Try this experiment on a religious friend: Tell him you think you might believe in God. Then ask him to list the qualities that define God.
Before reading on, I thought “Creator of everything, understands everything, is in perfect harmony with morality, has revealed himself to the Jews and as Jesus, is triune.”
People seldom start religions by saying they’re God. They say they’re God’s messenger, or maybe God’s son. But not God. Then God would be this guy you saw stub his toe, and he’d end up like that guy in “The Man Who Would Be King.”
That’s what’s so special about Christianity—Jesus is God, not just his messenger or Son. The stubbed toe problem isn’t original, it comes up in the Gospels, where people say “How can this be God? We know his parents and brothers!”
PPE: I see you added a footnote about this; still, even in the OT God lets himself be argued with—that’s what the books of Job and Habakkuk are all about. Paul also makes lots of arguments and has a back and forth style in many books.
A belief in the God that is an empty category is wrong, but it’s misrepresenting religion (Judeo-Christian ones in particular) to say that all or even most or even a substantial minority of its adherents have that sort of belief.
But if for some reason you want to know what “human terminal values” are, and collect them into a set of non-contradictory values, ethics gets untenable, because your terminal values benefit alleles, not humans, and play zero-sum games, not games with benefits to trade or compromise.
Evolution isn’t perfect—the values we have aren’t the best strategies possible for an allele to reproduce itself, they’re only the best strategies that have appeared. This leaves room for a difference between the good of a person and the good of their genes. Thou art Godshatter is relevant here. Again, just because our human values serve the “values” of genes doesn’t mean that they are subject to them and are somehow turned “instrumental” because evolution was the reason why they developed.
Of the qualities you list, the last two—the specifically Christian ones—mean that if you really take this as defining “God” then you have to say that, e.g., Muslims do not believe in God (because they are very insistent that he is not triune) and nor do any monotheists who don’t come from the “Abrahamic” tradition. Of course you are at liberty to define “God” that way, but it doesn’t look to me like a great idea.
If we drop those (considering them as defining “Christianity” rather than “God”, or something), and also (in accordance with Phil’s stipulation, though I’m not sure it’s a fair one) throw out “is in perfect harmony with morality” on the grounds that Phil doesn’t like the term “perfect”, we’re left with “Creator of everything, understands everything”. I think “Fred” satisfies the first condition but not the second.
So I think Phil’s thought experiment is a bit broken. Maybe we can salvage it. Suppose now that our universe was indeed created by a graduate student in some other universe; his mental capacities far exceed ours and he does in fact understand everything that goes on in our universe. And let’s suppose our moral values were somehow implanted in us by this graduate student in accordance with his own.
Does the grad student now fit your first three criteria? If so, would you call him God?
(My guess: he doesn’t, because if there are universes other than ours then creating just our universe doesn’t for you count as the right sort of thing to be God. That seems reasonable, though I remark that e.g. the creation story in Genesis 1 seems to show God already having some raw material to work with before he gets started creating; you probably don’t want to say that whoever wrote Genesis 1 didn’t believe in God.)
The stubbed toe problem isn’t original, it comes up in the Gospels
What the onlookers are complaining at there isn’t that Jesus is claiming to be God. It’s that he’s claiming to have come down from heaven. It’s far from clear that Jesus actually claimed to be God—there are a couple of places in the gospels where he says things that can be taken that way, but they’re never fully explicit and there’s no guarantee that the authors of the gospels exactly reproduced what he said.
Paul also makes lots of arguments
He does. But so far as I can recall, he always seemed pretty certain he was correct. There’s that one time where he takes care to qualify two things he says as (1) “not I, but the Lord” and (2) “I, not the Lord”, so clearly he admits his own fallibility in principle, but is there any instance where he admits having taught something wrong or says in so many words that something he’s teaching might be wrong?
I do think what Phil says about “God as the ultimate uncategory” is … less than perfectly fair. (I also think Phil is being less than perfectly clear about the distinction between “category C is defined negatively” and “category C is defined negatively to make it immune from criticism”.) But I do also think he has a point: religious doctrines tend to be unfalsifiable, when evidence does come along they get reinterpreted more often than jettisoned, etc.
