6 posts tagged “language”

The latest thing I’ve been thinking about a lot is slightly out of the realm of language and religion.  It has to do with the evolution of religious concepts within a particular religion.  Really, it’s not outside the realm of language.  Language is the vehicle by which totality of evolutionary changes in religious concepts is carried.  But that’s a different issue than I’ve been considering lately.  My recent focus has been on what the evolution of religious concepts means for the religion.

Let’s imagine for a moment that thousands of years ago a religion came into existence and we’ll also imagine that the religion’s God-concept was rather unique for its time.  (For this excursion, I’m not interested in the details of how the religion came into existence or how it came to spread.  I’ll talk about that more in the future.)  Let’s say that the God-concept is of a being, an entity that’s identified as male.  This entity shows distinctly human qualities of anger, vengefulness, jealousy, love, a desire for recognition and a willingness to reward for recognition or cause suffering for lack of recognition.  This God identifies itself with a particular and small group of people (it just so happens that it’s the people who came to believe in the God) and not with all the other people.  This God has no qualms killing (i.e., punishing) those who would threaten the small group of believers and will punish the group of believers for their sins by causing military attacks against them or starvation from the ruination of crops or suffering from plagues of disease. 

You may recognize this God as the God of the Old Testament, of the Torah.  It’s the God of Moses and Abraham; the God of the great flood and the exodus from Egypt; the God that caused the people of Israel to wander for 40 years in the desert because they hesitated in their belief that they could defeat the people who populated the land God told them they should take; the God that caused seven plagues to afflict thousands upon thousands of Egyptians who likely had never heard of the Israelites.  He was a God prone to acts of conspicuous intervention (bringing down the walls of Jericho) and non-intervention (the slaughter of all the people, men women and children, in Jericho).  A God with particularly small thoughts (the only way to control the people he populated the earth with was to kill them all in a great flood) done in a big way (you have to admit that raining for 40 days and nights with enough water to completely cover the Earth is pretty spectacular).  A God who didn’t hesitate to punish someone in an extremely severe manner for a relatively minor offense (turning Lot’s wife to a pillar of stone for the disobedience of looking back at Sodom’s destruction).  This was the beginning of the God Christians now worship.

My guess is that most Christians would argue that the God they worship today is not exactly the same God as the one described in the Old Testament.  (Actually, we’re probably all over the map here.  There are Christian sects that hold that the Bible, all of the Bible, is the infallible, divine word of God.  The evangelicals that believe the earth and the universe is no more than 6,000 years old based on a literal reading of the Old Testament might be one extreme.  The other extreme might be some new age interpretations of the stories in the Bible.  How we got to the point where there are so many interpretations of something that started at one point is very interesting and related to where we’re headed here, but not directly.  It’ll be another discussion.  For this discussion, we’ll avoid the extremes.  In fact, for the sake of argument, we’ll be Protestant, taking the position of the majority of Christians in the United States.  This by no means claims that Catholicism is an extreme.  In my mind, the extremes of Protestantism tend to define the extremes of Christianity.  But those aren’t the Protestants we’re going to be for this argument.  I’m not going to identify the position with any particular denomination, though I certainly believe the denominations are important.  And I don’t mean to say I’m taking the position of a “non-denominational Christian.”  I find that claim to be a rather ludicrous attempt to place themselves above the problems of various Protestant denominations.  What they don’t realize is that by believing that they’re ‘non-denominational,’ they’ve made themselves into a denomination.  I’ll have more to say about denominations in a later post.)  When asked why, they may respond with:

            “There have been events in the history of our religion that have served to more clearly define how we understand God.  In fact, the totality of the Old Testament with its writings from prophets and the reports of God’s actions show the growth in our understanding of God.  Ultimately, the teachings, life and death of Jesus gave us the greatest clarity on the nature of God.”

            “The more we learn about the world, the more we understand the nature of God.  The ancients understood very little of the world.”

            “The God of the Old Testament is unsophisticated because the people of the Old Testament were unsophisticated people.  We are much more adept at logical thinking and can see that some of the things the ancients believed are not possible in a being with the core nature that God must have.”

