Steve Watson

Unspeakable God

Hilary Putnam claimed as a consequence of the causal-descriptive semantic theory, that if you were a brain in a vat then you could never think that you were a brain in a vat, let alone say it, because the terms would fail to be properly causally connected to the things they were supposed to reference. (The brain in a vat would not have thoughts of vats created by the right sorts of sensory connections to real vats – only to mad-scientist-illusions of vats.) Similarly, if God exists outside of and independent of the causally structured universe – which He created – then we could not conceive of or even speak of Him.

There might be a couple of ways around this. Firstly, His incarnation as Christ might be a way for us to speak of a part of God – though not all of Him, naturally – since that part of Him does actually exist in the right causal relationships to us; though that brings up a further problem about how the ‘identity’ of the three parts can account for our different possibilities of reference. Secondly, God might have the same status as such fictional creatures as unicorns or dragons, in which the reference to non-causally-active entities (non-existent, in their cases) is constructed from other successfully referring terms. I have no idea how that could be achieved; and even if it was, would believers in God be satisfied with this status for God (or for their beliefs?)