by Jesse Galef

Language is a wonderful tool, but all too often it’s misused and consequently misunderstood. So many seemingly difficult disagreements in philosophy and religion are the result of poorly defined words. I remember a particular exchange I had with a nontheistic author who wanted everyone to embrace “God” — which, according to him, could be defined as “the ceaseless creativity of the universe and the objective validity of human rights.”  Clearly the confusion was because I didn’t know what he meant when he used the word.

Ok, the meaning of words is just shared convention, and he decided to use the word “God” in a way that was unexpected, no big deal. After some initial issues, we sorted out what he meant and were able to move on with the conversation.

But sometimes even the speaker doesn’t know what idea the word is referring to.  And that’s a real problem.  It’s so important to know what you’re talking about before you, well, talk. If you have the stomach for it, go read this article by Mark Vernon entitled “God is the Question“:

First you’ve got to ask what you mean by the word ‘God’. And there is a quick answer: we don’t know what we mean by the word ‘God’. God is a mystery. ‘The word “God” is a label for something we do not know,’ McCabe writes. Now this already reads like as much obfuscation to the sceptic. But bear with it and ask a second question too: what is a mystery?

A mystery is not a problem. A problem is a puzzle to which techniques can be applied, intuition brought to bear, and a solution found. Science tackles problems. It’s brilliant at it. But a mystery is not amenable to that strategy. And life is littered with them.

In a quick aside, what we see in the third sentence is an attempt to mislead us through a failure to recognize the Use-mention Distinction. The word “God” is poorly defined, but that fact doesn’t mean that the entity God is mysterious — only that our culture has no fixed meaning tied to that combination of letters.

It was difficult to know where to begin with this article. Terms are left gleefully undefined, contradictions abound, and I’m left scratching my head as to whether the author knows what he’s saying.  Then, on what must be at least the fourth read-through, I saw this and it all fell into place:

Similarly, the often forgotten motivation for the formulation of doctrine is the aim of not dissolving the mystery of God. When Christians say God is three in one, they assert what they take as a meaningful contradiction. And that’s the point. If you accept it, you accept a mystery.
…
Zen Buddhism tends not to talk of God, but it does talk of the mystery of existence in its koans and meditation on questions like “What is it?” Enlightenment comes when the monk sees that there is no answer, or rather that the answer is only the question: “what?” The mystery of life is revealed as an interrogative. So too God.

It’s all clear now — he’s not even trying to make sense; the entire article is a koan!  You know, the “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” nonsense that seems deep until you realize that it’s a contradiction in terms.  Suddenly I see that koans are not unique to Eastern mysticism. When Zen masters Christian theologians tell us “God is three persons and one”, “God is no being at all, God is being itself”, and “God is the question”, how is it different? (I’m looking at you, Karen Armstrong…)

Just because the words can be put together into a grammatically correct sentence doesn’t mean that it makes sense.  Congratulations theologians: you can baffle people by intentionally misusing language.

The alt-text of this old XKCD comic reads “The fifth panel also applies to postmodernists.”

Speaking of postmodern nonsense, my sister, Julia Galef, has been writing blog posts (Part One and Part Two) about the subject at Rationally Speaking. She’s now a co-blogger with Massimo Pigliucci and will be co-hosting a podcast with him for the NYC Skeptics (I love my family). Her question is how to distinguish meaningful complex text from meaningless word salad. I hope to write more about it later, but you should check it out yourself!