What Do We Mean by “God”?

The Ineffable God

“god — a superhuman person regarded as having power over nature and human fortunes.”

New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary

Before anyone can argue about whether God exists, both sides need to know what is being affirmed and what is being denied. A great many arguments go nowhere because they never settle this, and the two parties waste time refuting positions the other does not hold.

The dictionary above gives the popular meaning and is the meaning most objections are built to defeat: a superhuman, very old and very powerful Being taking an interest in our affairs. It is the figure on the Sistine ceiling reaching out toward Adam. It is Zeus, moved from Olympus to the clouds. It is also the ancient middle-east potentate that Jehovah’s Witnesses worship, and the exalted man of Latter-day Saint teaching, who has “a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s” (D&C 130:22). Unbelievers call it the ‘sky daddy’ — and as mockery it hits, because the thing being mocked is just as believable as Santa Claus.

If the above definition is all the word means, atheism is not merely defensible but obvious, and a Christian should be the first to reject it. No creed the Church has ever written describes such a being.

What Christians do mean can be put in a sentence: God is the ultimate Reality — that on which everything else depends, and which depends on nothing whatever. Not the largest thing in the universe, nor the oldest, nor the most powerful thing in it, but the reason there is a universe at all, the reason there is matter, energy, space, logic, mathematics, life, consciousness, morality, and rationality.

This page is about the definition and nothing more. It is not an argument that anything answers to this description; that question is taken up in the page arguments for and against God. Here I am asking only what is being referred to by the word “God.”

And the answer is not one person’s opinion. Many Jewish, Catholic and Protestant philosophers have arrived at the same definition, and — more surprising — so had pagan philosophers, centuries before there were any Christians to argue with. People with no reason to agree have agreed about this for well over two thousand years.

I invite your engagement with me on this question. You may leave comments below, but please be sure to read our policy on commenting before doing so.

Atheist/Skeptic View

Jump to the Catholic View ↓

The skeptic’s complaints about the word “God” come in more than one form. Most unbelievers hold that the word is clear enough and the claim simply false, or unsupported. But one school held something stronger: that the word has no clear content at all. This was logical positivism, and its classic form is A. J. Ayer’s: a sentence says something about the world only if some possible observation could count for or against it, and “God exists,” defined in terms — infinite, necessary, ultimate, beyond being — that rule out any check anyone could make, fails the test. On Ayer’s verdict the sentence is not false but meaningless: a description that forbids every test is not really a description at all.1 The school did not last. Its principle was widely judged to fail its own test, and by the 1960s it had been abandoned, Ayer himself later conceding that nearly all of it had been false. What survives of it is the suspicion, still pressed, that a “God” defined beyond every possible check has been defined out of reach.

The skeptic also points to a gap between that definition and ordinary practice. Most believers, he argues, are not thinking about the source of all existence when they pray over a biopsy result; they are addressing a person — very powerful, invisible, somewhere above, keeping accounts. That is the figure of the Sistine ceiling and the children’s Bible, the one some unbelievers mock as the ‘sky daddy,’ and the skeptic holds that it rests on no better evidence than Russell’s orbiting teapot while asking for a great deal more deference. Richard Dawkins presses the same point from the other end: however refined the theologians’ God, it is the interventionist person of ordinary belief — the one who hears prayers and works miracles — that religion actually runs on, and the one whose existence is the live question.3

What happens under pressure is, for the skeptic, the real objection, and Antony Flew gave it its famous picture: two explorers find a clearing in the jungle, and one insists a gardener tends it. No gardener is ever seen, so the claim is qualified — invisible, intangible, eternally undetectable — until the other finally asks what remains of the original assertion. The believer’s God, Flew argued, dies this “death by a thousand qualifications”: press him on the bearded figure and he does not defend it; he exchanges it for something more abstract — God was never a being at all, but the ground of being, the reason there is anything whatever. To the skeptic this is moving the goalposts rather than defending them, and moving them where no argument can reach.2 He adds that the abstraction is not what worship is directed at: people do not kneel or sing to a reason there is anything, so whatever the philosophers have described, it does not seem to be what fills the churches.

