Some musings based on other recent threads, specifically on the position of non-cognitivism.

As I understand it, the base position of non-cognitivism is that the term "god" can't be understood, it holds no meaning. In this regard the expression "there is a God" is like "There is a Zybzzt". It holds no meaning, as there is nothing to explain the term.

In a vacuum I think the idea has some slight merit. If we talk about a "god" in strict logic expressions and similar (like say a very basic cosmological argument), there might be so little attached to the term that we might as well replace god with "X" without anything changing.

But when it comes to religious or theistic beliefs I think this idea is less than sound. Even the most basic deistic belief comes with notions of God as a "maker" or "creator". Sure you might argue that it isn't very specific, but that's a dangerous road to take - no phenomena can be perfectly specified.

And ironically I think non-cognitivism becomes even weaker when applied to revealed religion and related theism. In these religions God is actually often conceptualized quite a bit. The Christian God for example is explicitly described as "jealous", "avenging", "Faithful", "loving", "spirit", "sitting on a throne" (paraphrased), "robed" (paraphrased"), "likeness of a human", "has hands" (paraphrased), "flaming eyes" (paraphrased), he speaks... implicitly we can also derive a good deal of characteristics.

Now of course the skeptic might say that this is all fable and not anything anyone can give evidence for. That is, however, not my point. My point is that claiming that God can't be conceptualized seems very weak when you are arguing against actual conceptualizations of God.

Secondly you might argue that none of this explains God's supposed powers or whatnot, but that is also not a very strong argument. I don't know how tomatoes are canned, but that doesn't allow me to reject the existence of factories that process and can tomatoes.

Now, I'm an atheist. I don't believe in God, but I see very little point in claiming the term is meaningless. I'd much rather argue the term on the merits of how it is presented.

God could be everything at once.

As a point of reference, this is the most thorough argumentation I've seen from the position of noncognitivism:

http://www.strongatheism.net/library...ognitivism/#L1

If you don't want to read through the whole thing, here are a couple excerpts that you might consider taking a look at:

I think you're likely to find the essay unsatisfying as it doesn't adequately address the issues you've raised, but at least it's a presentation from that side of the table.

Well, I think they come dangerously close to fragmentalism. "You can't explain *this* facet of *this* phenomena, so it's therefore it is meaningless". In our every day world there are many things we can't explain about phenomena we presume exist.

Now, I'm not arguing against demands for verifiability or falsification. I do believe that strong claims that can't be falsified hold very little value when they are used as a basis for conclusions. But to jump from that to "meaningless" is not a jump I am willing to take. Not if we take meaningless to mean "what you are saying is completely out of any bounds of reason". I know I myself has used the term "meaningless" fairly haphazardly in debates like these, but I'll be more careful about that in the future.

I think this is a good distinction to make, and at the risk of putting words into other people's mouths that they wouldn't agree with, it seems easy to me to read the "non-cognitivist" objection in the previous thread as really being about the lack of usefulness of the ideas towards drawing any particular conclusions. Which is probably true, but then sometimes philosophy is more interesting than useful? :P

I'll repeat some of my argumentation in the other thread here because I think it's relevant to this distinction that you're making.

The "usefulness" of ideas depends on what exactly you're trying to accomplish. For example, you can rightfully say that the statement "a bachelor is an unmarried man" is a pretty useless proposition. If you assent to the statement, there isn't anything more you can logically conclude about a bachelor other than exactly what the proposition states. In that sense, it's useless.

But it's not meaningless. Saying "a bachelor is an unmarried man" is a perfectly meaningful statement. And once you accept that definition, you can then understand aspects of "a bachelor" that may not be strictly (logically) inferrable from the proposition, but can be understood through experiences of unmarried men, and hence it's useful to accept that a bachelor is an unmarried man because it allows for a broader understanding of the term, even if those aspects are potentially constrained in their applications. (Bachelors in the US might behave differently from bachelors in China back in 1000 BC. But that doesn't make the idea of a "bachelor" meaningless. It just makes it a constrained conceptualization.)

It's not so much that the term "God" has no meaning, but rather that it has too many meanings. So when used without context it has in effect no meaning.

The more you specify what one means by God, the more meaningful the concept becomes.

'God' has to be the word most abused by equivocation?

How often is "God" used in a context-free environment?

