I’m going to use predicate calculus to simplify and hopefully clarify what was the most important point of my previous post, “‘God’, concept-object distinction”.

“What God is in himself is totally incomprehensible and unknowable.”
- John of Damascus

A philosopher of logic could reasonably call Saint John an atheist for that remark, thanks to the two words “…in himself…”.  But we’ll sit that interesting point aside for now.

My main point was that the popular notion of “God” being some kind of abstract thing, doesn’t lend well to being called “God”, and that another term should be adopted to describe the concept of “God” in religion.

To clarify some of the rules of logic mentioned or hinted to in the previous post, I’m going to break down a few of my sentences into predicate calculus.  Here goes:

“What God is in himself is totally incomprehensible and unknowable.”
- John  of Damascus

Every complete sentence contains two parts: a subject and a predicate. The subject is what (or whom) the sentence is about, while the predicate tells something about the subject.

In the quote above, this is the subject:

“What God is in himself…”

And this is the predicate:

“…is totally incomprehensible and unknowable.”

Gotlobb Frege, a mathematician and philosopher popularized the notion of separating concepts from objects present in singular propositions, in the same way that subjects and predicates are separated.  Though his method for creating this distinction is highly controversial (in those circles), the usefulness of the distinction itself is invaluable.

By Frege’s rules, the object would be:

“What God is in himself…”

and the concept would be:

“…is totally incomprehensible and unknowable.”

A concept cannot be the subject of a singular proposition, it must be the predicate, according to Frege.

With me so far?  re-read if your not, because what’s next is very important.

“What God is in himself is totally incomprehensible and unknowable.”

In the quote above, the subject is “God”.  We’ll assign the subject with the variable x.  There are two premises in the predicate: “unknowable” and “incomprehensible”.  We’ll call “unknowable” “P” and “incomprehensible” “Q”.  Therefore:

x[Px + Qx]

Translation: For x, P and Q are true

Now, to illustrate the importance of concept-object distinction, I’ll write the sentence another way:

Unknowable and totally incomprehensible is what God is in himself.

Px + Qx[x]

Translation: x is true for P and Q

Now, it appears that “unknowable” and “incomprehensible” are the object of the sentence, and “God” is the concept (whoa!).  But looking closer, you’ll notice the phrase “…in himself…” after the word “God”.  That phrase is a device of language designed specifically to describe the object or subject in its actuality, independent of perception or an observer.  So this sentence is illogical due to a concept-object distinction error.  Take the “thing in itself” phrase out, and you end up having to explain that “unknowable” and “incomprehensible” are objects, to which I say “Good luck!”.

But to prove a point, lets try anyway.  Let’s treat what would normally be a concept as an object instead.

unknowable is God.

According to the above statement, the concept of “God” is referent to the object “unknowable”.  Well, that’s an obvious falsehood; the concept of “God” is certainly knowable!

Now, outside Frege’s rules, one might interpret the above statement like so:

God = everything that cannot be known.

But to interpret it in this way will lead you down a path of infinite redundancy (because you’ll spend so much effort trying to figure out how to define “unknowable”)

because you’ll spend so much effort trying to figure out how to define “unknowable”

Can you see the futility of the “God” concept yet?

Conclusion

Three points:

1. Labeling “God” as a concept and then dismissing attempts to define that concept because “God is unknowable” (well, crap…), is not only illogical (literally) but also counterproductive to thinking.

2. Attempting to define the concept of “God”, without considering the object of “God” is an example of what psychologists call “denial of cycle” (of the existence of the object “God”).  And it also happens to be the direction religion is heading toward, which is why I suggest a change of terminology.  Changing the terminology would end the cyclic denial and turn this abstraction of “God” into “studying morality” or “observing human behavior”.

3. Attempting to define the object of “God”, without considering the concept of “God” is fundamentalist.  To define an object without the use of concepts is logically fallacious (if not impossible), but ignoring logic for a moment:  Many fundamentalists try to do this (whether they realize it or not), and they end up with a slightly more quantified version of “God”.  The problem with a quantifiable “God” is not only the lack of logic but also the lack of evidence for it.

