Do We Really Need to Agree on God?
A friend on Twitter asked for my thoughts on the following from Curt Jaimungal, host of Theories of Everything Podcast.
A friend on Twitter asked for my thoughts on the following from
, host of Theories of Everything Podcast.“I used to believe we needed a shared understanding of concepts such as truth or our highest beliefs, like ‘God.’ I thought that this shared belief created societal harmony by ensuring similar conceptions. But I no longer think this way. I also don’t believe in the usual alternative—that we simply shouldn’t (or can’t) believe in anything. People say that we’ve lost our core values. Cool… Okay… But what if these aren’t the only options? What if, when someone says ‘I believe in God’ or ‘I believe in truth,’ these words are meant to encompass the widest possible realm of existence? They’re as undefined as existence itself. What if, furthermore, this ambiguity isn’t a weakness but the key to its strength? When someone says they believe in God, perhaps it means something different to each of us. However, we all find our own place under this broad category. My understanding of God might differ from yours, but our expressions of belief harmonize because the idea is so vague. This vagueness lets each person fit their interpretation into the larger picture. The goal isn’t about believing in nothing. Instead, it’s about believing in the most ambiguous thing! Why? Because the most ambiguous allows the widest evolutionary canvas for each of us to create our niches of knowledge and epistemologies. This amorphous category creates a vast ecosystem, much like the biodiversity of life itself. Odd for me to say this as someone who values precision and rigor in conversation. My background in mathematical physics trained me that way. But what if embracing this ambiguity allows for the widest ecosystem of knowledge and thus the greatest diversity of thought? People dismiss the concept of ‘God’ as polysemic… but what if this abundance of meaning is part of the point?”
So, here are my thoughts (and please don’t mistake my brevity or directness for dismissiveness—I’m just crunched for time with the new baby and all : ).
Obviously, I think we need a shared understanding of certain things—at a minimum, this is necessary for communication.1 For example, we must agree on the meaning of terms to make arguments or simply convey ideas. Whether we need a shared conception of everything, including our highest beliefs, is another matter. As we tackle more difficult and abstract subjects, the likelihood of everyone having the same concept or understanding decreases. I don’t think this is a bad thing, necessarily; in fact, it creates opportunities for discovery, dialogue, partnership, and growth. Of course, differing conceptions or understandings do lead to conflict—as we know all too well, people can get rather insistent about who has the “correct” understanding, whether in religious, political, scientific, or other areas. (I’ll have more to say about this at the end).
As for truth? I'm an old-school Aristotelian on that. In other words, telling the truth is simply “telling it like it is”—or, as Aristotle put it, “to say of what is, that it is not, is to speak falsely, and to say of what is, that it is, is to speak the truth.” The idea here is that truth is a relational property between being and the intellect—we hold a true belief, or we speak truly, when what we believe or say either corresponds to or aligns with what is.2 Not only do I think this understanding of truth is accurate—that is, that it reflects the way things really are—but I would also argue that this notion of truth is exceedingly commonsensical and even assumed by most (if not all) people who argue against it. After all, in advocating for an alternative understanding of truth (whether constructivist, pragmatic, etc.), they implicitly assume that their view actually reflects reality; that it is, in fact, the case!
So much for truth, then. Now, what about God?
It’s clear that people often have different ideas in mind when they use the word "God," though many share similar concepts. It’s also important to recognize that what people think about God often depends on how they think about God. Before we explore the different ways people think about God, consider Curt’s statement: “My understanding of God might differ from yours, but our expressions of belief harmonize because the idea is so vague.”
When certain ideas are very vague—with boundaries so unclear—it does become less obvious where points of tension or clash might arise. However, it’s also evident that most people don’t hold beliefs about God so vague that they automatically harmonize (or at least avoid immediate conflict). In fact, many people hold rather specific and exact beliefs about God that directly clash or contradict others’ beliefs. Much of this is straightforward A or not-A type stuff; for example, either God is a trinity, or God isn’t; either God transcends the physical universe, or God doesn’t; either God works miracles, or God doesn’t, and so on.
This will become clear as we focus on different ways people come to hold different conceptions of God.
