share all intrinsic properties!
But then what about triunity? One could claim that triunity is not an intrinsic property. A Muslim might claim that triunity is a relational property, a property that involves a relation to the false beliefs of Christians. In other words, triunity is the relational property of being believed falsely by Christians to be a Trinity.
Clearly, a relational property of this sort cannot be used to show numerical diversity. Otherwise, one could 'show' that the morning and evening 'stars' are not the same because Shlomo of Brooklyn believes of one that it is a planet but of the other than it is a star.
Now consider a 'mind' argument.
a. If x = y, then x, y share all intrinsic properties. (A version of the Indiscernibility of Identicals) b*. This occurrent thinking of Venus and its associated brain state do not share all intrinsic properties: my mental state is intentional (object-directed) whereas my brain state is not. Therefore c*. This occurrent thinking of Venus is not identical to its associated brain state.
Not so fast! A resolute token-token mind-brain identity theorist will run the argument in reverse, arguing from the negation of (c*) to the negation of (b*).
But then what about intentionality? The materialist could claim that intentionality is not an intrinsic property, but a relational one. Taking a page from Daniel Dennett, he might argue that intentionality is a matter of ascription: nothing is intrinsically intentional. We ascribe intentionality to what, in itself, is non-intentional. So in reality all there is is the brain state. The intentionality is our addition.
Now Dennett's ascriptivist theory of intentionality strikes me as absurd: it is either viciously infinitely regressive, or else viciously circular. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the infinite regress is benign. Can I show that it is not without begging the question?
Question for the distinguished MavPhil commentariat: Are there good grounds here for solubility-skepticism when it comes to philosophical problems?
Ildefonso Fraga Ozuna is better known as Sunny Ozuna of Sunny and the Sunglows fame. Their big hit was Talk to Me that made the #11 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 in October, 1963. It is a cover of Little Willie John's effort of the same name from 1958.
The Sunglows became the Sunliners and came out with Just a Dream.
Baldemar Garza Huerta, also a Tejano, is better known as Freddy Fender.
I put the following question to Francis Beckwith via e-mail:
Thomas Aquinas and Spinoza both hold that there is exactly one God. Would you say that when they use Deus they succeed in referring to one and the same God, but just have contradictory beliefs about this one and the same God? When I put this question to Dale Tuggy in his podcast discussion with me, he bit the bullet and said Yes to my great surprise.
Professor Beckwith responded:
. . . I am accepting what each faith tradition (at least in its orthodox formulations) believes about God: he is the self-existent subsistent source of all that receives its being from another. Does that include Spinoza’s God? Yes, with a caveat. He has the right God but the wrong universe. He gets the self-existent subsistent source right, but he gets that which receive its being from another wrong. It’s the univocal predication of the theistic personalists–God and nature are of the same order of being–except in reverse. This is why St. Thomas is the bomb. :-)
Before I reply to Beckwith, let us make sure we understand how the Spinozistic conception of God differs from, while partially overlapping with, the traditional conception we find in Augustine, Aquinas, et al. Steven Nadler in SEP writes,
According to the traditional Judeo-Christian conception of divinity, God is a transcendent creator, a being who causes a world distinct from himself to come into being by creating it out of nothing. God produces that world by a spontaneous act of free will, and could just as easily have not created anything outside himself. By contrast, Spinoza's God is the cause of all things because all things follow causally and necessarily from the divine nature. Or, as he puts it, from God's infinite power or nature “all things have necessarily flowed, or always followed, by the same necessity and in the same way as from the nature of a triangle it follows, from eternity and to eternity, that its three angles are equal to two right angles” (Ip17s1). The existence of the world is, thus, mathematically necessary. It is impossible that God should exist but not the world. This does not mean that God does not cause the world to come into being freely, since nothing outside of God constrains him to bring it into existence. But Spinoza does deny that God creates the world by some arbitrary and undetermined act of free will. God could not have done otherwise. There are no possible alternatives to the actual world, and absolutely no contingency or spontaneity within that world. Everything is absolutely and necessarily determined.
The two conceptions overlap in that for both the traditionalist and the Spinozist, there is exactly one God who is the necessarily existent, uncreated, and the ground of the existence of everything distinct from itself. But there are important differences. For Spinoza, God is immanent, not transcendent; not libertarianly free; not capable of existing on his own apart from nature. There are other differences as well.
Beckwith's response implies that the orthodox Thomist and the orthodox Spinozist refer to the same God, but that the Spinozist harbors some false beliefs about God, among them, that God is not a libertarianly free agent who could have created some other world or no world at all. On the traditional conception, God does things for reasons or purposes while for Spinoza, "All talk of God's purposes, intentions, goals, preferences or aims is just an anthropomorphizing fiction." (Nadler)
As I see it, there is no one God that both the Thomist and the Spinozist succeed in referring to. If the God of Aquinas exists, then the God of Spinoza does not exist. And contrapositively: if the God of Spinoza does exist, then the God of Aquinas does not. This strikes me as evident even if we don't bring in the point that for Aquinas God is ipsum esse subsistens. If we do bring it in it is even more evident.