So, I have a few questions:

1.  How would you explain the difference in what you now believe is the nature of God and what the Old Testament says of the nature of God? 

2.  If, for example, someone believes in a God that intervenes and another person believes in a God that doesn’t intervene, do they not believe in two distinct Gods?

3.  If the God that Jesus believed in was the Jewish God (since Jesus was Jewish) and the God that we profess is our God today has different traits from the God that Jesus believed in based on the teachings of Jesus, do we not believe in a different God than Jesus?

Whatever responses I get will form the basis of the next post.  If I get no responses, I’ll use the ones above as representative.

Richard Dawkins idolizes Darwinian natural selection.  I think that’s fair to say.  Everything is a result of our innate motivation to survive as a species or is the result of a misfiring of genetic material.  Religion and belief in a God is, according to Dawkins, a mutation of a genetically engineered response.  At some point in our development as evolving beings, something misfired and God and religion is the result.  This grossly oversimplifies Dawkins’ argument, I know, but it will have to do for this discussion.

Something bothers me about the argument.  Initially, it makes sense to me.  It places us squarely in the middle of the rest of the natural world, no better or no worse than any other bit of complex carbon-based entity.  It’s where I think we belong.  Why should I believe that I’m any more important than any other living being on this planet?  Is it because I have complex thought processes that allow me to rationalize that since I can have thoughts of superiority, I must be superior?  Is it because over the millennium humans have developed a complex method of communication that allows them to convince those with similar methods of communication that a superior being has designated humans as the “recipients” of the natural world making it subservient to humans?  (I can’t help noting that this sort of argument, divine designation of humans as the preeminent being in the universe, is a pretty crafty way of arguing for our own survival.)  Is it because we’ve become particularly capable of manipulating the environment in ways that are beneficial to humans that makes us believe that the natural world must belong to us? 

But, Dawkins keeps going back to Darwinian natural selection as though it were, and I hesitate to say it but here goes, God.  It is the ultimate explanation for why everything is the way it is for all life on Earth.  Doesn’t anything that fits the bill as an “ultimate explanation” sound like God?  And therein lays my difficulty.  Dawkins seems to be no less dogmatic about his God—Darwinian natural selection—than the various religions are about their God(s).  It’s just that Dawkins’ God has some existence in scientifically proven phenomenon.  While I can’t claim to have scientific evidence to support my claims, it seems to me that Dawkins falls victim to the same sort of generalization error that our language seems to encourage.

The meaning of words seems to encourage us to believe that eventually, everything can be traced from singular, immutable facts or truths.  That’s what drove the philosophy of Bertrand Russell and the early Ludwig Wittgenstein.  At some point of linguistic analysis, we will ultimately point to what a word’s meaning refers to.  That’s how we think we learn language.  We point to an object, a fact, and name it.  It gives us the idea that everything is reducible to the facts to which they refer.  The natural inclination is to try to reduce these facts to a single, overarching theory that will explain them all.  For Dawkins, that inclination leads him to accept and postulate that Darwinian natural selection is the “law” behind all living beings even going so far as to explain deviations from the “law” as misfires in a flawed biological being.  It’s a tidy and convenient explanation supported by scientific evidence.

But, I find it a little too tidy to explain things like imagination, emotions, philosophy or other critical thinking endeavors, music, etc.  And I think the reason that it’s a little too tidy is because science, as well as religion, has been duped by the very language we created, to believe there’s an ultimate meaning, an ultimate explanation for why things are the way they are.  

What gets glossed over is that language and meaning changes with the user, culture and time.  All these changes impact and reflect our views of the world, including how we investigate and report phenomena with science. 

I've moved these posts from a different blog.  This will be my last for a couple weeks while I'm on vacation.

If there’s a concept of God being expressed by a particular religion that’s more correct than the concepts being expressed in other religions, why is that?  If the God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam is the same (the God of Abraham), how is it that Judaism, Christianity and Islam are so different to the extent that they invoke the name of God to help them prevail in battle against people of the same God?  What makes the believers of one religion so positive of the veracity of their religion that they hold believers of another religion based on the same God-concept in contempt?  Even within Christianity, how is it that belief in the same God-concept results in such a multitude of different factions?