For example, some (call them, theistic personalists3) conceive of God in rather anthropomorphic respects—as a powerful entity, perhaps a wholly immaterial person, yet still comparable to us as a thinking being that changes, interacts with the world in a give-and-take manner, is composed of various parts4, and so on. In this view, God is essentially just another being among beings, as suggested by expressions like “the bearded man in the sky.” Personally, I believe this understanding of God is mistaken (in fact, I think people should be atheists with respect to this concept of God; it strikes me as little better than belief in the Spaghetti Monster), but it’s evident that many people hold this view. Indeed, many adopt an anthropomorphic conception of God through certain religious depictions, perhaps because such a portrayal is more relatable and easier to understand.
Notice: Coming to think of God this way might be, to some extent, a necessary first step, especially for children. However, as with anything in life, we should strive for greater conceptual clarity as we grow older and become capable of deeper intellectual efforts. Unfortunately, it seems that few people move beyond a kindergarten-level conception of God—a simplified notion introduced to children to help them begin grasping a very complex idea. While potentially helpful as a starting point, this limited understanding can lead to significant problems if it isn’t refined over time, including renouncing the idea of God entirely.
Classical theists, however, hold a very different understanding of God. For them, the question centers on fundamentality: what sort of being could be truly ontologically independent—the ungroudned ground of everything else? Put differently, what could be the right kind of entity to 1) explain all aspects of reality that require an external factor, and 2) be self-explanatory in its existence. Classical theism involves conceptualizing God through a definite description, clarifying our understanding by examining the necessary conditions for broad-scale features of the world—change, compositeness, contingency, and so on. This approach argues that these phenomena are possible only if something categorically different from them (unchanging, simple, necessary, etc.) is causally responsible for them.
Much of this approach involves discerning what God is not (e.g., material, qualitatively finite, composed of parts), leaving us with a somewhat tenuous grasp of what God is positively. This understanding is not entirely absent, of course, as classical theists have reasons for viewing God as omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good. (Indeed, classical theists maintain that God is the very ground of being itself, a being whose essence just is his existence). However, the positive conception remains relatively thin, as the mode of God’s power, knowledge, and goodness is radically transcendent from ours.
Perfect Being Theists—another prominent school of theistic thought—can sometimes come close to classical theists in their understanding of God, but not always. Their approach is different—more “top-down” or a priori as opposed to “bottom-up” or a posteriori—often beginning with a specific concept, such as the idea of a maximally great being or “that than which nothing greater can be conceived,” and then attempting to deduce divine attributes from there. I'm not particularly a fan of this approach, as it relies heavily on debatable (and often quite dubious) intuitions about great-making properties. Moreover, it frequently results in a conception of God as a being that is simply exceptionally high in certain degrees of power, knowledge, and so forth. By contrast, classical theists understand God not as differing from creatures merely in degree but in kind. For classical theists, God is not simply at the highest end of a spectrum; rather, God is the limit-case instance of power, knowledge, and other attributes—not merely a limit simpliciter.
There are other conceptions of God as well. Some theists are pantheists or panentheists, believing that God is the universe or that the universe is a part of God. In contrast, classical theists hold that the universe is created and sustained by God but is not actually a part of God. Then there are deists, whose view is distinguished primarily by God’s current relationship to the world: the deistic conception of God generally fits within a mechanistic philosophy of nature. In this view, God essentially "wound the clock" or set the first domino in motion, but does not play much, if any, role in the ongoing conservation of the world’s existence, nor in performing miracles or intervening in nature.
So far, these conceptions of God at least share this much in common: they affirm the real existence of some concrete, causally efficacious entity that, in some way, stands behind or at the foundation of everything. But of course, there are other conceptions of God that are quite different—radically revisionist, I would say. Sometimes, for example, people say that God is simply one’s ultimate commitment. So, if someone’s ultimate commitment is political—say, Bernie Sanders—then, for them, I suppose “God” is Bernie Sanders. Talk about anthropomorphism! Others have described God as merely a feeling or a state of mind, without existence in extra-mental, extra-linguistic reality. It should be clear that these conceptions of God are deeply in conflict; either God is a real being beyond my mind, or He isn’t.
Again, how these understandings of God are arrived at varies from person to person—some come through certain religious or spiritual practices, others through philosophical reasoning, and still others from pop culture, the internet, or an acid trip at a Ted Nugent concert. (Some methods may be more reliable than others.)