Calling God the ultimate Reality does not, on this view, improve matters. Every position claims something is ultimate: the materialist says matter and energy are what everything else depends on and what depends on nothing, and those at least can be weighed and measured. If the argument is only about which candidate fills the slot, the skeptic reasons, the believer holds the harder position, since his candidate cannot be inspected.

Finally, the skeptic observes that the more careful theologians describe God largely by negation — not limited, not made of matter, not changeable, not able to be fully understood. Kai Nielsen made a career of the point: a definition assembled from denials has subtracted every feature by which anything is ordinarily picked out, and it is fair to ask what is left once they are all gone.4

Endnotes
  1. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (1936), ch. 6, applying the verification principle to theological sentences. Asked in a 1978 BBC interview what the main defects of logical positivism had been, Ayer answered that “nearly all of it was false”: Bryan Magee, Men of Ideas (1978), the conversation with Ayer. ↩
  2. Antony Flew, “Theology and Falsification” (1950), adapting John Wisdom’s parable of the gardener; the phrase “death by a thousand qualifications” is Flew’s. ↩
  3. Bertrand Russell’s teapot: “Is There a God?” (1952, commissioned and unpublished by Illustrated magazine). Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (2006), ch. 2, on the “God Hypothesis” and the irrelevance of the philosophers’ God to what is actually believed. ↩
  4. Kai Nielsen, Contemporary Critiques of Religion (1971) and Skepticism (1973), on the alleged incoherence of God-talk. ↩

Catholic View

Start with what a Catholic actually means by the word. Not the most powerful thing in the universe — something more basic than that. God is the ultimate Reality: what everything else depends on, and what depends on nothing at all. Not a thing inside the world, however grand, but the reason there is a world in the first place. Whether anything like that exists is a fair question, and it is not the question on this page. This page only settles what the word means — because until that is settled, both sides are arguing with the fog.

Say What You Mean First

It is entirely fair to ask a believer to say what he means. The further claim — that the word must be meaningless, because no experiment could ever check it — is an old rule with a bad history. Philosophers in the 1920s tried it: if the five senses cannot test a claim, it is not false but nonsense. They dropped it within a generation, for two plain reasons. It threw out a great deal of ordinary science along with religion. And it failed its own test: no experiment can check that rule either.

Meanings get fixed the way meanings are always fixed — by saying what you intend the word to mean. William Lane Craig thinks the best short definition is still Anselm’s, nine centuries old: God is the greatest being that can be conceived. Try it on whatever you are calling God. Can you imagine something greater? Then that greater thing is God, and you were talking about something else.

Everything else follows from that one rule. A being who could be outdone in power, or knowledge, or goodness, would not be the greatest conceivable — which is how you arrive at the fuller description Richard Swinburne gives: a spirit without a body, who has always existed and always will, completely free, able to do anything, knowing everything, wholly good, and the maker of everything else there is. If that sounds like a discovery being smuggled in, it is not. Nothing has been proved yet. A meaning has been fixed, the way every argument fixes its terms before it starts. The fight worth having is over whether anything answers to the description — and that fight cannot even begin until the description is on the table.

Two idioms of that description should be told apart, because the skeptic’s panel runs them together. The perfect-being idiom — Swinburne’s, and most of modern philosophy of religion’s — describes a person with every great-making property to the maximal degree. The older classical idiom of Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas goes a step further and denies that God is a being alongside other beings with properties at all: He is Being itself, in whom what He is and that He is are one. The two agree on everything the argument below needs, but the difference matters later, because the objection that God is a “super-person” with a problem of location touches the first idiom and not the second.

Flew’s gardener deserves an answer of his own. The parable assumes the believer starts with a visible gardener and qualifies him away under pressure — but the goalposts the skeptic says were moved were planted where they stand from the beginning: “I AM WHO I AM” is Exodus, not a retreat invented when the experiments came back empty, and Aquinas was arguing from the world’s contingency to subsistent being seven centuries before anyone demanded falsifiability. Nor does the believer refuse to say what would count against him. Paul stakes the whole faith on a checkable claim in one sentence: “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile” (1 Cor. 15:17) — a named falsifier, in the founding documents. The arguments of this section’s companion pages run from public facts: that anything exists, that the universe began, that its constants permit life, that reason tracks truth. A case built on evidence anyone can inspect is not a claim that forbids every test.

