Bill Vallicella links to an interesting discussion at the political blog, The Buck Stops Here, regarding whether God is a rigid designator. What is a rigid designator? It is a notion from Kripke wherein a name picks out the same "thing" in all possible worlds. It is a way of denoting something essential even though there may be various accidents about this thing. I'll avoid the metaphysics of such a notion (check the link) and proceed right to the argument.
Basically this is relevant to Mormons given the way Evangelicals in particular sometimes attack Mormons for "worshipping a different Jesus." Of course this rhetoric annoys Mormons to no end since we feel that we are referring to the same entity, merely that our other Christian friends have some mistaken notions about God. We're perfectly willing to accept that they think we have some incorrect notions from their perspective - but the idea that we worship an entirely different entity seems quite offensive.
I should add that the philosopher-friendly version of this argument is probably best exemplified by Francis Beckwith in "Philosophical Problems with the Mormon Concept of God." Blake Ostler reviewed a book length treatment of this issue by Beckwith a few years back, in case you are curious. There are various other responses to some of Beckwith's other arguments as well. But I don't really want to focus on these issues, but the underlying issue of reference.
Now Bill links to an earlier post of his, concerning whether Muslims, Jews and Christians really worship the same being. Of course this is the same argument that Mormons face, albeit oriented towards a different group. But I think the logic is pretty much the same.
The underlying issue is linguistic reference. (I'd suggest that linguistic reference without considering pragmatics is problematic - but we'll ignore that for the time being) The debate is between Russell's theory of description and Kripke's rigid designators. The Russell view is that we have a set of descriptions that pick out a variety of objects that match the descriptions. (Possibly only one) For God this would thus be the set of descriptions for God in any particular linguistic community. Clearly under the Russell view, Jews, Muslims and Christians worship different Gods since they hold to different descriptions. Within Christianity, Mormons, Eastern Orthodox and Evangelicals would also all worship a different God.
If we adopt Kripke, then God is a proper name which designates the same entity in all worlds. Now Bill doesn't really go through the implications of this. Blake Ostler, in his book, touches upon some of the implications of considering God a name. Of course there is then the problem of what kind of name it is. With Kripke, as I understand him, the rigid designator picks out a single entity. Thus it wouldn't work with a name-title like President of the United States. Ostler, in a move similar to Cornelius Plantinga's social trinitarianism, suggests that God is a name-title designating a collection of individuals with certain properties.
Now if we follow Blake, then we are forced, I think, away from Kripke and back towards something like Russell. What happens though, is we are forced to say that the descriptions that count aren't the descriptions of dogma but the descriptions of some basic processes. We might say the following:
Muslims, Christians and Jews all pray to a being they designate God
We then follow Russell, only we limit the descriptions to acts by humans. It is then the intentions of these acts that count. This lets us avoid the problem of saying that because two communities differ in doctrine that they somehow are referring to a different being - otherwise we logically end up with a situation where not only do the main theistic religions worship different Gods, even different congregations within the same religion worship different Gods.
Of course the alternative approach, and the one favored by Evangelical Mormon critics, is to designate certain descriptions as essential and other ones unessential. Thus an Evangelical philosopher may disagree with an Eastern Orthodox priest over the descriptions of God's nature, but agree on the earlier creeds they both feel define essential attributes of God. However clearly in these cases essential isn't meant in a metaphysical sense, but more in the sense of what constitutes a member of a particular community. It does nothing to determine if we are, in fact, worshipping different beings as opposed to merely having mistaken ideas about that being.
For instance I doubt the Evangelical critic would suggest that a child with no understanding of theology, praying to God, isn't praying to the right being. Yet that would seem to be entailed by tying intention to these descriptions. We don't want to say, for instance, that someone who prays everyday suddenly starts praying to a different being simply because they are convinced upon some point of doctrine about God. Do we?
I think the approach I outlined above, that we ought to consider the God we worship from the point of view of the believed interactions with the community rather than metaphysical properties, is the best solution. It recognizes the place of descriptions but avoids what I think is a too metaphysical approach by appealing to Kripke.
Interesting post, and discussion. There's actually a lot of research on God-concepts in cognitive science, and the most interesting finding is that in most cases, peoples' concepts of God seems to deviate a great deal from their stated theological beliefs. Only when people explicitly consider those theological beliefs while using God-concepts, do their uses accord with their stated theological beliefs. Furthermore, as with all other concepts, there seems to be a great deal of intrasubject variability in the make up of peoples' God (and other religious) concepts. What this implies to me is that if people take seriously their descriptionist, or definitional theories of reference when it comes to God-concepts, then their own concepts fail to refer to God more often than not. The implications of God as a rigid designator wouldn't fit with peoples' beliefs about God either. So, I think you advocate the right approach. God-concepts are socially and contextually mediated, and any sort of strict correspondence theory of meaning just isn't going to work.
That is very interesting Chris. I didn't know that had been established, although it is a phenomena I've long recognized. When acting as a Mormon missionary way back as a 19 year old, I found that most of the people I encountered talked about God in ways more in line of how I thought about him rather than in terms of the theology their churches espoused. Part of that is undoubtedly the problem of figuring out Trinitarian doctrines, which is hard to grasp even with a background in philosophy. So regular people tend to over simplify. I think the other phenomena is that people in their relating, instinctively think in terms of every day relating. i.e. prayer is naturally conceived in the form of talking to an other human being.
None of this necessarily impacts theology and what is correct. After all how regular people talk about physical phenomena follows the same pattern -- thus the difficulty in physics when people find out the universe doesn't actually work the way we are used to. Having had to teach physics to lots of freshmen before, I recognize how problematic that can be.
But by the same token, we don't want to say that the person who talks about tables prior to studying quantum mechanics is somehow now talking about a different table. They are speaking about the same table but have different ideas about it. Yet the rigid designator fails, because it can't deal with this fact, given it reliance on picking out the same entity in all possible worlds. (After all the table doesn't even exist in all possible worlds)
This distinction also opens up the obvious charges by naturalistic critics that religious beliefs are just misplaced interpretations of phenomena in terms of everydayness. The Skeptical Inquirer had an interesting article along those lines that I discussed a few months back.
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