As much as I’d like to believe that an analysis of the language surrounding the God-concept can explain what’s gone wrong, it’s far more complicated than that.  Environment, societal conflicts, emigration patterns, political intrigue, scientific sophistication all likely had impacts on the development of God-concepts.

The connection between various aspects of Zoroastrianism (a Persian religion founded in 1,500-2,000 BCE that’s recognized as the first documented monotheistic religion) and the God-concept of Abraham, the source of the God-concept in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, is widely documented.  Within Zoroastrianism are developed concepts of Heaven and Hell, Good and Evil, that are remarkably similar to those held by Old Testament Judaism.  Not to elevate Zoroastrianism too much, elements of later Zoroastrianism adopted tenets of Christianity.  The harshness of life in 16^th century Scotland likely had something to do with the preeminence of predestination in the early versions of Presbyterianism.  Would anyone seriously propose a creation story like that proposed in the book of Genesis knowing what we now know of geology, biology, astronomy and physics?  When Constantine I announced the toleration of Christianity assuring the demise of the Roman Gods did Christianity’s God-concept change at all?  As Christianity spread around the world, did the God-concept alter slightly due to cultural differences allowed by missionaries to ensure propagation of the religion?

Nevertheless, language, either spoken or written, is the vehicle for the propagation of the God-concept and religion.  Without it, the concept cannot spread, cannot be justified, cannot be canonized.  If the concept can’t be captured with language, how would we know what to worship?  Without language, the concept is meaningless and incapable of being as successful as it has been.  So, more than likely in we’ll find in the language used to transmit the God-concept its presumed justification or a reason to abandon it.

Let’s, for a moment, imagine an isolated culture.  A culture with a unique problem—they have no language.  (This is just an imaginary culture so don’t get bogged down in the details of why they have no language or how they could be a coherent culture if they didn’t have language.  They don’t, period.)  Perhaps they’re genetically incapable of speaking.  Perhaps they’re so isolated that the capacity to speak never evolved (oh, perish the thought) and so the need to develop a language, as we know it, never matured.   Whatever the reason (it’s not important for this excursion), this culture expresses itself solely through facial and bodily expressions and pointing to and showing what they’re referring to.

Given all that, can we imagine that they would have a God concept?  I think it would be highly unlikely.  If one of these poor sots does manage to conceive of a God, whatever he manages to postulate, without language to propagate the concept, it will likely die with him.   Without language to spread his concept, no matter how simple or complex, the best the person can hope for is a hug of sympathy for his/her frustration.

But, even without language, perhaps this isolated community could muster a God they could point to—an icon.  The icon could be put on a stone and the community could gather and show reverence in some way or another.  The reverence could easily be learned first by imitating, then adopting the presumed reverence of others.  So over time, the icon remains the same (except that the elements slowly soften the edges), but as the silent culture matures the form of showing reverence to the icon changes.  Perhaps it starts out as sitting quietly watching the icon.  Then it evolves to marching around the icon and further to dancing.  Perhaps they even develop an entire ritual learned by imitation that ends in a state of religious ecstasy. 

Here are some questions to consider about our silent community.  What’s the common factor in the community’s concept of God other than the icon?  Is it the method of showing reverence?  Lacking the language to explain the concept, wouldn’t the reverence for the icon be an entirely individual thing?  Can anyone in the community have the same concept of God that the original conceiver had?  How? 

Now, let’s say that a stranger shows up in the community and this stranger brings language and an expressible concept of God that’s obviously different from the apparent God of the silent community.  In the course of the stranger’s interactions with the community, members of the community begin to pick up the stranger’s language.  In doing so, they discover that everyone had different ideas of what their God, the icon, was.  Some still cling to their icon worship despite the fact that their understanding of it changes with the introduction of language.  As such, God changes slightly to allow different community member’s concepts to come closer together and they form a congregation of icon worshipers.  Others listen to the stranger expound on his concept of God and begin to convert to something approaching the stranger’s concept, limited, of course, by their meager language skills. 

At some point, the stranger departs the community leaving them to expand their use of language and refine their concept of God.  As the communities’ understanding and use of language becomes more sophisticated, they become spiritually fractured dividing into factions of icon worshipers whose concepts of what the icon represents are similar and factions of worshipers of the stranger’s concept of God divided by the words used to describe the adopted concept.

So, what is the difference between the stranger’s concept of God and the concept of God focused on the icon?  How do we know?  Let’s say the stranger is a Christian missionary.  For this community, what makes the validity of the stranger’s concept of God more tenable than the concept that formed around the icon?  If a mute stranger came to the community and started worshiping another concept of God represented in a different icon what would the difference be between that concept of God and the communities’ original concept?

I’m fascinated by the role of language and social evolution in the development of God concepts. 

I’ll return to my previous train of thought in a future entry, but today I’m obsessed with a slightly different but related question . . .

If I were to stop a handful of people on the street, or a representative sample of my office workers, or every other person leaving a Sunday church service what their concept of God is, would any of them be the same?  Would there be some kernel of meaning that would be common to them all that we could point to and say “There’s the essence of God?” 

I’ve heard it said many times that God is a personal God.  I believe it.  I believe that if I asked 20 people what they think God is, I’d get 20 different answers.  The differences may range from subtle (how God listens to prayers, for instance) to radical (whether God is active or passive in the events of the world).  Some may see God as the Trinity (Father, Son and Holy Ghost) and others may see the Son and Holy Ghost as adjunct deities.  Some may claim God to be an entity of some sort while others see God as the sum total of natural and physical law. 

This puts me in a bit of a quandary.  On the one hand, we have missionaries and ministers and proselytizers spanning the globe attempting to convince whoever they address to adopt their presentation of “God’s word” (and in some cases accompanying that adoption with vast amounts of tithes for massive churches and personal gain).  Would any of them agree on the concept of God?  Political parties are being bullied by a lobby of activist “Christians” promoting their “Christian” agenda.  Would their concepts of God all agree and, if not, wouldn’t it be interesting to see what the differences are?  There are Christians that don’t agree with the fundamentalist or evangelical ardor and believe in a separation of church and state.  Within this category, would they all agree on the concept of God?

My suspicion is that if you cared to get beyond the surface, or even on the surface in some cases, people’s concepts of God are about as varied as the number of fingerprints in the world.  The God of business owner on East Main is different in some way from the business owner on West Main, the history teacher’s concept is different from the English teacher’s, the minister at the United Presbyterian Church has a different concept from the elderly lady who has sat in the same pew for the last 60 years.  The concept of God would seem to be a very personal thing.

This raises an interesting question then:  Is there a core, immutable truth common to all believers that transcends personal differences? 

The believer’s answer to the question is “Of course there is.  The core, immutable truth is God.  The differences are interpretations.”  Well, that’s interesting.  For the sake of argument and clarity, let’s express this position in the following way:  person 1’s concept of God consists of S1, S2, S3, X1, X2, and X3.  Person 2’s concept is T1, T2, T3, X1, X2 and X3.  The X1, X2 and X3 that they have in common is the true nature of God.  So when was the last time anyone pinpointed what the Xs are and why isn’t that universally recognized as God?  If the Ss and Ts aren’t part of God, what are they?  If a person says that God is both the interpretation bits and the immutable bits who’s to be the referee and what gave them the right to discount the interpretation bits.

Perhaps our language is imprecise enough to allow this sort of concept variance to exist.  Perhaps underlying our language is an essence, an atomic particle, that each use of a word ultimately refers to.  But, that’s complex linguistic issue that philosophers have been arguing over for a long time and likely is of little concern to those who use the word “God.” 

The use of language, what words mean, and the concept of God seems inextricably linked.  I believe that looking closely at how we use the word, what we mean when we use it, is really all we have to work with when looking at the concept.  So, it’s in our language that God exists and that’s where we should go to explore the concept.

Someone please tell me what I’m missing. 

Let’s start with the second question first.  Is God a being?  What does being a “being” mean?  We’re using the word as a noun in this context.  Its meaning could be compared to its meaning in statements like “Man is a rational being” or “Some beings in the depths of the ocean are luminescent” or “It’s a myth that a unicorn is a real being.”  There are uses of the word “being” that are more complex.  Philosophers will talk about actuality or absolute existence.  But those are definitions that the average person of faith doesn’t have access to and so aren’t of interest at this point. 

(For the purposes of all these talks, I intend to employ language as it’s used by common users avoiding the technical uses and meanings associated with highly academic disciplines like philosophy.  After all, belief in God is not limited to an elite group of academicians.  It’s in the realm of the common man.  If it comes out that the academics own the nature of God’s existence and it’s different from what the common man believes the question then raises if the God of the common man is relevant.) 

So, for the sake of argument (and only for the sake of argument since the definition of “being” will shift slightly each time it’s used), lets say that a “being” is something (not making any presumptions on its value) that exists.  We can’t proclaim the nature of that existence.  Whether the existence entails thought, reasoning, physical properties, occupies space, etc., we can’t say.  We will assume that the existence can take whatever form is imaginable. 

What we can say, I believe, is that if something exists, it can be identified as separate from other things that exist.  Let’s start out with something simple.  To say something is a being seems to say that it has something that sets it apart from other things that exist.  Anything that’s indistinct from other things can’t be known to exist.  The mere fact that we give it a name that distinguishes it from other things makes it distinct in some way.  So, God, as a being, exists in some way distinct from other things we call beings just like man is a being distinct from the being we call unicorns.  We can identify God as existing separate from other things simply by looking at the way we talk about God.

If God exists in such a way that we can identify that he exists, there must be some measure of evidence that makes what we say meaningful.  There are luminescent beings that have been dredged up from the black depths of the ocean.  These are beings for which we have physical evidence.  This doesn’t seem to be the sort of being God is.  Not only do we not have physical evidence that we can point to and say “There’s God,” we don’t anticipate that we’ll ever have such evidence. 

There are mythical unicorns sprouting horns on their foreheads we can point to in writings or drawings.  They have an imagined physical form allowing us to distinguish them from horses, for instance, and ensuring we never lose sight of the fact that they’re fictional.  In fact, given the person talking about unicorns, their physical features and/or mythical powers can change yet they’re still identified as unicorns.  We’re getting closer with this class of being.  Some religious entities seem to hover nearby.  I’m thinking of angels and devils.  We’ve all seen depictions of angels and devils.  There are descriptions of them in the Bible.  However, the primary difference between unicorns and angels and devils is in the belief that the latter are not fictional. 

While we’re here, perhaps we should look at Jesus Christ, his mother Mary and the multitude of saints.  I’ll not argue against their existence in history.  So far as I’m concerned, they all walked this earth at some point.  But they, like other beings from other cultures, assumed a different state of being after their death.  They assumed a state of being that closely resembles but not quite on par with the state of being presumed for God.  Some may point to this proposition as proof that the state of being like that presumed for God exists.  But that proof assumes the very thing they’re trying to prove. 

This seems to bring us to the class of beings that would contain the likes of God.  This class of being would seem to entail factual existence (as opposed to fictional) and a total lack of experiential evidence to support the postulation of that existence.  The evidence often cited to support this class of being is inferential.  This class of being seems to rely on faith.  Supporters will point to acts of God—the creation, parting the seas, the flood, etc.—as evidence for God.  They’ll point to the miracles purported to Jesus or the saints as evidence of him belonging in this class of being.  They’ll point to the many apparitions of Mary as proof that she belongs in this class.  Yet, in all cases, the evidence pointed to is circumstantial, reliant on reports by ancient people whose understanding of the natural world was limited, reliant on the supposition that the reports in the Bible are beyond reproach.  In other words, taken on faith. 

Is this a real class of beings?  Why not?  That’s how we use the word in language.  A “being,” the existence of which is supported by faith, seems to have meaning for a vast majority of language users.  But, I would argue that while this use of “being” is meaningful, we’ve neglected the rationale for why.

More on that in the next entry.