The Maturing of Monotheism

A Dialectical Path to its Truth

Garth Hallett

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781350175440
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350089372
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

Tracing a dialectical path, The Maturing of Monotheism emphasises the plausibility of Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and kindred forms of monotheism and responds to anti-theistic challenges of our day. These include materialism, determinism, the denial of objective value, the pervasiveness of evil, and predictions of human individual and collective extinction. The book reviews traditional metaphysical ways of arguing for monotheism but employs a cumulative, more experiential approach. While agnosticism affects humanity's most basic beliefs, Garth Hallett demonstrates that there remains ample room for rational, theistic faith.

Of keen interest to students and researchers alike, The Maturing of Monotheism offers new insights and approaches in this steadily advancing field.

1

Truth

The nature and importance of truth have long been obscured by the complexity of language, so notably exemplified by its truth-terms. Now, however, the shift in Western philosophical reflection, still incomplete, from the truth of thoughts to the truth of written or spoken statements as conceptually primary dictates a decisively different approach to the formulation and cognitive appraisal of theism. Rightly understood, everyday linguistic analogy can supplement and surpass alternatives—poetic evocation of the ineffable, mental imagery, models, figurative speech, loose linguistic pragmatism—as a normal, effective way of expressing transcendent truth.

Pervasively, fundamentally, and perhaps nowhere more notably than with regard to the question of God, truth matters. Yet such obscurity still enshrouds the ancient query “What is truth?” that some, abandoning the search, have concluded that calling a proposition true amounts merely to affirming it: “P is true” says no more than “P.” Hence, we are told, “truth is not, as often assumed, a deep concept and should not be given a pivotal role in philosophical theorizing.”¹ It is “a parochial topic, one about which only philosophy professors find it profitable to reflect.”² Such dismissals, and the sort of practice they reflect and widely foster, mark the antithetical stage in a dialectical development, with the moment now ripe for synthetic clarification. For truth, true, and their linguistic kin are far from vacuous, but their complexity and the consequent invisibility of their mode of operation continue to veil their significance. The index of many a work on knowledge, truth, and the like contains no reference to language. So this opening chapter, looking in this still much-slighted direction, will comment on truth’s well-concealed nature, on the multilayered manner of its concealment, and on how, once its nature is more clearly revealed, the truth regarding the existence and nature of God can and should be sought, identified, and communicated. These clarifications, carried further in Chapter 9, will be fundamental for all that follows. For truth, so elusive and debated yet so desired and sought, does indeed matter as greatly as multitudes, learned and unlearned, have long supposed.

A historical dialectic

In the Western philosophical tradition, mental, nonverbal truth was long and widely accorded representational primacy vis-à-vis verbal truth. For words do not relevantly resemble the realities they refer to, whereas nonverbal thoughts, it seemed clear, frequently do. The thinking of an influential representative, Thomas Aquinas, can here briefly illustrate this general point of view.

True judgments, Aquinas taught, typically reveal two levels of correspondence with reality. First, the individual concepts that judgments employ and that general terms express are mental likenesses (similitudines) of the essences of things.³ Thus, whereas, for example, the sense of sight forms likenesses of the various shades and intensities of white, the intellect forms a likeness of the essence common to all whites; whereas various senses form likenesses of human beings, the intellect forms a likeness of the essence common to all human beings; and so forth. These intellectual likenesses furnish components (subjects, objects, etc.) of affirmation and negation in judgments. What then distinguishes true judgments from false is a second level of correspondence, built on the first: true judgments join what reality joins (e.g., humanity and rationality) or disjoin what reality disjoins (e.g., humanity and omniscience). Without this further correspondence of thought and reality, there would not be truth in the primary sense of the term; and without correspondence at the underlying concept-by-concept level, there would be neither truth nor falsehood in that primary, mentalistic sense.

