Notes on Use and Coherence
When we consider whether a something such as God exists, what must first be ascertained, obviously, is what is meant by the word “God.” This is the more general endeavor; but what is more specific is this: Can we count what is meant by “God” as a something that, in analyzing the referential presupposition, counts as a thing in the most basic and ordinary sense. By “basic” I consider that which is atomic to a system that is perceived; for instance, in a system of players on a football team, I might call the quarterback a basic unit of that team. Of course, what must further be checked is if my use of “team” is proper. In doing so, I have committed myself to a semantic treatment, an assertion that this collection (the “team”) is intelligible and commonly accepted linguistically by any other language speaker of my learned and communal language. In reflecting on the semantic preoccupation of “God,” would it be that we can perceive it in a most basic sense, as delineated by my analogy? Furthermore, to the nature of ordinariness, how might we consider this concept “God” as such? Can we obtain a standard by which “God,” in being used within language, is judged without committing any error to that language? An error might very well, in this case, consist of breaking the boundaries presupposed by that language of intelligibility. Would it be that the use of “God,” brings about an instance of communication breakdown–where language fails to capture the meaning of this term’s employment. But most importantly comes the issue of reducibility of the concept itself. Specifically, I might suppose that when a language speaker utters “God” in some sentence A, that usage of “God” can only be understood because of its proper use and coherence within the totality of the language itself and within the constructed sentence itself. In being coherent within a sentence, the use of “God” must be understood by relation to some particular event or object. The entire sentence itself will possess a meaning, a sense, if the use of “God,” in being related to some particular event or object, does not prevent the sentence A from having a use within the language in which that sentence inheres. The question now, then, is this: Does “God” exist in language wherewith no relation can be observed? To play hyperbolic: What would be meant by a language if she were to utter, strictly, “God!” without situational context. Naturally, one could imagine a person reacting to a terrible accident or signaling one’s own frustration, but imagine that there is nothing to which one is responding. We are continually responding to events and objects, so clearly the use of “God” must be combined with something else in discourse, contrived (argumentative, philosophical, etc.) or accidental (expressive, explicative, etc.). That said, let us suppose that in one’s use of “God,” the sentence in which it inheres is understood as a gateway term or through some other gateway term, ignoring, for the moment, the use of either term (supposing further, for the sake of simplicity, we are dealing with two simple terms). For instance, let us address the notion of a “private God.” That would be, at first glance, the notion that one’s God in some sense can only be understood by that person. Presumably, that person’s private experiences provide for that person a unique God which is barred off and inaccessible to other persons. The notion is better understood as one having a “personal relationship with Him.” For the most part, what a person means by this is that in some way, God interacts with persons (for, presumably, persons are God’s greatest creation), and furthermore, that God is interested and invested in each individual person’s unique and individuated affairs. But let us inspect this: for this notion of a “private God” to make sense at all, what must be understood is at least the concept of privacy. The word “privacy” either acts as a gateway for “God” to have sense or is understood through “God.” But in order for the word “private” to be understood, it must be interconnected with a lexicon, consisting of other words which themselves give “private” its sense. If we take “private” as the gateway term, “God” will only be understood once it is assimilated into the entirety of the language which gives “private” its sense. That language itself will consist of an infinite number of uses which correspond to the sentences in that language which, further, are composed of words with uses for the sentences in which they inhere.