I think the non-cognitivist position is that the specifications listed do not actually contribute to meaning.

I'm not even sure that "equivocation" is really the right term to be using here. How many arguments can you think of where someone uses "God" to mean one thing, and then changes "God" to be something else later?

If you mean something more like "ambiguity" (in the sense of not being completely well-defined), I suspect moral words like "good" and "evil" and "harm" are thrown around far more often without careful definition.

Usually in my experience, but my experience is probably biased. I generally don't know or care what religion anyone I talk to follows. However, if the people you socialise with usually belong to the same church this might be less true.

I think a non-cognitivist position might be that 'God' is a concept that cannot have a true or false value, hence is meaningless.

Personally, I think if any concept is defined well enough it can, in theory, be subject to empirical examination. I believe I have made this point before.

It seems critical to many "proof of God's existence" 'logical' arguments.
However, I guess my usage of equivocation is slightly loose.

What often happens in my experience is two people both use the term God to mean radically different concepts, but act as if they mean the same thing.

Maybe.

Just to be clear, I think you mean that "the proposition 'God exists' cannot have a true or false value, and hence is meaningless", or something like that, since concepts don't generally take truth values, but propositions do.

It's not that the "concept" is either true or false, because concepts are neither true nor false. (Is the concept of blue true? That's not even an understandable question.) -- Edit: See well named's explanation.

So you're taking the verificationist perspective. A statement can only be true or false if it can be shown that they are true or false. This is a very different perspective than saying that sentences like "God exists" are not even meaningful.

This is certainly probable. But it's probable in ways that are actually somewhat bland. In politics, people talk about "the government" but often have very different ideas about what they're talking about.

If concepts are neither true nor false then "truth" is unattainable.

My favorite way of framing this to regular people:

You have a concept of God in your head. It has ideas and feeling attached to it. Is that concept God?
(No).
Right. If we accept that the concept in your head isn't God, then what is God? How are you answering that question, instinctively? By going into your head, trigerring those feelings and rememberances. But they're just in your head. They're not real. They're not God. So if God is not the God in your head, what is God, and what can you say about Him?

This has gotten through to a remarkable number of people - it helps them see how their own thoughts are formed and how they repetitively access them, when they're really not based in reality. That last bit is true whether or not God exists.

And it's something you should ask yourself even if you believe in God, because it will help clear the fluff out of your head around God and get you closer to Him.

All the true/false/logic/proposition stuff is BS for poor minds that doesn't get through to anyone. You're triggering the wrong brain pathways, when what they really need to do is gain the ability to watch their own mind and how it forms thoughts. Every conception of God is different one; you commit a kind of very uncompelling classification/abstraction error when you try to argue against a non-real, abstract conception...

What of the idea that - we all conceive of something 'perfect', although perfection is not something that we learn about from experience or something that exists in the objective world. There is nothing we can point to in the world and say 'there is perfection', yet we all share an innate understanding or belief in the concept of perfection.

'Perfection' is most often reserved to what we relabel as - God.

The argument is such that - we ALL know of God innately and God is entirely synonymous with the concept of 'perfection'.

In a very small way, this adds some meaning to God's definition.

Philosophically, this is quite dull. The concept of a "computer" isn't an actual computer. Yet I have feelings and remembrances of objects in my experience that I use to create the conception of a computer. I'm doubtful of the number of people you *actually* got through to with this line of reasoning.

This reminds me of the challenge of answering the question, "What is a window?" For there are many conceptions of windows and they're all quite different. Different sizes, different shapes, different qualities... yet we can talk meaningfully about windows even though we haven't fully defined all of the characteristics of a window. So there's no particular error in conversation, discussion, or argumentation even if conceptions are different.

What do you say to people whose perception of god has been formed from what they've been taught and what they've learned about god from external sources?

I don't disagree. The more layers of context are added, like that of the athropomorphized Christian god, the more we can build a nontrivial conceptual framework of understanding, and the more we can talk and build from the idea. This is very different, in my view, from "beings create universes".

I don't see the "no phenomena can be perfectly specified" objection, however. Lack of being perfectly specified isn't the issue. Something like "that which created the universe created the universe" whether you call it useless or meaningless it has this just major lack of context and specificity by which to understand it, fit it into a larger framework, advance a discussion based on it, and so forth. Contrast this with "a human created a sculpture" where while I don't have perfect specificity, I can easily fit this into a larger framework of understanding.

