Discussing the Idea of a God

What do we mean by the word God? Ask a random hundred Americans. About sixty will believe in a personal god, 25 will believe in an impersonal force, seven won’t know which, and eight won’t believe in either.

Then ask a random hundred Europeans, and it gets even more ambiguous.

Only about forty will believe in a personal god, up to 33 will believe in a spirit or life force, fifteen won’t know which, and twelve will believe there is neither.

These figures are based on research by the Pew Forum and World Values Surveys. But the exact figures are not important. My point is that we cannot assume that the phrase “I believe in God” means anything like the same thing to each person who says it.

Same labels, different ideas

So what might “a personal god” be? Is it a god who is also a person, or a god who is in some way personal to you? Are the different variations of “god as an impersonal force” just attaching the label “god” to completely different ideas? Can we discuss these other ideas more effectively by removing the label “god” from them?

To complicate things further, many people also attach different meanings to other related words: belief, certainty, doubt, faith, truth, knowledge, evidence, proof, religion, theist, deist, atheist, agnostic, good, bad, evil, right and wrong. What do each of these words mean? Again, it depends.

As a unit of language, each word has at least three types of meaning: (a) its common meaning in general public discourse, which evolves over time and is recorded in reputable dictionaries; (b) one or more specialised meanings that people agree to use in fields like philosophy or in private groups; and (c) any number of contextual nuances of any of these meanings.

Then we each filter these meanings through at least three personal screens: (d) the meaning we each prefer to attach to the word, and how important that meaning is to us; (e) the meaning we each intend to convey when we use the word; and (f) the meaning that we each receive when we hear or read the word.

Discussing the idea of a God

In ordinary conversation, most of us assume the default meaning of a word to be some variation of its common meaning as used in general public discourse. But when we discuss the idea of a god, or many related ideas, we cannot make this assumption.

So we should agree to either clarify our respective definitions, or ideally use shared definitions, and then move on to discussing the ideas behind the labels. Otherwise, many crucial words will be reduced to meaning, for each of us, only “this-word-as-I-personally-define-the-word”.

Then we will each seem to agree with propositions that we reject as false, we will each waste our time disputing propositions that we accept as true, and we will never reach the stage of discussing what we actually mean.

Sources

The Pew Forum Religious Landscape Survey was conducted in 2007, in the continental United States, by Princeton Survey Research Associates International, on behalf of the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. The results are based on interviews in English and Spanish with 35,556 Americans aged 18 and older.

The World Values Surveys were conducted in four waves from 1990 to 2005, in over eighty countries spanning all six inhabited continents, by a network of social scientists at leading universities around the world. The question on personal god versus spirit or life force was asked of 27,622 people in thirty European countries between 1999 and 2005.

Image: Pantheon of Gods by Grizzli (cc)

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