A reader writes:

You posted recently a note about monotheism and you said that Sikhs and Christians believe in the same God because there is only one God. I wondered if you could elaborate on this.

I know that the Catechism teaches that Christians and Muslims worship the same God, and Protestant attempts to assert otherwise are easily refuted, since the identity of a person’s God isn’t dependent on having correct beliefs about Him. But if the question is, “how can people with different beliefs about God all have the same God,” I don’t know why the usual answer is “because there is one God to believe in.” The conclusion doesn’t seem to follow from that premise. Someone can believe in a God who is actually no god at all. It doesn’t have to be “Either monotheist X believes in the true God, or else monotheism is false.” It could be “Monotheist X believes in a false God, and monotheist Y believes in the true God.” From this, it is clear that the premise “There is only one God” does not yield the conclusion, “therefore, Christians and Sikhs believe in the same God.”

Your thoughts?

One can direct one’s worship toward something that is not God at all (Toward money, sex, or power to name three popular alternatives). Similarly, one can direct one’s worship toward a construct of one’s imagination (say, Apollo). One can direct one’s worship toward some creature and be subject to the deceptions of demons. One can direct one’s worship toward God, the source and end of our being, yet do so with only partial understanding of who he is (that would be all of us).

I’m not familiar with what Sikhs regard as the attributes of God. My guess, however, is that they believe God is One, that God is good and some of the other basic attributes that monotheism tends to attribute to God. Insofar as they worship such a God, they are worshipping the only God there is. The Catechism doesn’t mention Sikhs, so I’m not sure exactly where the Church would place their theology in the hierarchy of truth, but insofar as they are monotheistic, they are theologically closer to us than were the pagans to whom Paul preached on the Areopagus. And to them he said that God had no left himself without witness and it was he toward whom they were groping and feeling. A people who have gotten as far as monotheism has grasped a real truth (probably several real truths) about God. They don’t see the full picture, obviously, because they may not grasp things like his covenant relationship with us, his revelation to Israel, and his full revelation in Jesus Christ. But they still have a good thick slice of Him. Insofar as they affirm what we affirm, they are worshipping the same God.

We can’t create new gods. We can misidentify creatures as gods. We can be blind to real attributes and make false attributes of the real God. But to talk as though there can “there are two omnipotent, perfect, and perfectly simple Prime Movers, each of whom is identical to his own essence and his own existence” is, as my reader noted, rubbish. That is why, when it comes to Muslims, the Church acknowledges that “together with us they adore the one, merciful God, mankind’s judge on the last day.” (CCC 841) Ain’t nobody else gonna fill that role.