From my point of view, Beckwith makes the following mistake. He apparently thinks that the overlap of the Thomistic and the Spinozistic God concepts suffices to show that in reality there is exactly one God to which both Thomists and Spinozists refer. It does not.
Suppose the common concept is instantiated. Then it is instantiated by something that exists. But existence entails completeness:
EX –> COMP: Necessarily, for any existent x, and for any non-intentional property P, either x instantiates P or x instantiates the complement of P.
What the principle states is that every real item, everything that exists, satisfies the property version of the Law of Excluded Middle. Nothing in reality is incomplete. So if the common God concept is instantiated, then it is instantiated by something that is either libertarianly free or not libertarianly free. A concept of God can abstract from this alternative. But God in reality must be one or the other. Since successful reference is reference to what exists, Thomist and Spinozist cannot be referring to one and the same God.
Objection. "Why not? if Thomism is true, they are both referring to the Thomist God, and if Spinozism is true, they are both referring to the Spinozist God."
Reply. There are two conditions on successful reference. First, the referent must exist. Second, the referent must satisfy the understanding of the one who is referring. As I said in an earlier post, successful reference requires the cooperation of mind and world. The second condition is not satisfied for the Spinozist if Thomism is true. The Spinozist intends to refer to a being that is not libertarianly free. His reference cannot be called successful if, willy-nilly, he happens to get hold of the Thomist God.
Shooting analogy. A sniper has a Muslim man in his sights, a man whom the sniper believes is a jihadi he must kill. Next to the man is a Muslim woman whom the sniper believes is not a jihadi and whom he endeavors not to harm. Unbeknownst to the sniper, it is the woman who is the jihadi and not the man. The sniper, aiming at the man, gets off his shot, but misses him while hitting the woman and killing her. Question: has the sniper made a successful shot? No doubt he hit and destroyed a jihadi. That's the good news. The bad news is that he missed the target he was aiming at. He failed to hit the target he intended to hit.
So I say the sniper failed to get off a successful shot. He just happened to hit a jihadi. He satisfied only one of the conditions of a successful shot. You must not only hit a target; you must hit the right target. Suppose I score a bull's eye at the shooting range, but the bull's eye belongs to the target of the shooter to my right. Did I get off a successful shot? Of course not: I failed to hit what I was aiming at.
Same with successful reference: You must not only hit something; you must hit the right thing. Now what makes a thing the right thing is the intention of the one who refers. When a jihadi screams, Allahu akbar! he intends to refer to the voluntaristic, radically unitarian, God of Islam, not the triune God. If he happens to latch on to the triune God, then he has failed in his reference. He has failed just as surely as if there is no God to refer to.
Traditional Theism and Reductive Pantheism: Same God?
Suppose we define a reductive pantheist as one who identifies God with the natural world — the space-time system and its contents — where this identification is taken as a reduction of God to nature, and thus as a naturalization of God, as opposed to a divinization of nature. In short, for the reductive pantheist, God reduces to the physical universe. God just is the physical universe. (I take no position on whether Spinoza is a reductive pantheist; I suspect he is not, but this is a question for the Spinoza scholars.)
Now do the traditional theist and the reductive pantheist believe in, worship, and refer to the same God, except that one or the other has false beliefs about this same God? The traditional theist holds that God is not identical to the physical universe, while the reductive pantheist holds that God is identical to the physical universe. Does it make sense to say that one of them has a false belief about the same God that the other has a true belief about?
This makes no sense. To maintain that God just is the physical universe is tantamount to a denial of the existence of God. Either that, or 'God' is being used in some idiosyncratic way.
What we should say in this case is that the respective senses of of 'God' are so different that they rule out sameness of referent.
Someone who worships the physical universe is not worshiping God under a false description; he is not worshiping God at all. He is worshiping an idol.
Now Spinoza, as I read him, is not a reductive pantheist. But if you can see why the reductive pantheist does not worship the same God as the traditional theist, then perhaps you will be able to appreciate why it is reasonable to hold the same of the Spinozist.
And if I can get you to appreciate that, then perhaps I can get you to appreciate that it is scarcely obvious that Christian and Muslim worship the same God.
Francis Beckwith mentions the Kalam Cosmological Argument in his latest The Catholic Thing article (7 January 2106):
1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause. 2. The universe began to exist. 3. Therefore, the universe has a cause of its existence.