Such, quickly stated, was for Aquinas the usual configuration, but not in theological discourse. For God, he believed, shares no essence with us creatures. Thus such terms, for instance, as good and wise are not predicated univocally of God and of beings like ourselves, but analogically; when they are applied to us, their meaning differs, dramatically. Nonetheless, though God’s goodness and wisdom far transcend ours, Aquinas believed that the resemblance between the divine and created versions suffices to legitimate application of such terms to us creatures as well as to God. “Thus God is called wise,” he explains, “not simply because he begets wisdom but because, insofar as we are wise, we imitate to some extent the divine source of our wisdom.”⁴ W. H. Vanstone’s illustration nicely captures the basic balance of this long-popular position:

If the love of God is altogether different from human love, then it would be better to use for it the name of something from which it is not altogether different—the name of something within our experience to which it bears some likeness: and if there is nothing within our experience to which it bears some likeness, then we are speaking of a wholly unknown “something” of which it is unprofitable to speak.⁵

Still, problems remain. Aquinas speaks of resemblance “to some extent,” Vanstone of “some likeness.” So one wonders: plates resemble saucers to some extent but cannot truthfully be called saucers; bees resemble hornets to some extent but cannot truthfully be called hornets; and is not the difference between God and creatures far greater than any such discrepancies as these? Something was still seriously amiss in this account of Aquinas’s, as in others he proposed and in the more-than-millennial mentalistic tradition they represent. Hence much thinking about truth has swung in other, strongly antithetical directions. Anthony Kenny’s recent critique of Thomistic analogy can illustrate this broad reaction.⁶

Antithesis

Kenny has problems with two varieties of analogy stressed by Aquinas. By “analogy of attribution,” he points out, we can, for example, call a diet “healthy” because it leads to good health in those who adopt and follow it, but we cannot say truly of God whatever we can say of the things God causes or creates (for instance, that God is heavy, dark, spherical, or blue). Kenny illustrates “analogy of proportionality,” which is more complex, with the term good:

A good knife is a knife that is handy and sharp; a good strawberry is a strawberry that is soft and tasty. Clearly, goodness in knives is something quite different from goodness in strawberries; yet it does not seem to be a mere pun to call both knives and strawberries “good,” nor does one seem to be using a metaphor drawn from knives when one calls a particular batch of strawberries good.⁷

Similarly, but more metaphysically, one might suggest with Aquinas that, for example, talk about God’s goodness is made meaningful by the fact that God’s goodness relates to God’s essence as our goodness relates to our essence. Here, however, notes Kenny, “[t]he difficulty in applying this pattern of analogy in the case of God is that we have no idea what his essence is. Even those who have thought we had, in a fairly strong sense, a concept of God have fallen short of saying that we have any grasp of God’s essence.”⁸ So, turning from these traditional accounts, Kenny opts for a metaphorical alternative: as “He is a mouse,” “She is a tiger,” or “Don’t be such a dog in the manger” are merely “figurative,” so, too, are statements about God.

Here, for Kenny as for many, the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein may have proven influential. “According to him,” as Lorenz Puntel recounts, “religious expressions are ones that are understandable and interpretable only within the contexts of religious forms of life and religious language games. The chief consequence of this is that religious sentences that express religious convictions are not descriptive, i.e., do not express states of affairs or facts.”⁹ In a similar vein, Bob Becking recently writes, “I can only agree with Korpel and De Moor, when they state that all language about God has a metaphorical character . . . This view on religious language has become the dominant position in contemporary theology, philosophy of religion and biblical interpretation. There is no need to ponder on this point much further.”¹⁰ But there is. For where should we draw the line, and why? Should the theoretical writings of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Whitehead, and many others, ranging still more widely, be similarly reclassified as merely metaphorical? Should relativity theory, quantum mechanics, contemporary other-worlds speculation, far-reaching eschatological surmises, and the like be classified in this manner too?

