Anthropomorphism

In answer to a correspondent:

This is a complicated question to answer. In my opinion, many of the issues that devolve on God-talk aren’t distinctive to God-talk. Rather, these are questions and answers we bring to the issue of God-talk from our general philosophy of language, and related metaphysical or epistemic commitments. Let’s take some examples:

i) If you’re a materialist, you reject the existence of abstract objects, in the sense of objects that exist outside of space and time.

In that case, you would regard divine attributes like spirituality and timeless eternality as meaningless. They take positive concepts like time and space, and simply negate these concepts.

So these attributes have no positive content. They are vacuous linguistic placeholders that don’t refer to anything real.

If you take that view, then the position of Ayer or Nielsen on metaphysics generally and God-talk in particular makes sense.

If, on the other hand, you’re a realist like Penrose or Gödel, you do believe in abstract objects. You also believe that abstract objects are objects of knowledge.

ii) Likewise, if you’re an empiricist, you believe that we form all our concepts by abstraction from concrete particulars. Therefore, we have to “stretch” these mundane concepts when we apply them to God.

If, on the other hand, you subscribe to Innatism, you will take the position that sensory experience illustrates, activates, and refines our tacit knowledge of certain fundamental categories. It isn’t the source of our ideas. Rather, it’s a stimulus that makes us more self-aware of what we already understand at a subliminal level, and helps to furnish these generic, hardwired ideas with a more specific and detailed content.

iii) BTW, even if you were a doctrinaire empiricist, I’m not sure that that’s especially problematic for God-talk, because I think that we could make the mental adjustment as we adapt our mundane ideas to God.

iv) I believe that God-talk is analogical, but in that respect, God-talk is a special case of language in general. Language is always analogical.

And that’s because we have a one-to-many rather than one-to-one correspondence between word and object. When we use nouns to denote objects, they don’t pair off in terms of one noun per object. We don’t have as many words as we have objects to name.

Rather, we use a set of fairly generic nouns to denote a variety of concrete particulars. (You can extend this to verbs, adverbs, adjectives, &c.)

Now, we can do this in large part because we class objects by natural kinds, so we don’t need a separate word for every object. As such, we’re using a common word to denote a particular kind of object: a particular that belongs to a specific class of objects.

But that is still analogical, for there are many variations within a given class. No oak tree is identical with another oak tree.

iv) This brings me to another point: I object to theories of knowledge which stipulate that an analogy degenerates into equivocation unless we can isolate a point of identity between A and B.

For, as a matter of experience, we are able to recognize and classify objects at a glance without running through a process of analysis by which we isolate a common core.

Put another way, I reject theories of knowledge that lack psychological realism. Theories of knowledge that ignore the way we actually function in the world.

It’s clear that we are able to successfully communicate with each other despite the vagaries and ambiguities of language. It’s clear that we’re able to group concrete particulars as natural kinds, even though it would be very difficult to rigorously pinpoint what, exactly, they have in common.

v) It also important to keep in mind the relation between analogy, literality, and metaphor. For example, some theologians take the position that God-talk can only be figurative, never literal.

But a metaphor is, itself, an analogy. And sound analogies have a literal element. Analogies are figurative to the extent that every analogy involves an element of disanalogy. You’re saying that X is like Y—which means that X is both similar and dissimilar to X, but you are choosing to focus on their similarity.

For example, if I compare a sundial to a digital clock, these two objects are more unlike than alike in many respects. But they share the same chronometric function.

vi) Some theological traditions are apophatic. So, for them, it’s hard for God-talk to avoid equivocation. In a sense, they make a virtue of equivocation.

They operate under the assumption that God is so transcendent that he doesn’t correspond to anything we ever encounter in human experience. We have no frame of reference or standard of comparison. As such, God is unknowable and even ineffable—for God is incomparable in every respect.

