Abstract
In this article, I address some higher-order issues involving the concept of God that arise within a pluralistic context: the problem of conceptual unity, the problem of unicity of extension and the problem of homogeneity/heterogeneity. My proposal to solve these questions involves a special hybrid theory of concepts, called the theory of ideal concepts. I argue that when associated with a pluralistic vision of concepts, and formalized within a possible world structure, such theory provides a satisfactory answer to these problems. The formalization is based on a specific version of the Simplest Quantified Modal Logic (SQML), and its presentation is exclusively semantic, keeping technical details to a minimum.
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Notes
- 1.
To distinguish between the concept of God and the eventual object that falls under it, I refer to the latter using capital letters. Thus, while “God” means the (or a) concept of God, “GOD” means the entity which supposedly falls under the (or a) concept of God (although most of the time I will use the complex expression “concept of God”).
- 2.
Although EAM entails AM, the converse is not true.
- 3.
This appears very clearly, for example, in the Athanasian Creed. Out of its 44 theses, three of them state as follows: (1) “We worship GOD in Trinity and Trinity in Unity… Neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance.”; (2) “So the Father is GOD, the Son is GOD, and the Holy Spirit is GOD.”; (3) “And yet they are not three GODS, but one GOD.”
- 4.
He is the great Lord of all the worlds (5.29), the Supreme Divine Person (10.12), the God of the gods (10.14) and their origin (10.12, 11.38); no one is equal to or greater than Him (11.38). See Resnick (1995).
- 5.
See that PG does not necessarily conflict with AM. It might be that each one of these concepts of God has at most one instance.
- 6.
Locke seems to assume something very close to the classical theory when he gives an account of the concept of sun, for example: “[T]he Idea of the Sun, what is it, but an aggregate of those several simple Ideas, Bright, Hot, Roundish, having a constant regular motion, at a certain distance from us, and, perhaps, some other” (Locke, 1690/1975, 298–299). Plato’s use of what might be seen as the basic tenets of the classical theory can be found in the Euthyphro and Aristotle’s in the Categories.
- 7.
See Silvestre (2022) for a comprehensive account of the problems with the classical theory applied to the concept of God.
- 8.
- 9.
George Lakoff, for example, writes as follows (1987, 6): “Many categories are understood in terms of abstract ideal cases—which may be neither typical nor stereotypical. […] Naomi Quinn (personal communication) has observed, based on extensive research on American conceptions of marriage, that there are many kinds of ideal models for a marriage: successful marriages, good marriages, strong marriages, and so on. Successful marriages are those where the goals of the spouses are fulfilled. Good marriages are those where both partners find the marriage beneficial. Strong marriages are those likely to last.” The emphasis is mine.
- 10.
Commenting on this view of abstract objects, Gideon Rosen (2020) writes as follows: “It is widely maintained that causation, strictly speaking, is a relation among events or states of affairs. If we say that the rock—an object—caused the window to break, what we mean is that some event or state (or fact or condition) involving the rock caused the break. If the rock itself is a cause, it is a cause in some derivative sense. But this derivative sense has proved elusive. The rock’s hitting the window is an event in which the rock ‘participates’ in a certain way, and it is because the rock participates in events in this way that we credit the rock itself with causal efficacy. But what is it for an object to participate in an event? Suppose John is thinking about the Pythagorean Theorem and you ask him to say what’s on his mind. His response is an event—the utterance of a sentence; and one of its causes is the event of John’s thinking about the theorem. Does the Pythagorean Theorem ‘participate’ in this event? There is surely some sense in which it does. The event consists in John’s coming to stand in a certain relation to the theorem, just as the rock’s hitting the window consists in the rock’s coming to stand in a certain relation to the glass. But we do not credit the Pythagorean Theorem with causal efficacy simply because it participates in this sense in an event which is a cause. The challenge is therefore to characterize the distinctive manner of ‘participation in the causal order’ that distinguishes the concrete entities. This problem has received relatively little attention. There is no reason to believe that it cannot be solved. But in the absence of a solution, this standard version of the Way of Negation must be reckoned a work in progress.”
- 11.
See that m is a member of both categories.
- 12.
- 13.
See Silvestre (2021) for a full account – semantic as well as proof-theoretical – of this logical theory.
- 14.
See Schurz (2002).
- 15.
There is a third frame feature, which is pseudo-universality. Since the reason why I need pseudo-universal frames goes beyond the issues dealt with in this chapter, I will not explain it. For more on this, see Silvestre (2021).
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Silvestre, R.S. (2023). Religion Plurality and the Logic of the Concept of God. In: Vestrucci, A. (eds) Beyond Babel: Religion and Linguistic Pluralism. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 43. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42127-3_20
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