Explainer

Belief

Creed

30 March 2023

9 min read

What does the word ‘God’ mean anyway?

After asking why belief matters, Barnabas Aspray turns to transcendence as a way of defining God. The second in a series exploring the Nicene Creed.

Barnabas Aspray

Barnabas Aspray is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at St Mary’s Seminary and University.

A cloud-dappled s blue sky is viewed through a large circular opening, from below.

The view from a modern cave.

Shelter on Unsplash.

God’ is one of those words we think we understand, but many of us really don’t. Both believers and unbelievers often fall prey to a misguided idea of what the writers of the Nicene Creed meant by the word ‘God’.

Consider this description of God as an example:

God is an immensely powerful spiritual being, more powerful than anyone else in the Universe. He is invisible; he lives in heaven, but he can also be everywhere at once. He created the world a long time ago, and sometimes intervenes in the world today to perform miracles or answer prayers. His arch-enemy is another powerful spirit called Satan, but God is more powerful than Satan and will one day defeat him.

Almost everything about the above paragraph is either misleading or false from a traditional Christian point of view, yet it is not far off from the way many people today think about God. If we want to come up with a better definition, we need to understand, first that there are different kinds of reality, and second, that God belongs to his own unique kind of reality. Let’s use analogies to make each of these points.

God is like the number 2

Let’s have a look and a laugh at this XKCD webcomic.

A cartoon strip of a maths teacher explaining a proof.

What makes this comic funny is that the maths teacher is confusing two types of reality:

Physical, contingent realities whose existence is contingent (might or might not have existed), that exist in a particular place and time, and that can be destroyed.

Non-physical, non-contingent realities whose existence is necessary (cannot not exist), that are not in space or time at all, and that cannot be destroyed.

The maths teacher is treating a number as if it had the first kind of reality when in fact it has the second. It doesn’t make sense to ‘find and destroy’ a number. If the number 2 ceased to exist, what would 1+1 then be equal to? What would it mean if you saw more than 1 but less than 3 objects together, or would that no longer happen? Numbers are not the kind of things that you can remove, leaving the rest of the Universe unchanged. They are part of the fabric of reality, and we can’t really conceive a Universe without them.

Now, when we’re talking about God, this is the crucial thing to understand: the kind of reality that God has is more like the reality of numbers than the reality of physical objects. Like numbers, God is intrinsic to the way reality works. Like numbers, God can’t be located anywhere, yet without his presence reality would not make any sense. Like numbers, God can’t be seen, only represented through signs and symbols.

Compared to God, we are like two-dimensional beings

Let me introduce you to Flatty.

A line drawing of a flat round bug with six legs and two eyes.

Flatty is an entirely two-dimensional creature, living in a two-dimensional world called Flatland. In this world, there is no up and down, only left, right, forward, and backward. There are no spheres, only circles. There are no cubes, only squares. If I draw a square around flatty, it imprisons him. He cannot go over it or under it, because there is no such thing as ‘over’ or ‘under’ in Flatland. If I draw an object in front of Flatty, it looks to him as if it appeared out of nowhere.

Now, imagine you could talk to Flatty. Your voice would seem to be coming from nowhere, since he can’t see anything in three dimensions. How could you persuade him that you exist and he’s not going crazy? Perhaps you could press your finger on the surface of flatland. The fingerprint would appear like a strange oval shape, but that would only be the tiniest hint of what you look like. You could try to explain that you’re above him, but the word ‘above’ is meaningless for him so he would not understand.

Suppose Flatty was persuaded that you existed. How could he prove to other flatties that you existed? He has no words to describe you with except the ones you’ve given him, which have no meaning in a two-dimensional Universe. He can’t point to you, and he can’t offer any evidence. All evidence he might have would be two-dimensional, which misses the kind of reality he wants to prove.

Now the point of this analogy is that we are like Flatty in relation to God. We lack the language to describe God because his reality is so much greater than ours that our minds are not equipped to conceive or describe it. God can speak to us – he can even make strange appearances in the physical world sometimes, but those appearances only convey the tiniest hint of who he is.