And the definition of “god” (not capitalized) from merriam-webster.com/dictionary:

1 : a being or object believed to have more than natural attributes and powers and to require human worship; specifically : one controlling a particular aspect or part of reality
2 : a person or thing of supreme value
3 : a powerful ruler

I want you to look at the definition of the capitalized word “God”, outside of the context of this post.  It’s…so conceptual!

*Note: if you haven’t noticed, I don’t want a quantified or object “God” nor do I want an abstract or conceptual “God”.

I’ve noticed a gradual change in how people define “God”.  It appears to me that, even among classical and radical believers, “God” is becoming much more abstract.  The social reasons for such abstraction in the definition of “God” are beyond my understanding, but I can suggest that linguistics explains empirically what this abstraction is.  From there, I will point out that the degree of abstraction of “God” is directly proportional to the declining usefulness of the term “God”.

Some examples of the abstraction of “God”, or to put it another way, the “liberal theology” of “God”:

“God is so great that the greatness precludes existence.”
- Raimundo Panikkar, The Silence of God: The Answer of the Buddha (1989)

“It is the final proof of God’s omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.”
- Fictional Character Reverend Mackeral, The Mackeral Plaza (1958)

“…God isn’t just a being like you or me or the microphone in front of me or even the atom, an unseen being that we can find in our laboratories.  What we mean by ‘God’, some theologians have said, is being itself; that its in everything that is around us and cannot be tied down to one single instance of being.”
- Karen Armstrong, NPR “Fresh Air” interview (2009)

“…The early Christians…didn’t believe in deities, they believed in the god of classical western theism who’s not an existent in the world of existent, not a thing in the world of things, but a grand goal of all existence, in who all exist.”
- Reverend Richard Harries

“What God is in himself is totally incomprehensible and unknowable.”
- John of Damascus

These opinions are similar to those of classical theologians like Thomas Aquinas, and its those views which I am arguing against.  The liberal/abstract view of “God” is extraordinarily malleable, which may explain its popularity.  After all, scientific evidence suggests that humans ascribe their own personal beliefs onto their own definition of “God” (and: “…reasoning about God’s beliefs activated many of the same regions that become active when people reasoned about their own beliefs…”).

Use-mention distinction

And now onto the linguistic nature of this trend toward a more abstract definition of “God”.  In linguistics, there is a rule to distinguish the use of a term from the mentioning of a term;  its called the use-mention distinction, and here’s how it works:

“Tom” has three letters.

Tom has three letters.

In the first sentence, I am describing the word “tom”.  In the second sentence I am describing how many messages tom has.  You can easily see that in the first sentence, I am mentioning the word “tom” and in the second sentence I am using the name “tom”.

The quotation marks are used to denote the mentioning of a term, so as to avoid confusion with the actual use of the term.  A use-mention error usually happens when the writer fails to make the distinction between the use of a word or phrase and the mentioning of it.  Perhaps the below sentence is an excerpt from a paper on grammatical treatment of names:

Jill has four letters and Tom has three letters, so together they have seven letters.

So who are these letters addressed to exactly?  Are Tom and Jill mail couriers?

Its easy to see where a use-mention error might confuse someone, especially when the context is not clear.  But use-mention distinction has applications not only in linguistics, but also in logic and argumentation.  In first-order predicate calculus for instance, use-mention errors usually result in two different propositions being logically equivalent, which can lead to an ambiguity within the informal presentation of a proposition.

The very same problem persists on a more obtuse scale with concepts.  Use-mention errors of this sort occur when an object is confused with a concept.  Gottlob Frege popularized the distinction between objects and concepts.  His rule was that “any sentence that expresses a singular proposition, consists of an expression that signifies an object together with a predicate that signifies a concept.”  So by this rule, a concept must be a predicate or else it is not a concept.  It follows that:

The concept horse is not a concept.