Three Ways to Picture God

Mortimer Adler pointed out that there are only three ways to think about God, and that the list is complete. Suppose God is nothing at all like anything we know. Then no word we own applies to Him, and the conversation is over before it starts. Suppose instead that God is basically like the things we know. But everything we know is limited, made of matter, changeable and imperfect — so God would be too. That is the sky daddy exactly, and a God of that sort ought to be as easy to find as any other large object.

What remains is the third way. God is partly like what we know and partly unlike it. Unlike, in that He is not limited, not material, not changeable, not imperfect. Like, in the one respect shared by everything that exists at all: He is real. Only the third way leaves anything to think about — and it is the one the Church actually teaches.

Like a Father, but Not Literally a Father

So when Christians call God good, or wise, or a father, they do not mean quite what those words mean about a man — and they do not mean something unrelated either. They mean something genuinely similar, and never simply the same. Theologians call this the analogy of being. The idea matters far more than the label.

And it is not a recent dodge. In 1215 a council of the whole Church condemned a monk named Joachim for making God too much like His creatures, and laid down the measure still in use today: however alike God and a creature may be, the difference between them is always greater than the likeness. Keep that date in mind when someone says believers have moved the goalposts — that the abstract God was invented lately to duck hard questions. The rule is eight centuries old, and it was written to stop believers from picturing God as a creature grown very large. The Church condemned the sky daddy by name before anyone thought to mock him.

What Every Religion Agrees On

Roy Clouser draws a distinction worth borrowing. Ask who the president is and there are two good answers: name the man in the job, or describe the job itself — the office and its powers — without naming anyone at all. The same two questions can be asked about the word ‘divine.’ Ask who is divine and the world’s religions scatter: one creator, two warring forces, many gods, being itself, emptiness. Ask what the word means, and Clouser found no disagreement anywhere. Everywhere it means the same thing: whatever depends on nothing else, while everything else depends on it.

That is what “ultimate Reality” means in Christian use, and it is not the vaguest thing that can be said about God but the most exact. Ultimate, because nothing stands behind it. Reality, because it is not an idea we hold but a thing that holds us.

Notice what follows. The materialist fills the same slot: matter and energy, or the laws that govern them, or a brute fact about which no further question is allowed, are for him what everything else depends on and what depends on nothing at all. He has not declined the question; he has answered it, and “there is no answer” is itself an answer, since it makes the brute fact the thing everything else rests on. The real disagreement was never between people who believe in something ultimate and people who believe in nothing. It is between rival candidates for one office. Whether matter can carry that weight — whether the sort of thing that comes in quantities and changes over time can be the thing that depends on nothing — is a fair fight, and an old one. The pagans were having it long before the creeds: Pythagoras gave the office to numbers, Plato to the Forms, Aristotle to what exists on its own and never changes. They argued about who holds the office. Nobody argued about what the office is.

Nobody Kneels to an Abstraction — True, and Beside the Point

The skeptic’s best punch deserves the floor: people do not kneel or sing to “a reason there is anything,” so the God of the philosophers seems not to be the God who fills the churches. But listen to what the churches say kneeling: “I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth” — and maker of all things is the reason there is anything, confessed in those words for seventeen centuries. The philosopher’s phrase and the worshipper’s address are two grips on the same One, the way “the surgeon who saved my life” and “Mom” can name one woman without competing. Nobody prays to a description; everybody prays to the One the description picks out. And if the reason there is anything turns out to know you — which is exactly what the doctrine of God claims — then kneeling is not a category mistake. It is the obvious response of a creature to the source of an existence he did nothing to earn.

Why We Often Say What God Is Not

One thing more, since a definition heavy with negatives can look like an empty one. Maimonides, the great Jewish philosopher, held that the negative statements are the true ones: we approach what is infinite by denying everything finite, and each denial clears away a wrong picture rather than adding a right one. Keith Ward explains why the wrong pictures survive anyway. In an age that treats whatever can be counted and weighed as the only real thing, God gets shrunk into a super-person whose effects ought to be measurable — and a God like that soon looks unnecessary, and then ridiculous. The bearded old man survives not because the Church teaches him, but through what Ward calls a failure of imagination.