This is what the Christian tradition has always meant when it says that God is ‘transcendent’. The word ‘transcendence’ is an attempt to give a name to something we have no concept of and no ability to fully comprehend: the idea that there is a reality beyond the three-dimensional reality that we can see and experience, and that God inhabits that reality.

Let’s return to the misleading definition of God we quoted above and correct some of the points:

It is true to say that God is invisible, but this is not an accident, as if God could have been visible. It’s part of the very nature of God that he cannot be seen, because the only things that can be seen are things that belong to the three-dimensional world. (If you think about it, numbers can’t really be ‘seen’ either. The way we write the number 2 is just as symbol to represent something that has no visible form. Even if we see two objects together, we are not seeing the number 2 itself, merely an instance of its use in one particular place and time.)
God does not ‘live’ in heaven as if he were an object that could be located somewhere. ‘Heaven’ is itself a name for the transcendent reality that we cannot fully conceive (this is more obvious in the biblical languages, and in French, German, and Spanish, where the word for ‘heaven’ and the word for ‘sky’ are the same, yet nobody is confused and thinks you’re talking about the sky). When we say that God is in heaven, we mean that God’s reality is more tangible and present there than it is here on earth, although that will not always be the case.

The other misleading aspects of that initial quotation will be addressed in the next article on the doctrine of creation.

Why this is not apologetics

None of this counts as an argument for the existence of God, even if it makes a difference to how such arguments would go. The above should not be taken as evidence that God exists, but as providing a definition of God that we need before any productive argument can begin. The reason so many atheists and theists seem to be talking past each other is that they so often start with different definitions of God without realising it. David Bentley Hart puts it this way:

The most pervasive error one encounters in contemporary arguments about belief in God … is the habit of conceiving of God simply as some very large object or agency within the universe, or perhaps alongside the universe, a being among other beings, who differs from all other beings in magnitude, power, and duration, but not ontologically.

One example of this mistake is what Richard Dawkins says in the following:

I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one god further.

Dawkins has cleverly turned the tables, making it look as if all the religions disagreed with each other, when in fact most of them agree against atheism on the question of God, and only disagree much further down the line. It is as if someone were to count English accents as different languages, and then propose making Flemish the international language because more people speak it than any of the varieties of English.

More specifically, Dawkins’ mistake is to confuse capital ‘G’ God and lowercase ‘g’ gods which is not the plural of ‘God’ in any major religion. Lowercase ‘gods’, whether they exist or not, still live inside the Universe and are part of it like you and me. The Bible itself, even though it is a monotheistic book, uses the term ‘gods’ in this way (see e.g., Psalm 82, 86, 98).

FAQs

Is this really a biblical conception of God? Why are there so few Bible quotes in this article?

The point of this article is to explain what the writers of the Nicene Creed meant when they used the word ‘God’. They believed that their conception of God was derived from the Bible and accurately reflected the biblical view. Their conception of God has come to be called ‘Classical Theism’, which is the mainstream position taken by the majority of theologians and denominations throughout Christian history. In recent years, some academic theologians called ‘open theists’ have argued that Classical Theism did not come from the Bible but from ancient Greek philosophy, and is therefore not properly Christian. If they are correct, it means that they have understood the Bible better than almost every theologian in the first fifteen centuries of the Church, including the writers of the Nicene Creed. Their argument has not been accepted by most churches and denominations, and it depends on a not-universally agreed understanding of how Christians ought to interpret the Bible. To explain why I think the Bible supports Classical Theism would be to write a completely different, and much longer, article. There are many resources already out there that show how the classical conception of God is not only derived from the Bible, but rejects a lot of Greek philosophy in favour of the Bible. If you are interested in this debate, you might consider the following resources to start with: Paul Tyson, Returning to Reality: Christian Platonism for Our Times (Wipf & Stock, 2014); Andrew Davison, Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics (CUP, 2019); Simon Oliver, Creation: A Guide for the Perplexed (Bloomsbury, 2017); Paul L. Gavrilyuk, The Suffering of the Impassible God (OUP, 2004).