The above sentence is true in terms of Frege’s rule because “The concept horse…” is the subject of the sentence, therefore in cannot be the concept.  The concept in the above sentence is in the predicate, which is: “…is not a concept.”

Many philosophers disagree with Frege on this, but in hopes that you may understand Frege’s logic in this rule, here is a simpler example:

Socrates is a philosopher.

In the above sentence, the object is “Socrates” and the concept is “being a philosopher”.  Here you can see his reasoning behind the predicate concept a little easier. It is certainly reasonable to disagree with this rule, but its difficult to disagree with Frege’s reasoning for creating a distinction between concept and object, and I’ll take a point from philosopher Daniel Dennett to illustrate why:

The concept HORSE is not a horse!

You cannot saddle, ride or groom a concept of a horse, because a concept is not an object.  That being said, I can now relate all the above information with my original theme by saying this:

The concept “God” is not a god.

And yet so many theologians, church officials, and religious practitioners speak of the concept of “God” as if it is an object (just reread the above list of quotes).

That is a linguistic explanation of why there is this abstraction of “God”.

A small warning about theologians and opinionated people in general

Any time you wish to read an essay or a book or a paper about something supernatural or metaphysical in nature, watch out for use-mention errors. theologians thrive off use-mention errors (you’ll notice this if you pick up any of their books).  The same advice applies to situations in which you engage in debate with someone about similarly uncertain topics.

Usefulness of the term “God”

For this point, let me go back to one of the quotes from above:

“What God is in himself is totally incomprehensible and unknowable.”
- John  of Damascus

By this logic, the object “God” is being applied to the concept of being “incomprehensible and unknowable”.  Bearing that in mind, take a look at Karen Armstrongs definition of “God”, from an excerpt of her newest book A Case for God :

“…God is not a being at all. We really don’t understand what we mean when we say that he is good, wise or intelligent.”

Saint John’s definition of “God”, is by no incident, useless for all its futility and redundancy.  But it is at least a little bit more honest than Karen Armstrong’s definition, which seems to strip existence as a whole away from the object “God”.  As Biologist and Author Richard Dawkins puts it:

“If sophisticated theologians and post-modern relativists think they can rescue God from the redundancy scrap-heap by downplaying the importance of existence, they should think again.  Tell the congregation of a church or mosque that existence is to vulgar an attribute to fasten onto their God, and they will brand you an atheist.  They’ll be right.”

The term “God” is perhaps one of the least descriptive terms in all of religion, in particular the monotheistic religions.  Not only is there the common confusion between the concept “God” and the object “God”, but also the fact that every human being has a different definition of “God”, and then there is the degree of abstraction to consider.  You could map the degrees of abstraction of “God” on a spectrum:

My biggest charge against the abstraction of “God” is that those who hold this view tend not to know why they do, or for whatever reason, they are afraid to say that the object “God” does not exist (perhaps because they grew up with the tradition of religion).

Saint John applies the concept of “unknowable” to the object “God”.  But I’m curious if anyone would be willing to append to the object “unknown” the concepts of “will” or “intelligence”, that they so readily append to the object “God”.

I conclude this point with the suggestion that the word “God” is an inadequate descriptor for all the concepts that the object “God” seems to represent.  Find another term.

Conclusion

It can difficult sometimes to identify when someone is referencing a concept or an object in verbal conversation, so always ask for clarification if needed.  A good way to ensure clarity is to actually say “blah blah blah…the concept of blah.”  Or “blah blah blah…object of blah.”

Though that can make for some awkward sounding dialogue (kind of like this paper).

or rather, that’s what I’ve observed.

A good argument is based on a sound premise(s) and a proposition that reflects the premise presented.

I conclude X based on reasons A, B, and C.

If you want to argue a point, you need to make sure that reasons A, B, and C:

1. are logically sound

2. provide reasonable support for proposition X

If you’re premises strongly support your proposition, then you have a good argument.  Logic plays a huge role in successful argumentation, but many times, people forget to consider the strength of their premises before arriving at a conclusion, or sometimes, they don’t even consider a premise when arriving at a conclusion (i.e. insults/quarrels).

