Interesting comments on my post about one God/different Gods. Musings:
1. I should think more about the role that theism plays in the definite-descriptions view. My intuition is that, should God exist, it would be easier to say that both Christian and Islamic thought refer to that Thing rather than to different things. My further intuition is that this is so because of the centrality of certain descriptions to the reference of the name, i.e., if we find out that there’s a Being who created the world, etc., but He is really tripartite, we’d say, yikes, turns out the Christians were right about the Being we worshipped rather than saying that we were worshipping a nonexistent entity. If atheism is true, it might be harder to secure shared reference because there’s no there, there.
2. I should expand on my opaque remark about error theory, in case anyone is interested. Let me tell you a story. Suppose you think that moral properties are part of the world independent of our judgment. RM Hare calls this view “descriptivism” (because moral claims describe), and he gives this neat argument against it.
Imagine a Christian missionary landing on a cannibal island. Both the missionary and the cannibal use “good” (or “right” or…) to evaluate and commend, but they have very different criteria for applying those terms. The descriptivist is forced to say that “good” (or whatever) means different things coming from Christian and Cannibal: when the Christian says it, it just means meek, mild, etc., and when the Cannibal says it it means fierce, scalp-taking, etc. So they don’t really disagree, according to the descriptivist story; they’re simply using different terms. But they do disagree. Hence, descriptivism is false.
For a long time this argument looked pretty convincing. Then Kripke’s “Naming and necessity” convinced a lot of people that proper names picked out individuals because of the causal ties between a name and what it names, and a little later Putnam and Burge and others extended this in various ways to, for example, natural kind terms. Descriptivists (under different names) took up the thought and ran with it: maybe Christian and Cannibal are talking about the same thing because their use of “good” is causally tied to the property goodness despite their differences in theory. If so, the Hare argument looks bad. (You don’t actually need a causal view of reference; you might also do the same work with a sophisticated descriptions view or in some other way. All you need is a way of putting some space between the real referent and what the speaker thinks.)
So how does that tie into error theory? Error theorists think there are no moral properties. Hence they can’t say that Christian and Cannibal (or any other speakers with big disagreements) are causally attached to the same property. If they want to preserve the intuition that moral speakers disagree with one another, they need an account of how these speakers are arguing about one thing rather than talking about different fictions. Harder to do! If I remember Olson’s talk right, he uses this sort of argument against one sort of error theory that says our discourse about morality is like our talk about fictions, and he claims that this doesn’t make sense of disagreement. A lot of the questions were along these lines: but we can argue about fictions even when there’s no canonical text! E.g., fights over fan fiction. And furthermore you might think there is a canonical text of sorts, namely, our cluster of agreed-upon intuitions about cases and principles.
7 comments
September 27, 2009 at 11:33 am
kyllaros
I didn’t get a chance to comment on your previous post, but here’s a number of things it made me think:
1) The pre-history of Islam only matters if you do the same for Judaism and Christianity. The God of Abraham in Judaism clearly originated from a cattle god – those practices persisted well into the period of writing the scriptures.
2) Both Christianity and Islam are “successionist” religions, that is, Christianity claims to succeed Judaism, and Islam claims to succeed Christianity and Judaism. To be more specific, Islam considers itself to contain everything true about Judaism and Christianity, plus the inclusion of some more true things. Christianity feels similarly about Judaism. Given the way this nesting works, mainstream jews, christians and muslims all feel like they are worshipping the same God, even if they disagree about some of the details.
3) The trinity is an ill-defined concept. As a Catholic, I hear about it quite often, but it’s never very well defined (it’s a “mystery”). On one level, it’s just about different functions of divinity. On a different level, it’s about actual internal structure to God. However, from a certain distance, it kind of doesn’t matter if God is trinitarian or not (as a handy metaphor for the distance thing: for a long time, protons were believed to be fundamental particles. At some point, with sufficiently high energy, we discovered that they had internal structure. This matters at high energies, but at low energies, we can effectively ignore this.)
September 27, 2009 at 12:27 pm
jvhillegas
3) The trinity is an ill-defined concept. As a Catholic, I hear about it quite often, but it’s never very well defined (it’s a “mystery”). On one level, it’s just about different functions of divinity. On a different level, it’s about actual internal structure to God.