What about Jesus? Doesn’t this conception of God leave out the most central Christian tenet, that Jesus is God?

To say that ‘Jesus is God’ has no meaning unless you first have a definition of God that the word ‘Jesus’ can apply to. That is why the Bible starts by building up a conception of God in the Old Testament, before revealing in the New Testament that this same God came among us in the person of Jesus. That’s why it’s misleading to say (as some Christians do) ‘If you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus’. It’s true at the level of God’s character, but not at the level of God’s nature. If you are interested in this question, I would suggest reading Rowan Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation (Bloomsbury, 2018).

This definition of God makes him seem impersonal. Doesn’t Christianity teach that God is personal?

It’s true that God has chosen to relate to us as one person relates to another, and in that sense we can call God ‘personal’. But we must be careful of letting that idea run away with itself, until we imagine God to be like a human being, only bigger and more powerful. This is called the mistake of anthropomorphising God. If you’re interested in avoiding anthropomorphic conceptions of God, I would suggest starting with David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (Yale University Press, 2014).

Explainer

Atheism

Belief

Creed

Epistimology

12 June 2024

7 min read

The difference between Richard Dawkins and Ayaan Hirsi Ali

How we decide what is true rests on where we start from.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A man and woman speaker on a stage greet and embrace each other.

Friends reunited.

UnHerd.

If you want a deep dive into some of the big questions of our time, and a fascinating clash of minds, just listen to the recent conversation between Richard Dawkins and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

In case you haven’t heard the story, as a young devoutly Muslim Somali-Dutch woman, Ayaan Hirsi Ali turned her back on Islam to become a poster-child of the New Atheist movement, often mentioned in the same breath as the famous ‘four horsemen’ of the movement – Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens. When she announced she had become a Christian (or, as she described herself, a ‘lapsed atheist’) in November 2023, it sent shock waves through atheist ranks. A public meeting with her old friend Richard Dawkins was therefore eagerly anticipated.

As the conversation began, Ali described a period in the recent past when she experienced severe and prolonged depression, which led her even to the point of contemplating suicide. No amount of scientific-based reasoning or psychological treatment was able to help, until she went to see a therapist who diagnosed her problem as not so much mental or physical but spiritual - it was what she called a ‘spiritual bankruptcy’. She recommended that Hirsi Ali might as well try prayer. And so began her conversion.

Of course, Dawkins was incredulous. He started out assuming that she had only had a conversion to a ‘political Christianity’, seeing the usefulness of her new faith as a bulwark against Islam, or as a comforting myth in tough times, because, surely, an intelligent person like her could not possibly believe all the metaphysical mumbo-jumbo that vicars preach from the pulpit.

He was then somewhat taken aback by Ali’s confession that she did choose to believe the reality of the incarnation, that Jesus was the divine Son of God born of a virgin and that for a God who created the world, resurrecting his Son Jesus was no big deal. With a rueful shake of the head, Dawkins had to admit she was, to his great disappointment, a proper Christian.

Yet he was insistent he didn’t believe a word of it. The nub of the issue for Dawkins seemed to be his objection to the idea of ‘sin’. For him, all this is “obvious nonsense, theological bullshit… the idea that humanity is born in sin, and has to be cured of sin by Jesus being crucified… is a morally very unpleasant idea.”

Of course it’s unpleasant. Crucifixions generally were. It’s where we get our word excruciating from. And from the perspective of someone who has no sense whatsoever that they need saving, it is distasteful, embarrassing, not the kind of thing that you bring up in Oxford Senior Common Rooms, precisely because it is just that – unpleasant. I too find the notion that I am sinful, stubborn, deeply flawed, in desperate need of forgiveness and change unpleasant. I would much rather think I am fine as I am. Yet there are many things that are unpleasant but necessary - like surgery. Or changing dirty nappies. Or having to admit you are addicted to something.