Suppose that a Muslim and Christian come to believe that God exists on the basis of this Kalam argument and such ancillary philosophical arguments and considerations as are necessary to establish that the cause of the universe is uncreated, transcendent of the universe, unchanging, etc. The result is a conception of God achieved by reason without the aid of divine revelation. It is a conception common to the normative Muslim and the normative Christian. Crucial differences emerge when the core conception is fleshed out in competing ways by the competing (putative) revelations. But if we stick with the core philosophical conception, then all should agree that there is important overlap as between the Christian and Muslim God conceptions. The overlap is achieved by abstraction from the differences.
So far so good.
Beckwith then asks whether the Muslim and the Christian "believe in the same God" and he concludes that they do.
Permit me a quibble. 'Believe in' connotes 'trust in, have faith in, rely upon the utterances of,' and so on. I believe in my wife: I trust her, I am convinced of her fidelity. That goes well beyond believing that she exists. If I believe in a person, it follows that I believe that the person exists. But if I believe that a person exists, it does not follow that I believe in the person. Professor Beckwith is of course aware of this distinction.
At best, then, what the Christian and the Muslim are brought to by the Kalam argument and supplementary considerations is not belief in God, but belief that God exists. To be even more precise, the Kalam argument, at best, brings us to the belief that there exists a unique, transcendent, uncreated (etc.) cause of the beginning of the universe. In other words, both Christian and Muslim are brought to the belief and perhaps even the knowledge that a certain definite description is satisfied. The properties mentioned in this description are what constitute the shared philosophical understanding of 'God' by the Muslim and the Christian. At best, philosophy brings us to knowledge of God by description, not a knowledge by acquaintance. The common description is usefully thought of as a 'job description' inasmuch as God in brought in to do a certain explanatory job, that of explaining the beginning of the universe. As my teacher J. N. Findlay once said, "God has his uses."
But note that this common Christian-Muslim description leaves undetermined many properties an existent God must possess. (And it must be so given the finitude of our discursive, ectypal, intellects.) But in reality, outside the mind and outside language, God, like everything else, is completely determinate, or complete, for short. I am assuming the following existence entails completeness principle of general metaphysics (metaphysica generalis).
EX –>COMP: Necessarily, for any existent x, and for any non-intentional property P, either x instantiates P or x instantiates the complement of P.
What the principle states is that every real item, everything that exists, satisfies the property version of the Law of Excluded Middle. It rules out of reality incomplete objects. For example, God in reality is either triune or non-triune. He cannot be neither, any more than I can be neither a blogger nor not a blogger. The definite description(s) by means of which we have knowledge by description of God, however, are NECESSARILY (due to the finitude of our intellects) such that there are properties of God in reality that these descriptions do not mention. This is of course true of knowledge by description of everything. Everything is such that no description manageable by a finite mind makes mention of all of the thing's properties, intrinsic and relational.
Now suppose that Christianity is true and that God in reality is triune. Then the above common definite description is satisfied. The common Muslim-Christian conception is instantiated — but it is instantiated by the Christian God which of course must exist to instantiate it.
The Christian and the Muslim both believe that God (understood as the unique uncreated creator of the universe) exists. That is: they believe that the common conception of God is instantiated, that the common definite description is satisfied. They furthermore believe that the common conception is uniquely instantiated and that the common description is uniquely satisfied. But they differ as to whether the instantiator/satisfier is the triune God or the non-triune God.
So we can answer our question as follows. The question, recall, is: Do Christians and Muslims believe in the same God?
Muslims and Christians believe in the same God, as Beckwith claims, in the following precise sense: they believe that the same God exists, which is to say: they believe that the common philosophical God concept is uniquely instantiated, instantiated by exactly one being. Call this the anemic sense of believing in the same God.
But this is consistent with saying that Muslim and Christian do not believe in the same God in the following precise sense: they don't believe that the wholly determinate being in reality that instantiates the common philosophical God concept is the triune God who sent his only begotten Son, etc. Call this the robust sense of believing in the same God.
Now we robustos will naturally go with the robust sense. So, to give a plain answer: Christians and Muslims do not believe in the same God. If Christianity is true, the Muslim God simply does not exist, and Muslims believe in an idol.
The mistake that some are making here is to suppose that the shared Muslim-Christian philosophical understanding enscapsulated in the common concept suffices to show that in reality one and the same God is believed in, and successfully referred to, and non-idolatrously worshipped by both Muslims and Christians. Not so!
The real (extramental, extralinguistic) existence of God cannot be identified with or reduced to the being instantiated of a concept that includes only some of the divine determinations (properties). 'Is instantiated' is a second-level predicate, but God exists in the first-level way. Equivalently, God is not identical to an instance of one of our concepts. God is transcendent of all our concepts. So if we know by revelation that God is a Trinity, then we know that the Muslim God, the non-triune God, does not exist.
You say you're for it? Would you still be for it if I could show you that it is virtually certain that you will end up among the centrally planned and not among the central planners?
