Who or What does “God” Refer to?
What do you mean when you use the word “God”
What do you mean when you use the word “God”? Can you talk about God?
When you say “God,” do you mean a powerful being, a force of nature, or both?
These questions make everyday discussions about religion, let alone serious academic ones, extremely difficult.
The image above is a perfect example. If you ask a Hindu if this is “God” they are likely to say yes. But they do not mean that the God they believe in literally looks like that. It is simply a physical illustration of “God’s” qualities. So to say that their God has six arms is not true.
The word “God”
God, as being something or someone that is conceived as being completely other than humans are used to talking about, is often seen as an atypical case of language. There are even religious traditions that believe that the divine is so other that one is not able to talk about it at all.
The question of whether one is able to talk about ‘God’ has traditionally been approached by discussions concerning the nature of reference. In this article, I will challenge this traditional approach.I will argue that…