Synthesis

Kenny, I first suggest by way of synthesis, is right to stress the radical shift, from the literal to the figurative, in linguistic examples such as those he cites. But he appears not to recognize how flexible, and in what way, the ordinary fact-stating, nonmetaphorical use of language needs to be and often legitimately is. When, for instance, scientists believed that atoms could not be split, then discovered that they could be, they naturally and reasonably concluded that atoms could be split, and not that there were not and never had been any atoms. In their defense I suggest that, despite the unforeseen atomic splitting, the word atom still satisfied the following rough “Principle of Relative Similarity” (PRS): a statement is true if, and only if, its use of terms (e.g., atom) resembles more closely the established (standard or stipulated) uses of terms than would the substitution of any rival, incompatible expression (e.g., molecule). By this reasonable, usage-reflecting norm (which I have discussed more fully in earlier works¹¹ and will here now briefly unpack, assess, and recommend) it was and is still true to say that atoms can be split. In sharp contrast, “He is a mouse” or “She is a tiger” does not come close to satisfying this PRS requirement. Taken nonfiguratively, in reference to a human being, both are obviously false; he is not a mouse, she is not a tiger.

Thus there are indeed limits; not everything goes: PRS analogy is tighter than mere metaphor. Regarding the latter David Brown writes that “liturgical theologians are quite right to play on the variety of possibilities inherent in Christianity’s classical metaphors: water not just as cleansing, for example, but also as destructive on the one hand and on the other as refreshing, reinvigorating, and renewing. The metaphor should rightly be allowed to put in play more than one meaning at any one time.”¹² Perhaps so, on some occasions for some purposes. But for theological purposes, PRS analogy permits a sharper focus. Theologians might, for instance, want to say more explicitly that grace is destructive of sin, on the one hand, and spiritually refreshing, reinvigorating, and renewing, on the other.

However, despite such tightening, without some further dotting of i’s the PRS, keyed to linguistic usage, may still appear too accommodating a test of truth. It may be objected, for example, that people used to say that the Sun goes around the Earth, but their saying it did not make it true. However, notice in reply that that single saying, however popular, did not constitute, nor did it agree with, English usage—specifically, with the familiar use of around in that language, on countless occasions, for countless configurations—or with how deviations from that pattern were typically received and assessed. For “going around” to agree with this vast, varied usage and be right, the subject and the object terms would have to be reversed (from “The Sun goes around the Earth” to “The Earth goes around the Sun”), as they eventually were when astronomers finally got things right.

Perhaps no oversight is more basic for human thinking generally than the widespread blurring, in countless ways, of the medium-message distinction thus illustrated.¹³ The medium (e.g., the English language) is neither true nor false; what we say with it is. Although no sharp borders are discernible or obligingly drawn for us, clearly delimiting one from the other—the medium from the message—or suggesting how fundamentally significant the distinction is, the difference is real, and important! As real as the comparable distinction between money and the endlessly varied things we can, wisely or unwisely, do with it.

The PRS may also elicit fears that here, with respect to God, “[t]ranscendence that fits our categories has been domesticated”:¹⁴ mystery is being tamed. But this concern, too, would be groundless, for the Principle is both sufficiently precise and sufficiently flexible: both precise enough to decide between atom and molecule and flexible enough to warrant talk of our “making” breakfast and God’s “making” the world (without any suggestion that God used a skillet!). To sum up, then: traditional essentialism was too tight; traditional analogy was too loose; and here, at last, in the PRS, is a happy mean. We can still speak meaningfully and truly about the transcendent, while recognizing its transcendence.

Although, as Chapter 9 will further indicate, this flexibility blurs conceptual borders, and thus hinders the formulation of theories that are both precise and true, in general it is, as just noted, a virtue not a vice. For the PRS’s wording aims to capture, suggestively but helpfully, the sense of true, its variants, and its near-equivalents in the languages to which they belong; and there in those languages, these terms, like most, are employed with desirable flexibility, as new circumstances and applications arise. The Principle formulates this flexibility, flexibly. If, for instance, we encounter some new insect or disease, we need not, before applying the term, carefully check for the presence there, too, of an essence...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Also available from Bloomsbury
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Truth
• 2 Theism
• 3 Diversity
• 4 Freedom
• 5 Goodness
• 6 Evil
• 7 Afterlife
• 8 Eternity
• 9 Focusing
• 10 Convergence
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Copyright Page