"Popular exams in UK to be rescheduled to avoid Ramadan." The UK commits cultural suicide. Not all at once, but little by little, bit by bit, concession by concession. A culture is doomed when it no longer has the will to defend itself. (HT: London Karl)
In the West, Muslims are accommodated. In Muslim lands, Christians are persecuted and suppressed even unto beheading and crucifixion. And Barack Hussein Obama worries about global warming and the National Rifle Association? By the way, his presidency is a clear indicator of our decline: that a feckless fool, a know-nothing, could be elected and then re-elected. We may just be getting what we deserve. A foolish folk, fiscally irresponsible, addicted to panem et circenses, gets a POMO idiot who works to increase the dependency of the people on government while violating their liberties and undermining the rule of law.
Meanwhile, conservative inaction gives traction to the likes of Donald Trump.
. . . you said, "I'm not a magician." ISIS militants behead two magicians. And Obama the feckless fiddles while the world burns.
In other news, 1000 Muslim youths went on a New Year's Eve rape rampage in Cologne against women 80 of whom reported rapes and muggings. But the BBC doesn't call the assailants Muslims. This news agency should rename itself the PCBBC.
So far, Ed Feser's is perhaps the best of the Internet discussions of this hot-button question, a question recently re-ignited by the Wheaton dust-up, to mix some metaphors. Herewith, some notes on Feser's long entry. I am not nearly as philosophically self-confident as Ed or Lydia McGrew, so I will mainly just be trying to understand the issue for my own edification. But I am sure of one thing: the question is difficult and has no easy solution. If you think it does, then I humbly suggest you are not thinking very hard, indeed, you are hardly thinking.
1. Feser rightly points out that a difference in (Fregean) sense does not entail a difference in (Fregean) reference. So the difference in sense as between 'God of the Christians' and 'God of the Muslims' does not entail that these expressions differ in reference. Quite so. But I would add that on a descriptivist semantics reference is routed through, and determined by, sense: an expression picks out its object in virtue of the latter's unique satisfaction of an identifying description associated with the referring expression, a description that unpacks the expression's sense. If we think of reference in this way, then 'God' refers to whichever entity, if any, that satisfies the definite description encapsulated in 'God' as this term is used in a given linguistic community. So while difference in sense does not by itself entail difference in reference, difference in sense is consistent with difference in reference, so that in a particular case it may be that the difference in sense is sufficiently great to entail a difference in reference. Suppose that in one linguistic community a person understands by 'God' the unique contingent being who created the universe but was himself created, while in another a person understands by 'God' the unique necessary uncreated being who created the universe. In this case I think it is clear that the difference in sense entails a difference in reference. Both uses of 'God' may fail of reference, or one might succeed. But they cannot both succeed. For nothing can be both necessary and contingent.
From what has been said so far, 'God' (used by a Christian) and 'Allah' (used by a Muslim) may have the same reference or may have a different reference. The issue cannot be decided by merely pointing out that a difference in sense does not entail a difference in reference.
2. Feser makes a point about beliefs that is surely correct. You and I can have conflicting beliefs about a common object of successful reference without prejudice to its being precisely a common object of successful reference. For example, we both see a sharp-dressed man across the room drinking from a Martini glass. Suppose I erroneously believe that he is drinking a Martini while you correctly believe that he is drinking water. That difference in belief is obviously consistent with one and the same man's being our common object of perceptual and linguistic reference. "Similarly, the fact that Muslims have what Christians regard as a number of erroneous beliefs about God does not by itself entail that Muslims and Christians are not referring to the same thing when they use the expression 'God.'" (Emphasis added.)
True, but it could also be that conflicting beliefs make it impossible that there be a common object of successful reference. It will depend on what those beliefs are and whether they are incorporated into the respective senses of 'God' as used by Muslims and Christians. I will also depend on one's theory of reference, whether descriptivist, causal, hybrid, or something else.
It should also be observed that in perceptual cases such as the Martini case there is no question but that we are referentially glomming onto one and the same object. The existence and identity of the sharp-dressed drinker are given to the senses. Since we know by direct sensory acquaintance that it is the same man both of us see, the conflicting beliefs have no tendency to show otherwise. But God is not an object of perception via the outer senses. So one can question how much weight we should assign to the perceptual analogies, and indeed to any analogy that makes mention of a physical thing. At best, these analogies show that, in general, contradictory beliefs about a putatively self-same x are consistent with there being in reality one and the same subject of these beliefs. But they are also consistent with there not being in reality one and the same subject of the contradictory beliefs.
But not only is God not an object of sensory acquaintance, he is also arguably not an object among objects or a being among beings. Suppose God is ipsum esse subsistens as Aquinas held. It will then be serious question whether a theory of reference that caters to ordinary references to intramundane people and things, beings, can be extended to accommodate reference to self-subsistent Being. Not clear! But I raise this hairy issue only to set it aside for the space of this entry. I will assume for now that God is a being among beings. I bring this issue up only to get people to appreciate how difficult and involved this 'same God?' issue is. Do not comment on this paragraph; it is off-topic for present purposes. See here for one of the posts in which I disagree with Dale Tuggy on this issue.
