{"id":10736,"date":"2011-04-29T12:47:42","date_gmt":"2011-04-29T12:47:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2011\/04\/29\/gale-on-baptizing-god\/"},"modified":"2011-04-29T12:47:42","modified_gmt":"2011-04-29T12:47:42","slug":"gale-on-baptizing-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2011\/04\/29\/gale-on-baptizing-god\/","title":{"rendered":"Gale on Baptizing God"},"content":{"rendered":"

Richard M. Gale, On the Nature and Existence of God<\/strong> (Cambridge UP, 1991), p. 11 :<\/span><\/p>\n

     First, because God is a supernatural being, he seem to defy being<\/span>
     indexically pinned down or baptized. There are no lapels to be<\/span>
     grabbed hold of by a use of 'this.' Some would contend that we can<\/span>
     ostensively pin down the name 'God' by saying 'this' when having or<\/span>
     after just having a mystical or religious experience, in which<\/span>
     'this' denotes the intentional accusative or content of the<\/span>
     experience. This would seem to require that these experiences are<\/span>
     cognitive and that their objective accusative is a common object of<\/span>
     the experiences of different persons as well as of successive<\/span>
     experiences of a single person.<\/span><\/p>\n

Suppose Abraham or someone has an experience the intentional object of which he dubs 'God.' Suppose the experience is not 'cognitive,' i.e., not veridical: nothing in reality corresponds to the intentional <\/span>object, the accusative, of the experience. Then there will not have been a successful reference to God. Successful reference is existence-entailing: If I succeed in referring to X, then X exists. Pace<\/em> Meinong, one cannot refer to what does not exist. Reference is in every case to the existent. It therefore seems that Gale is right when he says that a successful baptizing of God requires the veridicality of mystical experience.<\/span><\/p>\n

Andrew V. Jeffrey (Faith and Philosophy<\/em>, January 1996, p. 94) responds to Gale as follows:<\/span><\/p>\n

     . . . the religious language-game could be played as if theistic<\/span>
     experiences were both veridical and cognitive even if they were<\/span>
     not; i.e., people could play the referential game even with a<\/span>
     radically misidentified referent.<\/span><\/p>\n

It seems to me that this response misses the point. Suppose the referent has been radically misidentified: Abraham dubs his Freudian superego, or an overwhelming sense of anxiety, or what have you, as  'God.' Then no successful reference will have been achieved. Is a long disquisition necessary to explain that God cannot be a feeling of anxiety?<\/span><\/p>\n

And if you say that all baptisms are successful in that, after all, something gets baptized, then I say that this shows the utter hopelessness of the causal theory of reference. For the question to be   answered is this: How in the utterance of a name does the speaker succeed in referring to an object? Under what conditions is successful reference achieved? A theory that implies that one always succeeds, <\/span>that there are no conditions in which one fails to succeed, is worthless.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Richard M. Gale, On the Nature and Existence of God (Cambridge UP, 1991), p. 11 :      First, because God is a supernatural being, he seem to defy being     indexically pinned down or baptized. There are no lapels to be     grabbed hold of by a use of 'this.' Some would contend that we can     ostensively … Continue reading “Gale on Baptizing God”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[143,408],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-god","category-language-philosophy-of"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10736\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}