To some extent this also goes back to empiricism, where experience is the source and standard of knowledge. And extreme denies that we can experience God due to his utter transcendence.

a) At the same time, apophaticism is paradoxical. How do you know what something is not unless you know what it is? Otherwise, on what basis do you contrast A and B?

b) Moreover, alterity is a form of univocal predication. It’s just a negative predication.

vii) But my own philosophical and theological commitments are such that, for me, apophaticism is predicated on too many false assumptions.

As a realist, I believe that we do have an intuitive grasp of abstract objects. And we can use abstract objects to model God’s own mode of subsistence, viz. simplicity, spirituality (incorporeity), infinitude (e.g. omniscience), and (timeless) eternality.

Indeed, I believe that abstract objects inhere in God. So it’s more than just a theological model.

This still leaves plenty of room for mystery, just as the Mandelbrot set is both apprehensible and inexhaustible.

As a dualist, I also believe that we have a direct experience of the incorporeal. Indeed, our experience of matter is mediated by our experience of mind. At an epistemic level, knowledge of the incorporeal is prior to knowledge of the corporeal.

I also think that we are endowed with innate moral intuitions (although these can be distorted by sin). But even if I were an empiricist, I don’t have any inherent problem with extrapolating our ethical categories to God.

Sure, we have to make some mental adjustments when we apply human examples to God. But I don’t see that this presents any great difficulty—especially when revelation (i.e. Scripture) supplies us with a lot of specific information about the difference between divine goodness and human virtue.

ix) Divine accommodation can mean (at least) two different things:

1. Epistemic accommodation

It can refer to Biblical God-talk. How does Scripture represent God? It is inherently anthropomorphic or figurative?

2. Ontological accommodation

How does God (apparently) interact with human beings?

I affirm (2), but deny (1).

Take the case of divine-human dialogue, God conversing with Abraham or Moses. The give and take appears to take place in real time. What are we to make of this?

i) This is a genuine accommodation in the sense that God must adapt to our finitude when communicating with us. Since human beings are timebound creatures, an actual dialogue must be sequential in time.

So I think the conversation takes place in real time. And that's a necessary accommodating to the human conversation partner.

ii) On the other hand, this doesn't mean that the divine conversation-partner literally enters into Abraham's timeframe.

Rather, God *effects* a dialogue in real time—whether telepathically or by simulating speech. *God* is not responding to Abraham in real time. But he is *effecting* a response to Abraham in real time.

viii) The upshot is that I don’t have much use for a theory of accommodation in the epistemic sense—if by this we mean that God is so different from us that he cannot reveal to us what he is really like, but must resort to fictive metaphors.

I think Scripture uses anthropomorphic descriptions, but not for that reason. To begin with, not all God-talk is anthropomorphic. And where it is anthropomorphic, this is not because there is no other way of representing God in human language.

Bible writers also employ many metaphors to depict human beings. Consider the Song of Solomon. They don’t do this because human beings are ineffable or incomprehensible.

Rather, I think Bible writers use anthropomorphisms for the same reason that poets use metaphors. Poets don’t resort to metaphors because an object is literally indescribable. Rather, poets use metaphors because metaphors are very economical ways of expressing an idea.

It would take a page of prosaic exposition to spell out the connotations of a well-chosen metaphor. And we should decrypt anthropomorphic language in the same way we decrypt the figurative imagery of a poet.

Take an anthropopathetic expression like divine jealousy. That’s a quick, graphic, memorable way to pack several ideas into a small space.

Or, to take another example—in discussing predestination, Bible writers explain that God elected us before the foundation of the world (and equivalent expressions). Within the limits of popular language, this is a prosaic description of God’s timeless eternality.

On the other hand, you have passages in Ps 90 and 102 that express divine eternality under the figure of time’s passage. The first set of passages is literal, whereas the second set illustrates the same idea though picture-language.

Biblical God-talk isn’t systematically anthropomorphic or systematically literal. Rather, the Bible alternates between poetic and prosaic descriptions of God. This is good pedagogy.