3. Now consider these conflicting beliefs: God is triune; God is not triune. Please note that it would be question-begging to announce that the fact of this dispute entails that the object of the dispute is one and the same. For that is exactly what is at issue. The following would be a question-begging little speech:
Look man, we are disputing whether God is triune or not triune; we are therefore presupposing that there is one and the same thing, God, about whose properties we are disputing! The disagreement entails sameness of object! Same God!
This is question-begging because it may be that the tokens of 'God' in "God is triune; God is not triune" differ in sense so radically that they also differ in reference. In other words, the mere fact that one and the same word-type 'God' is tokened twice does not show that there is one and the same object about whose properties we are disputing.
4. Feser writes,
Even errors concerning God’s Trinitarian nature are not per se sufficient to prevent successful reference. Abraham and Moses were not Trinitarians, but no Christian can deny that they referred to, and worshiped, the same God Christians do.
[. . .]
But shouldn’t a Christian hold that some reference to the Trinity or to the divinity of Jesus is also at least necessary, even if not sufficient, for successful reference to the true God? Doesn’t that follow from the fact that being Trinitarian is, from a Christian point of view, also essential to God? No, that doesn’t follow at all, and any Christian who says otherwise will, if he stops and thinks carefully about it, see that he doesn’t really believe that it follows. Again, Christians don’t deny that Abraham and Moses, or modern Jews, or Arians and other heretics, refer to and worship the same God as orthodox Christians, despite the fact that these people do not affirm the Trinity or the divinity of Jesus.
There is a modal fudge across these two passages that I don't think it is mere pedantry on my part to point out. In the first passage Feser claims in effect that
A. No Christian CAN deny that Abraham and Moses worshiped the same God that Christians do
while in the second Feser claims in effect that
B. No Christian DOES deny that Abraham and Moses worshiped the same God that Christians do.
If we charitably substitute 'hardly any' for 'no' in (B) then we get a statement that I am willing to concede is true. (A), however, strikes me as false. I myself am strongly tempted to deny that Jews and Christians worship the same God — assuming that the Jewish God is non-triune and explicitly determined to be such by Jews – and what I am strongly tempted to do strikes me as entirely possible and rationally justifiable. Why can't someone reasonably deny that Jews and Christians worship the same God?
Feser thinks he has cited some incontrovertible fact that decides the issue, the fact being that everyone or almost everyone claims that Jews and Christians worship the same God. I concede the fact. What I don't concede is that it decides the issue. My claim against Feser on the present occasion is not that he is wrong to maintain that (normative) Jews, Christians, and Muslims all worship the same God, but that he is not obviously right, his confident asseverations in the passages lately quoted notwithstanding. I am saying to Feser what I said to Beckwith and Tuggy: you gentlemen think this issue easily resolved. But it isn't, in large part because its resolution depends on the solution of hitherto unsolved problems in the philosophy of language.
Here are two questions we ought to distinguish:
Q1. Do Christians use 'God' and equivalents with the intention of referring to the same being that Jews refer to or think they are referring to with 'God' and equivalents?
Q2. Do Christians and Jews succeed in refer to the same being?
An affirmative answer to the first question is consistent with a negative answer to the second question. I agree with an affirmative answer to (Q1). But this affirmative answer does not entail an affirmative answer to (Q2). Moreover, it is reasonable to return a negative answer to (Q2). I will now try to explain how it is reasonable to answer (Q2) in the negative.
5. The crux of the matter is the nature of reference. How exactly is successful reference achieved? And what exactly is reference? And how is worship related to reference?
First off,the causal theory of Kripke, Donnellan, et al. is reasonably rejected and I reject it . It is rife with difficulties. (See e.g., John Searle, Intentionality, Cambridge UP, 1983, ch. 9) Connected with this is my subscription to the broadly logical primacy of the intentional over the linguistic. Part of what this means is that words don't refer, people refer using words, and they don't need to use words to refer. All reference, at bottom, is thinking reference or mental reference. Reference at bottom is intentionality. To refer to something, then, whether with words or without words, is to intend it or think of it. This is to be understood as implying that words, phrases, and the like, considered in their physical being as marks on paper or sounds in the air or carvings in stone (etc.) are entirely lacking in any intrinsic referential, representative, semantic, or intentional character. They are not intrinsically object-directed. There is no object-directedness in nature apart from mind. (Though it may be that dispositionality is an analog of it. See here.) This is equivalent to saying that there is no objective reference without mind. A word acquires reference only when it is thoughtfully used.