And that is ultimately the difference between Dawkins and Ali. They are both as clever as each other; they have both read the same books; they both live similar lives; they know the same people. Yet Ayaan has been to a place where she knew she needed help, a help that no human being can provide, whereas Richard, it seems, has not.

It is like trying to measure the temperature of a summer’s day with a spanner. Spanners are useful, but not for measuring temperature.

Dawkins responded to Ali’s story by insisting that the vital question was whether Christianity was true, not whether it was consoling, pointing out that just because something is comforting does not mean it is true. True enough, but then it doesn’t mean it is not true either. The problem is, however, how we decide whether it is true. Dawkins seems to continue to think that science - test tubes, experiments and the rest - can tell one way or the other. Yet as the great Blaise Pascal put it:

If there is a God, he is infinitely beyond our comprehension, since, being invisible and without limits he bears no relation to us. We are therefore incapable of knowing either what he is or whether he is.

Science can’t really help us here. It is like trying to measure the temperature of a summer’s day with a spanner. Spanners are useful, but not for measuring temperature.

Whether Christianity makes sense or not cannot be determined by asking whether it is scientifically plausible or logically coherent – because that all depends on which scientific or logical scheme you are using to analyse it. It is all to do with the place from which you look at it, your ‘epistemic perspective’ to give it a fancy name. From the perspective of the strong, the super-confident, the sure-of-themselves, Christianity has never made much sense. When St Paul tried to explain it to the sophisticated first century pagans of Corinth – he concluded the same - it was ‘foolishness to the Greeks’.

Christianity makes no sense to someone who has not the slightest sense of their own need for something beyond themselves, someone who has not yet reached the end of their own resources, someone who has never experienced that frustrating tug in the other direction, that barrier which stands in the way when trying and failing to be a better version of themselves – that thing Christians call ‘sin’.

Why would you need a saviour if you don’t need saving? Would you even be able to recognise one when they came along? No amount of brilliant argument can convince the self-satisfied that a message centred on a man who is supposed to be God at the same, time, much less that same man hanging on a cross, is the most important news in the world. It is why Christianity continues to flourish in poorer than more affluent parts of the world, or at least in places where human need is closer to the surface.

She found the atheist paradigm that she used to believe, and that Dawkins still does, was no longer adequate for her.

The philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn described what he called ‘paradigm shifts’. They happen when a big scientific theory of the way things are gets stretched to breaking point, and people increasingly feel it no longer functions adequately as an explanation of the evidence at hand. It creaks at the seams, until an entirely new paradigm comes along that better explains the phenomena you are studying. The classic example was the shift from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics, which was not a small shift within an existing paradigm, but a wholesale change to a completely new way of looking at the world.

That is what Christians call conversion. This is what seems to have happened to Ayaan Hirsi Ali. What marks her out from Dawkins is not that she has found a crutch to lean on, whereas he is mentally stronger, so doesn’t need one. It is that she found the atheist paradigm that she used to believe, and that Dawkins still does, was no longer adequate for her – it no longer could offer the kind of framework of mind and heart that could support her in moments of despair as well as in joy. It no longer made sense of her experience of life. It could no longer offer the kind of framework that can resist some of the great cultural challenges of the day. This was not the addition of a belief in God to an existing rationalist mindset. It was adopting a whole new starting point for looking at the world. When she first announced her conversion she wrote: “I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable — indeed very nearly self-destructive. Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?” This is a classic paradigm shift.

Of course, Dawkins can’t see this. He is still in the old paradigm, one that still makes perfect sense to him. It’s just that he thinks it must make sense to everyone. It is surely the one that all right-thinking people should take.

As the conversation continued, Ayaan Hirsi Ali often seemed like someone trying to describe the smell of coffee to someone without a sense of smell. Dawkins in turn was like a colourblind person deriding someone for trying to describe the difference between turquoise and pink, because of course, anyone with any sense knows there is no real difference between them.

No amount of proof or evidence will ever convince either that the other is wrong. They are using different methods to discover the truth, one more analytical and scientific, the other more personal and instinctive. The question is: which one gets you to the heart of things? It’s decision every one of us has to make.