As I recall from some reading a while back, on yet another level the trinity was a political expedient decided upon during the Council of Nicea in an attempt to differentiate the Christianity that became Catholicism from all the other variants of Christianity (Gnosticism, Arianism, etc.) that thereafter the Council deemed blasphemous. Perhaps this was a way to differentiate the Christian god from the Jewish god also, so Christians could at least claim to worship a different god? It’s essential to have a clear branding message in a market filled with parity products (i.e., unprovable claims about what-came-before and what-comes-after).
September 27, 2009 at 12:39 pm
Tim Silverman
But you need some kind of shared reference, to ensure that the god that doesn’t exist is the one you worship, rather than some other entity (or non-entity…).
September 27, 2009 at 2:20 pm
kyllaros
@jvhillegas:
The theology of the trinity definitely evolved out of the fight against alternative versions of Christianity (particularly Arianism and Gnosticism). The gospels kind of do a dance around the question of the divinity Jesus. Mark doesn’t really ever specifically say that Jesus=God, but by the time John comes around, that equivalence had become central. Once the Church decided that it was going for “both fully divine and fully human” (to combat Arianism in the first and Gnosticism in the second), the doctrine of the trinity was necessary (otherwise, the Church would have had to abandon monotheism).
I don’t think that the Church was really trying to distinguish the Christian God from the Jewish God. Although Christianity’s roots in Judaism were glossed over in the middle ages, you can’t really escape the fact that for Christians, the Jewish scriptures were fully incorporated into the Christian scriptures as the Old Testament. I think that the stance was always implicitly that Christians and Jews both worshiped the same god, just that Christians felt(feel) that they have a more full understanding. That’s the nature of a successionist religion. (see Buddhism’s relationship with Hinduism as another example)
September 28, 2009 at 1:21 am
Doctor Science
Speaking as a scholar of fanfiction, the question becomes, “when is God out-of-character?”
Judaism, Christianity, Islam — and Mormonism — are related the way different versions of the Arthurian legends are related. In what way is King Arthur “the same” when he appears in works by Chretien de Troyes, Mallory, Tennyson, Marion Zimmer Bradley, or the BBC? The name is the same, but is the character “the same”?
What makes all the variants on King Arthur “the same character” is the willingness of the fans — the writers and readers — to consider all the contradictory Arthurian material part of the same fandom, open to the same community. And in particular, it’s the willingness to look at, borrow, or react to (anti-borrow, you might say) details from each other that makes them all part of the same fandom.
From an outside or Doylist POV, God is “the same character” in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. LDS is a much trickier case, actually, because the character known as “God” in Mormon theology has very different qualities, personality, and properties of existence, yet “in-universe” or from a Watsonian POV the LDS “God” is what the Jewish and Christian “God” really was all along.
September 29, 2009 at 6:57 am
Ceri B.
This is me basking in the unexpected warmth of the Arthurian comparison, and the utility of fanfic insights. Good work.
October 1, 2009 at 12:03 pm
Chris
If they want to preserve the intuition that moral speakers disagree with one another, they need an account of how these speakers are arguing about one thing rather than talking about different fictions.
I don’t see why. All you really need is that both speakers *believe* that there is an objective moral reality and that they are talking about it. The fact (if it is a fact) that they are *actually* talking about different fictions doesn’t prevent them from disagreeing, as long as they don’t realize it (of course if they did realize it, they would abandon their argument and join hands in noncognitivism).
“There is a universal meaning of good and it is defined by moral system 1” and “there is a universal meaning of good and it is defined by moral system 2” actually are inconsistent positions. Disagreement between them is quite genuine. The noncognitivist just disagrees with *both* of them.
Imagine one Star Wars fan who has only seen the original version and one who has only seen the special edition arguing over whether Han or Greedo shot first. No Watsonian explanation can possibly resolve their argument because it results from a bald-faced retcon. But their disagreement does not prove (or require) the existence of an actual Han and Greedo which one of the versions of the movie was factually wrong about.
On second thought, in order for the analogy to work they have to not be fans and have a fan mentality. They have to be like the aliens in _Galaxy Quest_. They can’t adopt or even conceive of Doylism because they aren’t aware that what they are discussing is fictional at all. The noncognitivist corresponds to the person who believes that both of their “historical documents” are actually works of fiction and therefore their content disagreement is both unresolvable and unimportant. Even if he’s correct, that won’t stop the other two from arguing as long as they retain their own beliefs.