So, what to make of all this?
While people undoubtedly hold many different ideas about God, I don’t believe all of them are of equal intellectual worth—or, to put it directly, true. In fact, I think only one view is true, only one reflects the way reality actually is—and no surprise, I’m in the corner of classical theism. Why? Because I believe that’s where the best philosophical arguments lead, both classical and contemporary, as I attempt to show in my book The Best Argument for God.
Put another way, I think classical theism, as a worldview hypothesis, explains the most with the least; it maximizes explanatory comprehensiveness while minimizing costly theoretical and ontological commitments (see my book for more). In other words, I believe there are decisive reasons to conclude that God is definitely not Bernie Sanders, merely a feeling, or even just a concept—since part of what it traditionally means to be God is to be a se, or self-sufficient, and concepts depend on minds; they simply aren’t the right sort of thing to be God. Moreover, as the necessary condition for a mutable, contingent order filled with real natures and complex unities, I think there are strong, if not decisive, reasons for understanding God as non-contingent, ontologically simple, and transcendent of such categories.
So, that would be the intellectual side, but I think classical theism is compelling spiritually as well—but those reflects I’ll save for another time.
For now, let me highlight what I appreciate about Curt’s post and where I agree with him. While I think people clearly have definite enough ideas of God to clash—and while I believe that questions about God’s existence and, to some extent, nature are adjudicable through philosophical investigation (not that this is an easy or tidy process!)—I appreciate his spirit of ecumenism and dialogue. Though I’m not familiar with Curt’s work, my impression from his post is that he does not want our differences in beliefs about God to lead us to 1) hostility toward one another or 2) abandoning the idea of God altogether. To me, this is exactly the right attitude, and it’s something that should obviously extend far beyond debates on the existence or nature of God.
However, there is another position I find harmful: simple indifferentism. So, when we ask if we really need to agree on some understanding of God (or anything, for that matter)—setting aside, for now, issues of salvation, eschatology, etc.—I think there are some clear extremes to avoid: intolerance (silencing those who disagree), nihilism (giving up hope of finding truth), and indifferentism (not caring about disagreement at all). The sweet spot—the golden mean, if you will—seems to lie somewhere between these. It involves caring about disagreements, understanding that we disagree because we assume there is truth to be found, and recognizing that it is genuinely good to seek this truth and believe we can reach it. And we do this best, I think, through cooperative efforts.
After all, people hold wildly different ideas about many things—just consider the diversity of thought in political philosophy, moral philosophy, epistemology, and so on. I don’t think anyone would suggest that disagreement—even widespread disagreement among intelligent, well-educated people—should lead us to fight, to give up on making genuine intellectual progress (that is, finding the truth about things), or to stop caring altogether.5 Perhaps the difference between Curt and me, then, lies in my aim—or rather, my hope—that we can dispel vagueness overtime and, together, reach a more precise and refined understanding of the way the world actually is.
And just so we have a shared understanding of concept: When I say a person possesses a concept, I mean, to paraphrase Mortimer J. Adler, that they have acquired a disposition to recognize perceived objects as belonging to a certain kind, to understand what that kind of object is like, to identify various particulars as sharing that kind, and to distinguish them from other sensible particulars that differ in kind. Moreover, as Adler points out, “concepts are acquired dispositions to understand what certain kinds of objects are like both (a) when the objects, though perceptible, are not actually perceived, and (b) when they are not perceptible at all, as is the case with all the conceptual constructs we employ in physics, mathematics, and metaphysics.” Mortimer Adler, Ten Philosophical Mistakes, (Touchstone Reprint, 1997), 51.
I think Curt is onto something here: truth is indeed as “wide” as being or existence itself, since truth is simply being under the aspect of intelligibility—a classic scholastic notion!
For the sake of charity—or, really, to avoid a potential mobbing—I’ll make a distinction here between theistic personalists and neo-classical theists. Neo-classical theists might reject certain aspects of classical theism (such as divine eternality, which I think is a mistake) but generally steer clear of anthropomorphic portrayals of God.
Even if just non-physical parts—intellect and will, say.
Who am I kidding? Of course some will suggest this. Some do!