(In fact, the best example known to me of the sort of process I think Phil is describing comes from the early days of Christianity, when the idea of the Trinity was being worked out. What they ended up with was a situation where basically anything at all definite and comprehensible you might say about the Trinity has at one time or another been officially declared heretical. So you have a doctrine you’re required to believe but forbidden to make sense of.)
Before reading on, I thought “Creator of everything, understands everything, is in perfect harmony with morality, has revealed himself to the Jews and as Jesus, is triune.”
That’s what’s so special about Christianity—Jesus is God, not just his messenger or Son. The stubbed toe problem isn’t original, it comes up in the Gospels, where people say “How can this be God? We know his parents and brothers!”
PPE: I see you added a footnote about this; still, even in the OT God lets himself be argued with—that’s what the books of Job and Habakkuk are all about. Paul also makes lots of arguments and has a back and forth style in many books.
A belief in the God that is an empty category is wrong, but it’s misrepresenting religion (Judeo-Christian ones in particular) to say that all or even most or even a substantial minority of its adherents have that sort of belief.
Evolution isn’t perfect—the values we have aren’t the best strategies possible for an allele to reproduce itself, they’re only the best strategies that have appeared. This leaves room for a difference between the good of a person and the good of their genes. Thou art Godshatter is relevant here. Again, just because our human values serve the “values” of genes doesn’t mean that they are subject to them and are somehow turned “instrumental” because evolution was the reason why they developed.
Of the qualities you list, the last two—the specifically Christian ones—mean that if you really take this as defining “God” then you have to say that, e.g., Muslims do not believe in God (because they are very insistent that he is not triune) and nor do any monotheists who don’t come from the “Abrahamic” tradition. Of course you are at liberty to define “God” that way, but it doesn’t look to me like a great idea.
If we drop those (considering them as defining “Christianity” rather than “God”, or something), and also (in accordance with Phil’s stipulation, though I’m not sure it’s a fair one) throw out “is in perfect harmony with morality” on the grounds that Phil doesn’t like the term “perfect”, we’re left with “Creator of everything, understands everything”. I think “Fred” satisfies the first condition but not the second.
So I think Phil’s thought experiment is a bit broken. Maybe we can salvage it. Suppose now that our universe was indeed created by a graduate student in some other universe; his mental capacities far exceed ours and he does in fact understand everything that goes on in our universe. And let’s suppose our moral values were somehow implanted in us by this graduate student in accordance with his own.
Does the grad student now fit your first three criteria? If so, would you call him God?
(My guess: he doesn’t, because if there are universes other than ours then creating just our universe doesn’t for you count as the right sort of thing to be God. That seems reasonable, though I remark that e.g. the creation story in Genesis 1 seems to show God already having some raw material to work with before he gets started creating; you probably don’t want to say that whoever wrote Genesis 1 didn’t believe in God.)
What the onlookers are complaining at there isn’t that Jesus is claiming to be God. It’s that he’s claiming to have come down from heaven. It’s far from clear that Jesus actually claimed to be God—there are a couple of places in the gospels where he says things that can be taken that way, but they’re never fully explicit and there’s no guarantee that the authors of the gospels exactly reproduced what he said.
He does. But so far as I can recall, he always seemed pretty certain he was correct. There’s that one time where he takes care to qualify two things he says as (1) “not I, but the Lord” and (2) “I, not the Lord”, so clearly he admits his own fallibility in principle, but is there any instance where he admits having taught something wrong or says in so many words that something he’s teaching might be wrong?
I do think what Phil says about “God as the ultimate uncategory” is … less than perfectly fair. (I also think Phil is being less than perfectly clear about the distinction between “category C is defined negatively” and “category C is defined negatively to make it immune from criticism”.) But I do also think he has a point: religious doctrines tend to be unfalsifiable, when evidence does come along they get reinterpreted more often than jettisoned, etc.
(In fact, the best example known to me of the sort of process I think Phil is describing comes from the early days of Christianity, when the idea of the Trinity was being worked out. What they ended up with was a situation where basically anything at all definite and comprehensible you might say about the Trinity has at one time or another been officially declared heretical. So you have a doctrine you’re required to believe but forbidden to make sense of.)