Reference to particulars in the sense of 'refer' just explained is always and indeed necessarily reference to propertied particulars. This is because reference to a particular 'picks it out' from all else, singles it out, designates it to the exclusion of everything else. Particulars taken in abstraction from their properties cannot be singled out to the exclusion of all else. To think of a thing or person is to think of it as an instance of certain properties and indeed in such a way as to distinguish it from all else. So, to think of, and thus refer to, a particular is to think of it as an instance of a set of properties that jointly individuate it.
To refer to God, then, is to think of God as an instance of certain properties. I cannot think of God directly as just a particular, and then as instantiating certain properties. This ought to be quite clear from the fact that in this life our (natural) knowledge of God is not by acquaintance but by description. I don't literally see God when I look upwards at "the starry skies above me" or gaze inward at "the moral law within me" to borrow a couple of signature phrases from Immanuel Kant. Our only access to God here below is indirect via his properties, as an instance of those properties. Here below we approach God from the side of his properties as we understand them. The existence and identity of my table is known directly by acquaintance. Not so in the case of God. The existence of God is not given to sense perception but has to be understood as the being-instantiated of certain properties. The God I know by description is God qua uniquely satisfying my understanding of 'God.'
Someone could object: What about mystical experience? Is it not possible in this life to enjoy mystical knowledge by acquaintance of God? This is a very large, and I think separate topic. To the extent that mystical experience leads to mystical union it tends to collapse the I-Thou and man-God duality that is part of the framework of worship as we are discussing it in this context. See my Buber on Buddhism and Other Forms of Mysticism. It also tends to explode the framework in which questions about reference are posed . I mean the framework in which: here is a minded organism with linguistic capacity who thoughtfully utters certain words and phrases while out there are various things to which the organism is trying to refer and often succeeding.
There is also the question of the veridicality of mystical experience. How do I know that an experience of mine is revelatory of something real? How do I know that successive experiences of mine are revelatory of the same thing? How do I know that the mystical experiences of different people are veridically of the same thing? So I suggest we bracket the question of mystical experience.
Any natural knowledge of God in this life, then, is by description. Reference to God is indirect and via the understanding of 'God' within a given religion. Now the orthodox Christian understanding of 'God' is that God sent his only begotten Son, begotten not made, into our predicament to teach us and show us the Way (via, veritas, vita) and to suffer and die for our sins. Together with this contingent Sending goes the triunity of God as the necessary condition of its possibility. This is part of what an orthodox Christian means by 'God,' although I reckon few Christians would put it the way I just did. It is part of the sense of 'God' for an orthodox Christian. But this is not part of the sense of 'God' for the orthodox Muslim who denies the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the soteriology connected with both.
So do Christians and Muslims succeed in referring to the same being? No. Successful reference on a descriptivist semantics requires the cooperation of Mind and World. Successful reference, whether with words or without words, requires that there exist outside the mind something that satisfies the conditions set within the mind. (Remember: it is not primarily words that refer, but minds via words and mental states.) Now suppose there exists exactly one God and that that God is a Trinity. Then the Christian's understanding of 'God' will be satisfied, and his reference to God will be successful. But the Muslim's reference will fail. The reason for this is that there is nothing outside the mind that satisfies his characteristic understanding of 'God.'
Of course, the Muslim could put it the other way around. Either way, my point goes through: Muslim and Christian cannot be referring to the one and the same God.
You say the Christian and Muslim understandings of 'God' overlap? You are right! But this overlap is but an abstraction insufficient to determine an identifying reference to a concrete, wholly determinate, particular. In reality, God is completely determinate. As such, he cannot be neither triune nor not triune, neither incarnated nor not incarnated, etc. in the way the overlapping conception is. So if the triune God exists, then the non-triune God does not exist. Of course, we can say that the Christian and the Muslim are 'driving in the same direction.' Heading West on Interstate 10, I am driving toward the greater Los Angeles area, and thus I am driving toward both Watts and Laguna Niguel. But there is a big difference, and perhaps one pertaining unto my 'salvation,' whether I arrive in Watts or in Laguna Niguel. What's more, I cannot terminate my drive in some indeterminate location. The successful termination of my peregrination must occur at some wholly definite place. So too with successful reference to a concrete particular: it must terminate with a completely determinate referent.
Here is another related objection. "If the Christian God exists, then both Christian and Muslim succeed in referring to the same God — it is just that this same God is the Christian God, i.e., God as understood in the characteristically Christian way. The existence of the Christian God suffices to satisfy the common Christian-Muslim underdstanding of 'God.'"
In reply I repeat that both mind and world must cooperate for successful reference on a descriptivist semantics. So it is not enough that God exists and that there be exactly one God. Nor is it enough that the one God satisfy the common Christian-Muslim conception; for the Muslim God to be an object of successful reference it must both exist and satisfy the characteristic Muslim understanding of 'God.'