I would venture to say that the reason there is such tension between opposing views on issues such as abortion rights, illegal immigration, religion, Constitutional interpretation, or gun ownership, is because of a lack of reason and/or logic in the arguments.  I’m not saying that the middle ground in the soundest option in any of these issues, but rather, I’m saying that people tend to become “sticky” with their opinions, even in the face of sufficient evidence that disproves their position.  People apply emotional bias to their positions on many issues, and so they don’t research, or they don’t acknowledge that opposing views might not be entirely incorrect.

Some people are so entrenched in their beliefs that nearly every premise they make is logically flawed.

But everyone has argued without reason or logic, we are all very guilty of having fallacious premises and propositions.

Abortion is murder…
Obama is a socialist…
God created the universe…
My religion is the right one…
The Illuminati exist…
The September 11th attacks were an inside job…
Only stupid people support the Iranian “revolution”…
God cured X disease…
Free software is socialistic…
a stolen copy represents a lost sale…
Video games cause real-world violence…
Terrorism is a great threat…

and many more.  These are propositions, some are impractical, some are viable, some are unprovable, and many of them are weak.

A word of advice:  Don’t try to defend a moot point (Stupid people supporting “revolution”, for instance) and don’t try to prove something that is inherently unprovable (religion for instance).  Your argument will inevitably be weak, defeated, or serve only to inflame opposing opinions.

But If you hold a position on a viable issue, make sure the premises for your opinion are strong, and maintain an open mind when confronted with opposing views.  Make sure you have a strong counter-argument before you begin pointing out the flaws in the opposition.  If you aren’t careful, you may end up resorted to ad hominem or fallacious appeals to emotion, or authority, or fear, or beliefs.

A person is not stupid simply because they believe in something that you don’t.

A belief is not stupid simply because you don’t like the person who believes in it.

Ad hominem - “argument against the man”

Basically, ad hominem is the logical fallacy in which a persons claims are dismissed as false or incorrect because there is something objectionable about the person making the claims.

an example of a simple, and all-too-common ad hominem argument:

“Athiesm is bad.”

“Stalin was an athiest.”

“Therefore, Stalin is bad.”

Now, isn’t that a ridiculously unfair judgement?  The example above illustrates a humans natural inclination toward bias.  Bob might hold the belief that athiesm is bad, but if he applies that bias toward another persons claims, he is commiting a logical fallacy.  It’s inaccurate to claim that a person is bad if they are athiest.

I hate jews with a fiery passion.  Iran is a nice place to live.

Of course, I don’t hate jews, but if I did, and if you knew that I did, and if you found that objectionable, how would you interpret my claim that Iran is a nice place to live?

An ad hominem argument might be that Iran is not a nice place to live, because a Jew-hater claimed that.  To take that further, one might assume that my claim is indicative of sympathy for Mamoud Ahmaddinejad.

This fallacy exists all over the place.  But lets not assume that ad hominem should be completely avoided in all cases.  Certainly, in intellectual discourse, it needs to be avoided, but in legal discourse, it’s useful.  When a criminal suspect makes a claim, the reliability of that claim is automatically disputed (guilty until proven innocent? kind of) , and legal experts need to work to examine the claim and find evidence of it before judging it’s accuracy.

Next time a political debate happens, keep this fallacy in mind.  Watch Bill Orielly’s or Keith Olbermann’s show, with this fallacy in mind.  Find issues of high contention (abortion, scientology, athiesm vs. creationism, terrorism) and examine the popular arguments on both sides.  You’ll probably want to face-palm after an in depth look.

I’ve noticed, in extreme cases, people will literally begin to associate a persons thirst for knowledge as an elitist trait.  Or people will assume that if anyone doubts a certain claim or desires to be reasonable with a certain claim, they are stupid, or lost, or sinful, or wrong.

Some more information on ad hominem:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem