Do Christians and Muslims Believe in the Same God? Francis Beckwith and the Kalam Cosmological Argument

Francis Beckwith mentions the Kalam Cosmological Argument in his latest The Catholic Thing article (7 January 2106):

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause of its existence.

Suppose that a Muslim and Christian come to believe that God exists on the basis of this Kalam argument and such ancillary philosophical arguments and considerations  as are necessary to establish that the cause of the universe is uncreated, transcendent of the universe, unchanging, etc.  The result is a conception of God achieved by reason  without the aid of divine revelation.  It is a conception common to the normative Muslim and the normative Christian.  Crucial  differences emerge when the core conception is fleshed out in competing ways by the competing (putative) revelations.  But if we stick with the core philosophical conception, then all should agree that there is important overlap as between the Christian and Muslim God conceptions.  The overlap is achieved by abstraction from the differences.

So far so good.

Beckwith then asks whether the Muslim and the Christian "believe in the same God" and he concludes that they do. 

Permit me a quibble.  'Believe in' connotes 'trust in, have faith in, rely upon the utterances of,' and so on. I believe in my wife:  I trust her, I am convinced of her fidelity. That goes well beyond believing that she exists.  If I believe in a person, it follows that I believe that the person exists.  But if I believe that a person exists, it does not follow that I believe in the person.  Professor Beckwith is of course aware of this distinction.

At best, then, what the Christian and the Muslim are brought to by the Kalam argument and supplementary considerations is not belief in God, but belief that God exists.  To be even more precise, the Kalam argument, at best, brings us to the belief that there exists a unique, transcendent, uncreated (etc.) cause of the beginning of the universe.  In other words, both Christian and Muslim are brought to the belief and perhaps even the knowledge that a certain definite description is satisfied.  The properties mentioned in this description are what constitute the shared philosophical understanding of 'God' by the Muslim and the Christian.  At best, philosophy brings us to knowledge of God by description, not a knowledge by acquaintance.  The common description is usefully thought of as a 'job description' inasmuch as God in brought in to do a certain explanatory job, that of explaining the beginning of the universe.  As my teacher J. N. Findlay once said, "God has his uses." 

But note that this common Christian-Muslim description  leaves undetermined many properties an existent God must possess.  (And it must be so given the finitude of our discursive, ectypal, intellects.)  But in reality, outside the mind and outside language, God, like everything else, is completely determinate, or complete, for short.  I am assuming the following existence entails completeness principle of general metaphysics (metaphysica generalis).

EX -->COMP:  Necessarily, for any existent x, and for any non-intentional property P, either x instantiates P or x instantiates the complement of P.

What the principle states is that every real item, everything that exists, satisfies the property version of the Law of Excluded Middle.  It rules out of reality incomplete objects.  For example, God in reality is either triune or non-triune.  He cannot be neither, any more than I can be neither a blogger nor not a blogger.  The definite description(s) by means of which we have knowledge by description of God, however, are NECESSARILY (due to the finitude of our intellects) such that there are properties of God in reality that these descriptions do not mention.  This is of course true of knowledge by description of everything.  Everything is such that no description manageable by a finite mind makes mention of all of the thing's properties, intrinsic and relational.

Now suppose that Christianity is true and that God in reality is triune.  Then the above common definite description is satisfied.  The common Muslim-Christian conception is instantiated -- but it is instantiated by the Christian God which of course must exist to instantiate it.

The Christian and the Muslim both believe that God (understood as the unique uncreated creator of the universe) exists.  That is: they believe that the common conception of God is instantiated, that the common definite description is satisfied.  They furthermore believe that the common conception is uniquely instantiated and that the common description is uniquely satisfied.  But they differ as to whether the instantiator/satisfier is the triune God or the non-triune God.

So we can answer our question as follows.  The question, recall, is: Do Christians and Muslims believe in the same God?

Muslims and Christians believe in the same God, as Beckwith claims, in the following precise sense: they believe that the same God exists, which is to say:  they believe that the common philosophical God concept is uniquely instantiated, instantiated by exactly one being.  Call this the anemic sense of believing in the same God.

But this is consistent with saying that Muslim and Christian do not believe in the same God in the following precise sense: they don't believe that the wholly determinate being in reality that instantiates the common philosophical God concept is the triune God who sent his only begotten Son, etc.  Call this the robust sense of believing in the same God.

Now we robustos will naturally go with the robust sense.  So, to give a plain answer: Christians and Muslims do not believe in the same God.  If Christianity is true, the Muslim God simply does not exist, and Muslims believe in an idol. 

The mistake that some are making here is to suppose that the shared Muslim-Christian philosophical understanding enscapsulated in the common concept suffices to show that in reality one and the same God is believed in, and successfully referred to, and non-idolatrously worshipped by both Muslims and Christians.  Not so!

The real (extramental, extralinguistic) existence of God cannot be identified with or reduced to the being instantiated of a concept that includes only some of the divine determinations (properties).  'Is instantiated' is a second-level predicate, but God exists in the first-level way.  Equivalently, God is not identical to an instance of one of our concepts. God is transcendent of all our concepts. So if we know by revelation that God is a Trinity, then we know that the Muslim God, the non-triune God, does not exist.

Alles klar?

Why Muslims and Christians Worship the Same God 

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Christians and Muslims: Exactly One God, so the Same God?

Perfect: 'You Ain't No Muslim' Guy Now Afraid Of Being Killed By Muslims

Comments

[Lydia McGrew]

In one sense I'm extremely pleased to see you taking a hard-line stance on this and openly calling the sense of "worshiping the same God" that Beckwith is using anemic, because it *is* anemic--far too anemic to be relevant to the important practical issues that turn on the question.

Let me, however, suggest a third sense of "worshiping the same God" which I think is more robust than the anemic sense but less restrictive than your robust sense. This would be what I'll call the historical sense. It would go something like this (wording can be tinkered with):

The orthodox adherents of two religions worship the same God in the historical sense just in case the same real deity actually carried out the definitional, foundational, historical acts that founded their religions.

This would mean that while in your robust sense (which is important) modern Jews and Christians don't worship the same God, in the historical sense, at least the orthodox modern Jews (who believe in a real God who gave the law at Sinai) and Christians do.

Some cousin of the historical sense might also underlie a statement that Arians (following a spin-off of historic Christianity) worship the same God as Trinitarian Christians.

It seems to me that the historical sense is not merely anemic, but it also is incomplete. That is to say, for a balanced view of the question one should supplement the historical sense with something more like your robust sense.

One further point: I have thought all along that the Thomistic notion of the unity of the transcendentals, which is *supposed* to be part of "classical theism" (as, e.g., Ed Feser has always taught it), should rule out the claim that Islam is a version of "classical theism." I think it's rather...shocking, and disappointing, that Beckwith and Feser are both so dismissive of the problem of extreme moral voluntarism and Islam. Feser has in his previous writings explicitly attributed an extreme form of voluntarism to Islam, and this would seem to mean that Allah is not good in the same sense of "good" that a classical theist would attribute to God. Certainly not if the thought of Aquinas on such matters of metaphysics is taken to be definitional of classical theism. Because on that view, the single, ultimate cause of the universe *must be* good in a sense that is not captured by extreme voluntarism. I think that this is a serious problem for Beckwith's and Feser's current position on the "same God" question, because they are putting all their eggs in the "classical theism" basket but now seem to be waffling on the perfect being theology that is supposed to be bound up with that, and waffling _specifically_in order to include Muslims as "classical theists." Frankly, I think that whether God must be good in a non-voluntarist sense is _much_ more important than whether God is "a person" or rather is "personal"--the latter being a distinction which Feser has *insisted* is *central* to rightly holding to classical theism. If "classical theism" is now going to be casually said to be compatible with extreme moral voluntarism, then, as Flannery O'Connor once said about a purely memorialist view of the Sacrament, the hell with it. As far as I'm concerned such an "ultimate being" might not even be worthy of worship.

[Bill Vallicella]

Thanks for the comments, Lydia.

>>The orthodox adherents of two religions worship the same God in the historical sense just in case the same real deity actually carried out the definitional, foundational, historical acts that founded their religions.

This would mean that while in your robust sense (which is important) modern Jews and Christians don't worship the same God, in the historical sense, at least the orthodox modern Jews (who believe in a real God who gave the law at Sinai) and Christians do.<<

This seems consistent with what I have been arguing. As I wrote in an earlier entry:

"A Christian could say this: The God of the ancient Jews and the God of the Christians is the same God; it is just that his attributes were more fully revealed in the Christian revelation. The Christian revelation augments and supersedes the Jewish revelation without contradicting it. [. . .] My knowledge of an object can be enriched over time without prejudice to its remaining numerically one and the same object."

If God is worshiped under a description that is silent on whether he is triune or not triune, that description could be included in a more specific description which specifies that he is triune.

It is interesting how Miroslav Volf and Ed Feser argue. They argue that if the God of the Jews and of the Christians is the same, then the God of the Christians and of the Muslims is the same. And then they make a modus ponens out of it.

You and I could just deny the conditional major.

[Bill Vallicella]

Lydia,

The rest of what you say is also quite penetrating. I hadn't thought of Islamic voluntarism as implying a denial of the unity of the transcendentals, but I think you are on to something.

For Thomas ens et bonum convertuntur: 'being' and 'good' are convertible or equivalent terms in the sense that, by metaphysical necessity, whatever is is good, and whatever is good is. To be is to be good. But Allah is one willful deity: what is good and evil depend on his whim. So Allah can't be identical to Goodness itself, as for T.A., whence it follows that Allah can't be the standard of Good. And the same goes for Truth; Allah cannot be Truth itself since in his omnipotent willfulness he can make the true false and the false true. He can make it false that *2 + 3 = 5.*

Truth and the Good must submit to the will of Allah or else be put to the sword!

And so you claim that Allah is not good in the same sense in which the God of classical theism is good. I think you are right about that. This supports our claim that the God of classical theism and the God of Islam cannot be the same.

But it may be a mistake to bracket perfect being theology together with classical theism. Barry Miller argues against doing so.

[Lydia McGrew]

I think the tricky part about the Jews, modern Jews, comes into play when we consider (say) some ardent Hasid whose ardor is directed partly towards being anti-Trinitarian. One can imagine (I don't want to sound flippant) such a man earnestly praying something like, "Oh Hashem, I thank Thee that Thou art not a trinity, as the blasphemous Christians claim, and that Thou canst never be incarnate as a man," etc. In other words, worshiping God explicitly _as_ non-triune. I think this supports the _sense_ in which (as you've suggested in other entries) such a person and we Christians do not worship the same God.

Obviously, Abraham and Isaac never prayed that way! The issue didn't arise.

But on the other hand, I think it wouldn't be dishonest for me if I were trying to witness to such a Hasid to say that I am talking to him about the God of his people--this on the basis of the historical facts that I believe to be true about the God of the ancient Jews.

It's obviously tricky precisely because of this "in one sense, yes, in another sense, no" issue. Indeed, I have met one ardent orthodox Jew (earlocks, etc.) who was positively _livid_ about messianic Jewish missionaries whom he considered to be deceptive.

The subject is of interest to me both because I've written about messianic prophecy and because I have an interest (though little experience) in missionary efforts to orthodox Jews.

[Lydia McGrew]

I think I would say that, at least when it comes to divine goodness, a lot of the interest (for me) of the whole concept of classical theism (in which I don't otherwise have much of a stake, to be honest) is that the unity of the transcendentals is supposed to rule out the possibility of an evil First Cause. This is an important part of the answer to Hume and others who have scoffed at natural theology arguments on the grounds that they allegedly give us such a "thin" theism.

Now, I've never really been able to wrap my mind around the arguments for the unity of the transcendentals in order to be _sure_ that an evil First Cause is impossible, but I've at least found it attractive.

At this point if the phrase "classical theism" is going to be watered down to the point that it doesn't even hold out that promise, then it becomes much less important, from my own perspective at least. And at that point to worry about such (relative) trivia as whether someone conceives of God as "a being" vs. "Being itself" or "a person" rather than "the personal ground of Being," etc., such as I have heard *much* about in the blogospheric debate with certain Thomists over intelligent design theory and its allegedly incredibly important conflicts with "the AT view" which is in *those* conversations (as I have understood them) equated with classical theism, seems to be straining at gnats after having swallowed a rather large camel.

[Elliott]

Bill: >> But in reality, outside the mind and outside language, God, like everything else, is completely determinate, or complete, for short. <<

Lydia: >> the problem of extreme moral voluntarism and Islam <<

These are key points to consider.

Just as it's important to solve the question of reference, I think it's important to deal with the nature of identity.

It seems there are two different interpretations of identity at work in the "same God" debate: absolute identity (the idea that identity is absolute, and is a real feature of mind-independent, objective reality) and relative identity (the idea that identity is relative to the way humans use language, but is not a feature of objective reality).

What follows from these interpretations? If identity is relative to language, then the "same God?" answer is arguably "yes." But if identity is absolute, then the "same God?" answer is arguably "no." The Christian God is triune, incarnate, and non-voluntarist. The Muslim God is non-triune, non-incarnate, and as Lydia noted, voluntarist.

So, if one can demonstrate the falsity of the claim that identity is relative, then it seems the answer is "no."

The argument would be something like:

If identity is relative to the human use of language, then the "same God?" answer is "yes." And if identity is absolute and objectively real, then the "same God?" answer is "no." But either identity is relative to language or identity is absolute/objective. And it's not relative. Thus, it's absolute/objective. So, the "same God?" answer is "no."

I don't mean to oversimplify the debate. I don't believe there's an easy solution. Solving the reference problem is tough. Identity is hard, too. But I think it's reasonable to hold that identity is absolute, not relative.

And it seems the causal theory of reference doesn't square with the absoluteness of identity.

[Thomas Beale]

Just a small question (from a very lapsed Catholic): is there any theological basis for not treating the triune nature of the Christian God as ontological, but in some sense an epistemological / explanatory artefact? I.e. as a 'way of understanding' God rather than a true description of God's reality (which we presume, despite the best efforts of the most enlightened souls, remains mysterious)? If so, the trinity would not be a definitionally differentiating characteristic, and one would presumably have to look elsewhere for real differences...

[Bill Vallicella]

Thomas Beale,

Interesting question. No orthodox Christian would think of the Trinity in this way. I think what would be said by Catholics and others is that while the dogmatic formulation remains residually mysterious, it does lay bare the reality of God in himself.

Contrast that with saying that the Trinity doctrine is but a necessary makeshift we need to make sense of God, but possibly not revelatory of the nature of God in himself.

[Bill Vallicella]

Elliot,

Relative identity theory, whose main proponent is Peter Geach, is just as objective as absolute identity theory. Or so I understand it to be.

The relativity is not to us or "the human use of language" but (on one version) to sortals that pick out natural kinds and sorts.

For example, The Father is the same god as the Son but not the same person as the Son. So the Father is not absolutely identical to the Son, which leads to well-know difficulties; the Father is the same as the Son relative to the sortal 'god' but not relative to the sortal 'person.'

But this is a very difficult topic and it is not clear how it might apply to the current dispute.

How would it go? M-god is the same causa prima as X-god but not the same deity?

Obscurum per obscurius.

[Bill Vallicella]

>>the unity of the transcendentals is supposed to rule out the possibility of an evil First Cause.<<

Lydia, who argues this out explicitly. Have some references for me?

As for whether God is a being among beings or Being itself strikes me as crucial and not like "straining at a gnat."

[Lydia McGrew]

No, I don't have references. I'm basing that statement on conversations I've had with Ed Feser which led me to understand that that was how he took it. It seems pretty straightforward as to _why_ it is supposed to be the case, given the concept: The First Cause must be self-existent. Self-existence is supposed to be tied to the fact that the first cause is "ultimate being" (or something like that). Being and good are (as you said) interconvertible. All the ultimate properties are, in fact, supposed to entail one another--if you have one, you have them all. So the First Cause must be not only self-existent but also absolute Reason, absolute Good, omnipotent, omniscient, etc.

On "being itself" vs. "a being," as the saying goes, your mileage may vary. Speaking for myself, I'm never entirely sure what is meant by the phrase "being itself" anyway. Of course God isn't just "a being *among* other beings." He transcends all created things. But I have never been able to see that it makes a huge difference whether, in talking about God, we start off a sentence by saying, "God is a being who..." or something like that. Maybe capitalize "Being" if one wants to indicate God's ultimacy. In any event, my reference to gnats and camels was meant to contrast being deeply concerned about that distinction (and even more, _very_ concerned that people are worshiping or teaching a "false god" if they speak of God as "a person" rather than "personal") while accepting that someone could be worshiping the true God via classical theism while worshiping a God who is "good" only in the etiolated sense of being a voluntarist deity.

To put it bluntly, it seems a lot more important to the "same God" question whether someone's God can declare torturing and raping little girls to be good tomorrow and make it so than whether or not its adherents think of God as "a person."

[London Ed]

Here is a shorter version of the comment I posted yesterday.

1. Your analysis depends on analysing ‘God’ as a Russellian definite description
2. a Russellian definite description is an indefinite description
3. an indefinite description is not a referring expression
4. But the name ‘God’ in ‘God is triune’ is a referring expression

Which of the premises is false?

[Elliott]

I agree that applying the RI theory to this dispute would be to try to explain the obscure with an idea that is even more obscure, if this is what you meant to say.

Apparently, there are some who hold that RI presupposes metaphysical anti-realism. Michael Rea makes this point in Relative Identity and the Doctrine of the Trinity.

"It is, of course, tempting to ask here what our individuation practices could possibly have to do with the identity of the things that we individuate. Why should the fact that we individuate things by way of sortal concepts go any distance toward showing that nothing is distinct from anything else absolutely and independently of our sortal concepts? The answer should be obvious: It does not go any distance toward showing this unless we presuppose a decidedly antirealist metaphysic." (p. 6)

"But what about the pure RI strategy? As I see it, the consequences of that strategy are catastrophic. The reason is that, as noted above, the doctrine of relative identity seems to presuppose an antirealist metaphysic." (p. 12)

"But if this is right, then identity is best construed as theory-relative." (13)

"Many philosophers are attracted to antirealism, but accepting it as part of a solution to the problem of the Trinity is disastrous. For clearly orthodoxy will not permit us to say that the very existence of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is a theory-dependent matter ... And yet it is hard to see how it could be otherwise if Geach’s theory of relative identity is true." (13)

[Elliott]

Sorry, I meant to post the link as well.

https://www3.nd.edu/~mrea/papers/Relative%20Identity%20and%20the%20Doctrine%20of%20the%20Trinity.pdf

[Bill Vallicella]

Ed,

A Russellian definite description as opposed to what?

Why is (2) true?

[London Ed]

>>A Russellian definite description as opposed to what?
A definite description by definition is one which qualifies the noun using the definite article ‘the’. An indefinite description qualifies using ‘a’. A Russellian definite description is one which analyses ‘the F’ into the indefinite description ‘an x that is uniquely F’.
Donnellan showed that some definite descriptions can’t be analysed in the Russellian way. If I am right, and there is a use of a definite description which refers back intralinguistically to some antecedent, then this use also cannot be analysed in the Russellian way either.
>> Why is (2) true?
If we define ‘indefinite description’ as an expression of the form ‘an F’, then it is an indefinite description. Let F be ‘thing that is uniquely F*’.
It all depends how you definte definiteness, I agree.

[Peter Lupu]

The Bill-Lydia thesis about "worshiping the same God" or "referring to the same God" expounded here and elsewhere maintains that

(i) the reference of names is fixed via descriptions;
(ii) the reference-fixing descriptions encode the true essential properties of God;
(iii) Christian revelation uniquely reveals the truth that the one and only true God is triune and incarnate.

The Bill-Lydia theses (i)-(iii) above incorporate several critical meta-themes:

(a) There is no distinction between a theory of reference-fixing of names (i., the semantics of names) and a theory of the world (read here theory of the deity);
(b) Christianity is the standard bearer of the nature of the deity.

The combination of (a) and (b) is audacious, far reaching, and embody some quite unpalatable consequences. I also believe that both are questionable.

Consider the term 'gold' and substitute it systematically in the above theses and meta-themes for 'God'. What do you get? Our current theory about metals is the standard bearer of what is the essence of metals. The essence of gold (according to current theory) is that it has the atomic number 79. The reference of the term 'gold' is determined via a reference-fixing description that must include the atomic number of gold. Any use of the term 'gold'; past, present, and future, not associated with such a description fails to refer to gold (refers to nothing). This conclusion of the Bill-Lydia thesis about gold is absurd. So what went wrong? I suggest that meta-theme (a) is certainly false as well as thesis (i) (and, therefore, most likely thesis (ii) as well).

Assume Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (the historical order of emergence) are three theories about the monotheistic deity. The three theories agree on some essential characteristics of God and differ on others. According to the Bill-Lydia thesis [(i)-(iii) plus (a) and (b)] above we get the following consequence:

(1) Christian Perspective: Only those who believe that God is triune and incarnate (plus some other characteristics) succeed to refer to God by the term 'God' and other cognate names.
Everyone else, including: Modern Jews, Muslims, Deists, Christians who find these two theses as a misguided historical invention by the Church Fathers without any Scriptural foundation, and Atheists refer to nothing with the word 'God' or cognate terms and many from the above list worship nothing.

(2) Jewish Perspective: God is essentially non-triune and non-incarnate. Therefore, only those who believe in a non-triune and non-incarnate God can refer to God using the term 'God', or cognate terms. In particular, all Christians who believe in a trinitarian and incarnate God refer to nothing and worship nothing.

(3) Muslim Perspective: God is essentially non-triune, non-incarnate, and Muhammad is God's messenger (prophet). Anyone who fails to believe these (plus some other essential characteristics) refers to nothing by the word 'God', and cognate words, and worships nothing.

Who worships God? Who refers to God? According to the Bill-Lydia conception, these question depend on the perspective one takes. Of course, since both believe that they know that Christianity is true, they both endorse (1). But, then, the Modern Jew and Muslim, etc., endorse their own perspective (2) or (3) or some other. Is there a way of avoiding this, and many other, unpalatable consequences? Short of giving up meta-theme (a) or (b) or both, I do not think so.

[Lydia McGrew]

I doubt that there is one "Bill-Lydia thesis."

But speaking for myself alone, the reason I treat Christianity as "the standard-bearer" concerning reality is that this entire argument is allegedly going on _amongst_ Christians, and the question is whether *we as Christians*, believing what we believe about reality given that we are Christians, should say that we and Muslims worship the same God. Perhaps an atheist would conclude that the entire discussion is based on an absurdity since _no_ God exists.

By the way, I have _explicitly_ argued in various threads on here that *in one sense* Christians and Jews worship the same God while *in another sense* they don't. This is related to my "historical" sense. I have explicitly _contrasted_ what the Christian should say about Muslims with what the Christian should say about Jews. I do not in any way claim to speak for Bill in that. They are my own perspectives. But your "Christian perspective" at most refers to _one_ sense concerning Jews.

Let me also add that my own view is that there are a variety of meanings of "refer" and also a variety of senses in which different people might be said to "refer to the same God." The trouble is that I don't think the Allah of Islam and the God of Christianity, as a pair, satisfy any of these senses that are not so incredibly thin as to be worthless for all important purposes.

As for atheists, the atheists I've read will usually use tags to describe which _putative_ God they are meaning to discuss. (One of my senses of "refer" is "talk about" or something like that, which could apply to fictional characters as well, which is presumably what atheists think all deities are.) An atheist may refer to "the god of the Old Testament" or "the Christian god" or what-not. He is capable of _talking about_ such putative deities as I am capable of talking about Santa Claus.

[Ed from London]

Lydia: >>As for atheists, the atheists I've read will usually use tags to describe which _putative_ God they are meaning to discuss. (One of my senses of "refer" is "talk about" or something like that, which could apply to fictional characters as well, which is presumably what atheists think all deities are.) An atheist may refer to "the god of the Old Testament" or "the Christian god" or what-not. He is capable of _talking about_ such putative deities as I am capable of talking about Santa Claus. <<
Quite. Except that no conventional theory of reference is explain to explain this kind of 'reference', i.e. talking about fictional characters. (Russellian) descriptive theories of reference went out with the ark. IMO all the criticisms that Kripke brought to bear against a descriptive analysis of proper names apply to the analysis of 'God'. But the alternative to a description theory, on the standard account, is a direct reference theory. But if direct reference theory is true, and 'God' is a logically proper name, then God exists. So we have the following weird proof of the existence of God:

1. 'God' is either a description or a logically proper name.
2. 'God' is not a description.
3. Therefore (1,2) 'God' is a logically proper name.
4. Every logically proper name has an existing referent.
5. (3,4) 'God' has an existing referent, i.e. God exists.

Obviously premiss (2) requires some justification. Try this: it is possible that God is not triune. I deny premiss (1), of course.

[Lydia McGrew]

Yes, well, I have little interest in a debate with you, LE, on whether Russellian theories are right or wrong.

My intent in the passage you quote was to refute Peter L.'s claim that on my view atheists cannot in any sense refer to God because they think God doesn't exist.

[Peter Lupu]

Lydia (if I may), sorry for the delay in my response: work related matters imposed their heavy shadow upon me.

1. I assume that both you and Bill accept the theses I stated above; in this sense there is at least this one agreed thesis.

2. While it is true that the subject of "worshiping the same God" burst into the public arena due to an incident in a Christian University and most disputants are perhaps Christian, the question itself goes beyond the confines of Christianity and, hence, concerns what anyone, regardless of their religious affiliation, should believe about the matter. Therefore, I take various positions on the matter as aiming at the truth, not merely this or that religiously affiliated truth.

3. "By the way, I have _explicitly_ argued in various threads on here that *in one sense* Christians and Jews worship the same God while *in another sense* they don't. This is related to my "historical" sense."

I am not sure I understand the distinction you are making between different "senses" of "worshiping or referring to the same God". Let us take a pair of typical believers , one Jew and the other Christian. Both proceed in their worship in more or less typical manner, respective to their religion: praying to God as instructed, following prescribed forms of behavior, etc. Do they worship and refer to the same God in their prayers, etc? An account of "worshiping or referring to the same God" needs to say whether they do or do not.

I have been arguing that a purely descriptivist account of reference, one I believe you hold, will be an inadequate account and that a certain mixture of a causal theory amended with "suitable" descriptivist content is preferable. Some details are worked out in the essay to which I linked earlier on this thread.

4. "my own view is that there are a variety of meanings of "refer" and also a variety of senses in which different people might be said to "refer to the same God.""

Again, I am not sure I understand a multiplicity of different senses of 'refer'. As Bill articulated in various posts and comments, we do have to distinguish between the "intention to refer to x" and "referring to x". [Side-note: this distinction pertains to speaker's reference only; I am not in full agreement with Bill's view that "only speakers refer; words do not refer." (a recollection-quotation). There is a further question as to whether occurrences of 'Allah' in the Qur'an refer and if so to what?] In any case, if this is the distinction you have in mind, then I certainly agree. But we still need to answer the question whether, and under what conditions, a Jew or a Muslim succeed in referring to the same God as a Christian, while holding the beliefs distinctive of their respective religions.

[Peter Lupu]

Ed,

Here is the problem. Every theory of reference has to deal with the so called reference to fictional entities at some point and no theory does so without problems (hence, Bill adds this one to his collection of unsolved philosophical problems). So this is a general problem and it is not immediately clear that the nature of the problem is the same as the one under discussion currently. While the problem of referring to fictional entities is that they do not exist, the problem of referring to God presupposes that a God does exist.

[Lydia McGrew]

PL, insofar as at least some important notions of reference have to do with reality (e.g., what entities the real world actually stocks), there is simply no getting around the fact that different people who believe different things about reality will draw different conclusions about whether or not some word successfully refers, where "refers" has to do with picking out some entity in the external world. For example, an atheist will think that, in the sense of picking out an entity in the real world, no believer successfully refers to his god. Just as I don't think that anyone successfully refers to a _real_ Santa Claus. And there will be other variants depending on what essential properties a given theist thinks are really instantiated in the true God. This is not to say that it's "all relative" and that everyone is right. Of course not. It is to say that I will give a different answer concerning what real entities there are in the world than either an atheist, a Muslim, or a non-Christian Jew (obviously), and that insofar as these differences influence the issue of successful reference to an entity in the real world, I will have different opinions. Others who disagree with me about these realities are as capable as I am of looking at matters and articulating the same _types_ of points. For example, an atheist is capable of saying that he doesn't think any of us successfully refer to a real entity, though of course he knows why I must disagree with him, given what I think about reality, and so forth. There is not a relative, "religiously affiliated truth," but it is _inevitable_ that there will be different views _about_ the Truth (the objective truth) precisely because there are different views about what deity really exists! In arguing about this, I have not been arguing *that* the Christian God exists and *that* Islam is false. Those are obviously big questions that have to be argued on their own terms. Obviously I think good arguments can be made to that effect, but comments on the reference question don't need to morph into full-scale Christian apologetics. But I've been telling my fellow Christians that, given what we think is true (really, objectively true) about what entities are stocked in the real world, we shouldn't say that Muslims and Christians worship the same God.

" Both proceed in their worship in more or less typical manner, respective to their religion: praying to God as instructed, following prescribed forms of behavior, etc. Do they worship and refer to the same God in their prayers, etc? An account of "worshiping or referring to the same God" needs to say whether they do or do not."

My comments above address this. You can re-read them. Insofar as the Jew is deliberately worshiping God *as* non-triune (e.g. "I worship thee, O God, as a non-triune God, different from what the Christians hold you to be") and the Christian worships God *as* triune, the answer is no. And the same mutatis mutandis for the incarnatiohn.

Insofar as it is historically _true_ that Yahweh, who chose the Jews for his own people and is the true God of the Jewish people, also sent Jesus, the eternal Son, to be Incarnate and to die for the sins of all mankind, we (assuming the Christian view of the history of revelation in the Old and New Covenants to be true) can say in this _historical_ sense that the Jew who worships the God of his people is worshiping "the same God" as the Christian God, though he does not realize this.

Hence, two senses, one with a "no" answer and one with a "yes" answer. That's something I sometimes have to do as a philosopher--answer a question in different ways depending on the sense in which one is using crucial terms in the question.

As I said above, the idea that there is a significant historical sense of "refers" would be that the orthodox adherents of two religions worship the same God *in this sense* just in case the same real God founded both of their religions. But it needs to be supplemented with the more "robust" sense, because otherwise we may ignore serious and important differences of theology concerning the nature of the God who founded the religions, which differences affect the concepts used in worship.