What is the "larger framework" that you think "a human created a sculpture" fits into? And why does such a framework fail to exist when saying "a being created the universe"?

Until you are able to specify the issue, this is not a useful objection.

This is fine enough as pedagogy, but it has little to do with the underlying philosophical issue. In philosophy, "concept" refers to some of the constituent parts that make up thoughts or propositions. Thus, we can have feelings or remembrances associated with concepts, but they are not constitutive of the concepts themselves. The question whether "god" is meaningful is really a question of whether we can construct a well-formed proposition or sentence using the concept of god.

This is different from what you are talking about. For instance, you can have memories and emotions associated with words that you can't use in well-form propositions.
Poor minds would probably benefit more from learning a rigid system of computation like logic than by trying to introspect about how their minds forms thoughts.

I don't know, these discussion generally seem pretty confused to me. First, is "god" meaningful? Well, it depends. It is obviously meaningful as used by some theologians and philosophers, who give more or less rigorous definitions of the term. However, unlike some concepts, such as the the number five, there is a no general consensus about the specific definition of god, so instead we get a range of different definitions. This is worsened by the fact that they are trying to define something that isn't real. Imagine trying to give a rigorous definition of "fairy." So yeah, no consensus on the meaning of "god," but in the specific contexts in which theologians and philosophers talk about god, they could be (and probably are) using a specified definition and so be speaking meaningfully.

That being said, it does seem that some people define "god" so broadly as to make it almost worthless as a concept since it can't pick out anything. Furthermore, you might think that most people don't know the more technical definitions of "god" and instead have vague and unformed impressions of what they are talking about - based mostly on repetition and context. You could somewhat fairly say of both these groups that their talk about god is meaningless. But this is true in the same sense that most people's talk about "quantum" is meaningless, and so shouldn't be taken as a reason to think that all talk about god is meaningless.

I've read all the replies and thanks for them.

I'll note that I understand the difference in view (there was little in the form of direct objections), but I'm not completely sold on it.

Yes, the concept of God can be hazy and vague and yes there, when you look at arguments in a vacuum, be very little attached to the concept of "God". As I noted in the OP I'm not a fan of barebone logic arguments that try to prove God.

However, outside such arguments - when people employ the term "God" they are typically not making such barebone arguments. Even basic deism, where God is essentially a non-intervening creator, argues that God is evident from nature, while revealed religion claims God is evident from scripture (and / or testimony). So the concept of God is often implied, like how if I say I'm interested in fast cars people aren't going to assume I mean tuned Tatas. Now, one might disagree with such claims (which I do), perhaps even argue that they are not falsifiable (they could be tautologies, for example) but that still is not "meaningless".

Furthermore, claiming that some concepts of God is "hazy" is a far cry from "meaningless". Remember that we employ hazy concepts in our everyday understanding of the world without so much as a second thought. Few people dispute the existence of consciousness, but there is (as of yet) no good empirical explanation as to a) what it is b) how pieces can feel whole c) how one individual can be fragmented from the whole. Mostly empiricists just assume such an explanation exist and continue to look for it. That doesn't make consciousness a meaningless concept.

I believe in God. My question is what is his/her/its nature?

I would think that is based on your specific belief and the evidence (if any) thereof.

For example I might speculate that sculptures could exist and make some thoughts about the people making them. I might speculate on the nature of actual sculpting artists. If I see a sculpture I might speculate on the nature of its maker. if I read a biography about a sculpture artist I might have some informed opinion about his nature. If I met a sculpture artist I might have some ideas about who he is. If a sculpture artists was my childhood friend I might know his specific nature very well. If my identical twin who grew up in the same household was a sculpture artist and I myself made sculptures I might have very strong evidence in regards to his nature.

So it depends.

Thanks. I was looking for a more universal answer though. Myself, I have my ideas about His Majesty's Nature based on my personal beliefs/experiences. So "it depends" is right of course but a common thread regarding His Nature needs to be defined.

In a semi humorous note, do the sculptors sometimes hit their sculptures violently? Michelangelo come to mind.

I think a general answer is difficult. Not necessarily because what you mean by "God" is very broad (I don't know), but because "God" can be very different depending on who you ask.