Conclusion
My thesis is a rather modest one. To repeat what I said above:
My claim against Feser on the present occasion is not that he is wrong to maintain that (normative) Jews, Christians, and Muslims all worship the same God, but that he is not obviously right, his confident asseverations in the passages lately quoted notwithstanding. I am saying to Feser what I said to Beckwith and Tuggy: you gentlemen think this issue easily resolved. But it isn't, in large part because its resolution depends on the solution of hitherto unsolved problems in the philosophy of language.
I have been arguing that whether 'God' and equivalents as used by Jews, Christians, and Muslims refer to the same being depends on one's philosophy of language. In particular, I suggested that only on a causal theory of names could one maintain that their respective references are to the same entity. The causal theory of names, however, strikes me as not very plausible. Here is one consideration among several.
The causal theory of names of Saul Kripke et al. requires that there be an initial baptism of the target of reference, a baptism at which the name is first introduced. This can come about by ostension: Pointing to a newly acquired kitten, I bestow upon it the moniker, 'Mungojerrie.' Or it can come about by the use of a reference-fixing definite description: Let 'Neptune' denote the celestial object responsible for the perturbation of the orbit of Uranus. In the second case, it may be that the object whose name is being introduced is not itself present at the baptismal ceremony. What is present, or observable, are certain effects of the object hypothesized. (See Saul Kripke Naming and Necessity, Harvard 1980 p. 79, n. 33 and p. 96, n. 42.)
As I understand it, a necessary condition for successful reference on the causal theory is that a speaker's use of a name be causally connected (perhaps indirectly) with the object referred to. We can refer to objects only if we stand in some causal relation to them (direct or indirect). So my use of 'God' refers to God not because there is something that satisfies the definite description or disjunction of definite descriptions that unpack the sense of 'God' as used by me and others in my linguistic community, but because my use of 'God' can be traced back though a long causal chain to an initial baptism, as it were, of God by, say, Abraham.
If this is what the causal theory (or at least the Kripkean version thereof) requires, then thetheory rules out all reference to abstracta: Fregean propositions, numbers, sets, etc. But it also rules out reference to future events.
Suppose meteorologists predict a hurricane that has the power to wipe out New Orleans a second time. Conservatives to a man and a woman, they introduce the name 'Hillary' for this horrendous event, and they introduce it via some appropriately complex definite description. (They can't point to it since it doesn't yet exist.) The meteorologists continue with their work using 'Hillary' for the event in question. Since the event lies in the future, there is no question of its causing directly or indirectly any use of the name 'Hillary.' Nor is there any question of the name's being introduced on the basis of effects of the event.
What we seem to have here is a legitimate use of a proper name that cannot be accounted for by the causal theory. For the causal theory rules out reference to a thing or event to which one does not stand in a causal relation. This suggests that there is something very wrong with the theory. (See John Searle, Intentionality, Cambridge 1983, p. 241.)
Admittedly, the above Searle-y objection is not compelling, relying as it does on controversial assumptions about the nature of time. A presentist will probably not be impressed by it. If the present alone exists, then future events do not, in which case there can be no reference to them, assuming that one can successfully refer only to what exists.
Question for Kripkeans: Isn't "initial baptism" pleonastic? Or does Kripke allow for subsequent baptisms of a thing?
Master podcaster Dale Tuggy presents the question and then he and I discuss the 'public square' and 'technical' aspects of the question. You can also hear it on YouTube. Part II in a week or so.
Each of the following three propositions strikes me as very reasonably maintained. But they cannot all be true.
A. Worship Entails Reference: If S worships x, then S refers to x. B. Reference Entails Existence: If S refers to x, then x exists. C. Worship Does Not Entail Existence: It is not the case that if S worships x, then x exists.
It is easy to see that the triad is inconsistent. The conjunction of any two limbs entails the negation of the remaining one. For example, (A) and (B), taken in conjunction, entail the negation of (C).
What makes the triad a very interesting philosophical problem, however, is the fact that each of the constituent propositions issues a very strong claim on our acceptance. I am inclined to say that each is true. But of course they cannot all be true if they are logically inconsistent, which they obviously are.
Why think that each limb is true?
Ad (A): While there is much more to worship than reference, and while reference to a god or God can take place without worship, it is surely the case that whatever one worships one refers to, whether publicly or privately, whether in overt speech or in wordless thought.
Ad (B): Unless we make a move into Meinong's jungle, it would seem that reference is reference to what exists. There are different ways for reference to fail, but one way is if the referent does not exist. Suppose I think Scollay Square still exists. Trying to say something true, I say, 'Scollay Square is in Boston.' Well, I fail to say something true because of the failure of reference of 'Scollay Square.' My sentence is either false or lacks a truth-value. Now if one way for a reference to fail is when the referent does not exist, then reference entails existence.
