Naming and Describing and God

As I have mentioned a few times already, one of the important contributions of Naming and Necessity is that it makes the distinctions between semantics, metaphysics, and epistemology more apparent and easier to draw. Kripke definitely has some metaphysical and epistemological claims that he wants to defend by using the approach he recommends, but I think it is a mistake to think that Kripke is pulling a metaphysical or epistemological rabbit out of a semantic hat (I’m borrowing this analogy from Nathan Salmon, who thinks that is what Kripke is trying to do). What he is doing is separating these areas and then putting them all to work together. It’s the Descriptivist who confuses the areas, and in some cases may be the Descriptivist is right to do so. But in some areas, the Descriptivist is not right to do so and Kripke’s approach helps us to see that more clearly. 

Consider the term ‘God.’ If God is a name and thus a rigid designator, then the name ‘God’ refers to the same being in all possible worlds, just as ‘Nixon’ refers to that guy in all possible worlds. If Kripke is right, and if ‘God’ is a name, then it is wrong to think that the name ‘God’ is an abbreviated description in the Frege/Russell sense or in the Cluster Theory of Names sense. This implies that if your five-year-old kid uses the name ‘God’ and either associates that name with ‘the big man in the sky’ or ‘an invisible being’ or maybe even ‘my mommy and daddy’s boss,’ your kid is, in fact, referring to God. This helps to make sense of the following utterances by your kid as she matures.
“I used to think that God was the big man in the sky and my mom and dad’s boss but now I see that I was wrong. God is not really any one of those things, at least as I used to think of them. God is the creator of the world, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, …”
To make sense of the above, it seems that we have to interpret it using something like Kripke’s suggestions. It seems that the above statements assume that your kid used to think that God was such-and-such and no longer thinks those things. Your kid is not saying that she used to refer to nothing when she used the name ‘God.’ She seems to be saying that she referred to God and had a bunch of false descriptions of Him.  Since she inherited the name from you and you inherited it from so-and-so who inherited it from … all the way back to someone who met God or had an encountered God in some way (perhaps you did!) she can refer to him in the same way you refer to Aristotle when you use his name. If Muslims are members of that same community of reference-borrowers (persons whose use of a name ultimately traces back to some confrontation with the bearer of the name), then it seems that Muslims refer to God when they use the name ‘Allah.’ But, as we discussed in class, that’s an empirical question. So, Kripke’s account does not entail a particular outcome to the debate about whether Muslims and Christians worship the same God, but it does seem to help see how to go about resolving it, if‘ God’ is a name. 

But is ‘God’ a name? Peter Geach argues that it is not based on the fact that names do not get translated into other languages –they get transliterated or transcribed—and ‘God’ does get translated. So, ‘God’ is not a name. I am not quite sure how to argue that it definitely is a name other than performing some of the tests that Kripke gives, but for the sake of discussion let’s just suppose that it is not. Let’s suppose, in other words, that ‘God’ really is an abbreviated description. One issue then will be what, precisely, are the descriptions that the name ‘God’ abbreviates. And it is this issue, I think, that helps us see how a descriptive account of the term ‘God’ will resolve the debate about whether Muslims and Christians worship the same God. It will depend on how much overlap there actually is between the descriptions Christians associate with the term ‘God’ and the descriptions Muslims associate with the term ‘God, and how much weight is given to those overlaps. For example,  if both Christians and Muslims agree that God is an immaterial being and that was the extent of their agreement (the extent of their overlap), then, assuming that there are a decent amount of descriptions each religion associates with the name that does not overlap, it would be safe to say that Christians and Muslims do not refer to the same being when they use the term ‘God.’ But now suppose that each religion agrees with a bunch of descriptions and differs only over a few descriptions. Here we might be inclined to think that they do refer to the same being when they use the abbreviated description ‘God.’ But that is too fast. It could be that in the few areas where Christians and Muslims disagree a significant amount of weight is given to those descriptions, perhaps significant enough to imply that they do not refer to the same being when they use the term ‘God.’ 

Is Kripke committed to saying that the term ‘God’ is a name? Not at all. That’s going to depend on how the term is used in the language. One of the points of this post is simply to suggest that if ‘God’ is a name, then descriptivism may not be relevant to deciding whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God. If ‘God’ is not a name, then descriptivism probably is highly relevant to figuring out whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God. Either way, the philosophy of language seems quite relevant to an important issue in theology and religion. That’s pretty cool!

Comments

  1. UnknownSeptember 27, 2018 at 8:37 PM

    In reading the section about Kripke, I thought of an interesting question that may or may not be food for thought depending on if my logic is correct. Something that jumped out to me is the situation of a Muslim converting to Christianity. If a Muslim converted to Christianity, in his previous religion would he have been referring to nothing when speaking of God? Or would he have been referring to the Christian God but with more acceptance of false descriptions than true descriptions of God? I'm not really looking for a choice to be made between the two, but more of an opinion on whether this is something that can be logically discussed in a paper about whether Muslims, Christians and Jews worship the same God.

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    1. David AlexanderSeptember 29, 2018 at 11:41 AM

      This is a cool question to consider. Another related one is whether the Muslim convert to Christianity would think of himself or herself as now worshipping a different being. My guess, without any empirical data at all, is that some would think of themselves as now having a more accurate picture of God and some would think of themselves as now worshipping and talking about God for the first time.

      Analogy: Suppose Steve is married to Jan. Steve and Jan have been married for 10 years, have a couple of kids, and what appears to be a good marriage. Steve, it turns out, has another family in another state--wife, kids, house, etc. Jan learns of this. It is likely that Jan says the following to herself (and perhaps to Steve): I never knew him. The man I loved and married and had kids with, etc does not exist, never existed, is a fiction of my imagination. Of course, she talked to Steve often, hugged him often, thought about him often. But the real Steve is far different from the person Jan thought he was. Did Jan love Steve?

      And yes, your idea can be logically discussed in a paper.

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