But the denials never stand alone. Behind every one of them sits a single plain affirmation: God is real — the ultimate Reality on which everything else depends. That one claim is what keeps a description made largely of denials from being a description of nothing. It is also why the mockery keeps missing. What the mockery knocks down is the sky daddy, and the Church agrees he should fall. She toppled him herself, eight hundred years ago.

The full essay takes up what this panel only touches: why God cannot belong to any category or class; how words like ‘good’ and ‘wise’ can say something true about God without meaning exactly what they mean about us; why being able to do anything never included doing the self-contradictory; and how the God of the philosophers is related to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Summary

Skeptics say the word “God” is empty — that press a believer hard enough and he retreats from a bearded figure in the sky to an abstraction nobody actually worships. The Catholic answer is that the meaning was settled a very long time ago, that it was never the popular picture, and that it can be stated plainly enough to argue about.

God is the ultimate Reality. That on which everything else depends, and which depends on nothing whatever. Not the largest or oldest or most powerful thing in the universe, but the reason there is a universe rather than nothing. Ultimate, because nothing stands behind it; Reality, because it is not an idea we hold but a thing that holds us. Everything else on this page unfolds from that sentence.

Settle the meaning before arguing about the existence. Until both sides know what is being claimed and what is being denied, an argument about whether God exists settles nothing, whichever way it comes out. Nothing here tries to show that anything answers to the description. That is separate work, done elsewhere.

The sky daddy was never the Christian claim. The superhuman person of the mockery — very old, very powerful, somewhere above us — is the figure on the Sistine ceiling and Zeus moved to the clouds. No creed the Church has ever written describes such a being. Where the mockery lands, it lands on something Christians have equal reason to reject.

Anselm’s rule fixes the meaning in one line. God is the greatest being that can be conceived. Whatever you are calling God, ask whether you can imagine anything greater; if you can, that greater thing is God, and you were talking about something else. The rest of the description follows, since a being who could be outdone in power, knowledge or goodness would not be the greatest conceivable.

“That gives me nothing to test” is not an objection to a definition. No definition gives you something to test; it tells you what would count. And testability was never the price of rational belief. No experiment shows that other people have inner lives, or that cruelty is wrong, and every sane person believes both. A rule strict enough to exclude God takes the laboratory down with the church.

Two of the three ways to picture God collapse. Say God is nothing like anything we know, and no word applies — nothing to discuss. Say God is basically like what we know, and He becomes limited, material, changeable and imperfect: the sky daddy again, who ought to be as easy to find as any other large object. What remains is that God is partly like and partly unlike — unlike in being unlimited, immaterial, unchanging and perfect; like in the one respect everything real shares, that He is real.

Nobody comes to this question from neutral ground. Roy Clouser separates the office from whoever holds it, the way you might describe the presidency without naming the president. Every religion means the same thing by ‘divine’ — whatever depends on nothing while everything depends on it — and they differ over who holds the office. So does the atheist. The materialist puts matter and energy in that slot, or the laws, or a brute fact he declines to question. He has not declined to answer; he has answered, and the argument is between rival candidates for one office, not between belief and neutrality.

“You moved the goalposts” has the history backwards. Pagan philosophers described the divine this way long before the creeds — Pythagoras giving the office to numbers, Plato to the Forms, Aristotle to what exists on its own and never changes. And in 1215 a council of the whole Church fixed the rule still followed today: however alike God and a creature may be, the difference is always greater than the likeness. That was settled to stop believers shrinking God to creature size, eight centuries before the objections it now gets accused of dodging.

Saying what God is not is not saying nothing. Much that is true of God has to be said backwards, by ruling things out, and each denial clears away a wrong picture. But one thing is claimed outright — that God is real — and that single affirmation keeps a description made largely of denials from being a description of nothing.

In short: the question was never whether a very large invisible person lives above the clouds. Christians deny that too. The claim is that there is an ultimate Reality on which everything else depends and which depends on nothing — and that this is what the word has always meant. Whether anything answers to it is the next question, and a fair one.

For a more complete essay on this topic, download What Do We Mean by God (.docx) or (.pdf)

See also the companion page What Do We Mean by “Faith”?

Next: What Do We Mean by “Faith”?