Here is a second consideration. Philosophers often speak of reference as a word-world relation. Better: it is a relation between a word of phrase thoughtfully deployed by a person and something that exists extralinguistically. But surely if a genuine relation R holds, then each of R's relata exists. In the dyadic case, if x stands in R to y, then both x and y exist. A weaker principle is that of existence-symmetry: if x stands in R to y, then either both relata exist or neither exists. Both principles rule out the situation in which one relatum of the reference relation exists and the other doesn't.
So if reference is a genuine relation, and a person uses a word or phrase to refer to something, then the thing in question, the referent, exists. So again it seems that (B) is true and that reference entails existence. If the referent does not exist, then the reference relation does not hold in this case and there is no reference in this case. No referent, no reference. If reference, then referent.
Ad (C): Some say that the Christian God and the Muslim God are the same. But no one this side of the lunatic asylum says that all gods are the same. So at least one of these gods does not exist. But presumably all gods have been worshipped by someone; ergo, being worshipped does not entail existence.
So how do we solve this aporetic bad boy? We have three very plausible propositions that cannot all be true. So it seems we must reject one of them. But which one?
(A) is above reproach. Surely one cannot worship anything without referring to it. And I should think that (C) is obviously true. The idolater worships a false god, something that does not exist. As Peter Geach points out, the idolater does not worship a hunk of gold, say, but a hunk of gold as God, or God as a hunk of gold. But then he worships something that does not exist and indeed cannot exist. The only hope for solving the triad is by rejecting (B). For (B) does not share in the obviousness of (A) and (C). (B) is very plausible but not as plausible as the other two limbs.
London Ed will presumably endorse (B)-rejection as the solution since he is already on record as saying that one can successfully refer to purely fictional (and thus nonexistent) individuals and that one also be confident that it is numerically the same fictional individual to which different people are referring in different ways. Thus if London Ed brings up in conversation the fictional detective who lives on Baker Street, has an assistant named 'Watson,' etc. , then I know he is referring to Sherlock Holmes. And referring successfully. We are talking about one and the same individual. Successful reference thus seems not to require the existence of the referent.
But notice. If there is successful reference to nonexistent individuals, then it would seem that reference is an intentional state just like worshiping is. Or to put the point in formal mode: it would seem that 'refers' is an intentional verb just like 'worship' is. What one worships may or may not exist without prejudice to one's being in a state of worship. On (B)-rejection, what one refers to may or may not exist without prejudice to one's being in the state of referring.
By the way, it is not words that refer, but people using words. Of course, one can say that 'cat' in English refers to furry, four-legged mammals, but that is elliptical for saying that competent English speakers who are using 'cat' in a standard, non-metaphorical, way refer by the use of this word to furry, four-legged mammals. Linguistic reference is grounded in and parasitic upon thinking reference, intentional reference. And not the other way around. Not everyone agrees, of course. (Chisholm and Sellars famously disagreed about this.) This is yet another bone of contention at the base of the Same God? controversy. And one more reason why it is not easily resolved.
Well, suppose that linguistic reference is like mental reference (intentionality) in this respect: just as the intentio is what it is whether or not the intentum exists, the reference is what it is whether or not the referent exists. This makes sense and it solves the above aporetic triad. We simply reject (B).
Now where does my solution to the above triad leave us with respect to the question, Does the Christian and the Muslim worship the same God? My solution implies that they do not worship the same God. For it implies that reference to an individual or particular is not direct but mediated by properties. Let's consider private, unverbalized worship in the form of discursive prayer. Suppose I pray the Jesus Prayer, or some such prayer as 'Lord, grant me light in my moral and intellectual darkness.' Such prayer is on the discursive plane. It is not a matter of infused contemplation or any state of mystical intuition or mystical union. On the discursive plane I have no knowledge of God by acquaintance, and certainly not by sensory acquaintance. My knowledge, if knowledge it is, is by description. I refer to God mentally via properties as that which satisfies, uniquely, a certain identifying description. Obviously, I cannot have God before my mind as a pure, unpropertied particular; I can have God before my mind only as 'clothed' in certain properties, only as an instantiation of those properties.
Now if the properties in terms of which I prayerfully think of God include the property of being triune, and the properties in terms of which a Muslim thinks of God include the property of not being triune, then no one thing can be our common mental referent. For in reality outside the mind nothing can be both triune and not triune.
If you object that there is a common God but that the Muslim has false beliefs about it, then I say you are either begging the question or assuming a causal theory of reference. It is certainly true that different people can have contradictory beliefs about one and the same thing. But if you say that this is the case with respect to the Muslim and Christian Gods, then you assume that there is one God about whom there are contradictory beliefs — and that is precisely to beg the question. This is the very mistake that Beckwith and Tuggy and others make.
If, on the other hand, you are assuming a casual theory of reference, then how will you solve my triad above? Besides, you take on board all the problems of the casual theory. The notion that reference can be explained by causation is a very questionable one, about which I will have more to say later.
