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Two Concepts of God*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

John Lachs
John Lachs
Affiliation:
College of William and Mary Williamsburg, Va.
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Extract

Philosophers have long debated the question of the existence of God. This is one of many philosophical issues in which the motivation for inquiry has come more perhaps from the side of human feeling than from disinterested scientific curiosity. Powerful emotions appear to prompt thinkers to devote effort to the attempt to prove or disprove the existence of God. The urgency of this task has made some of these philosophers pay less than adequate heed to the concepts they employ. It appears to have escaped the attention of many of them that the word “God” does not have a single meaning either in religious language generally or in philosophical theology. It is obvious that one of the important ways in which religious traditions differ is in their conceptions of the Deity. But a considerable number of different God-concepts may be distinguished in the Judeo-Christian religious tradition itself, and not even in Christian theology proper is the word “God” free of ambiguity.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 59 , Issue 3 , July 1966 , pp. 227 - 240
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1966

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References

1 There are intimate connections between epiphenomenalism and the entire argument of this essay, not the least of which is shown in the concept of God — modeled on epiphenomenal mind — presented in the following pages. Yet the theory of epiphenomenalism itself must remain unsupported here. The reader interested in seeing a defense of it may turn to my “The Impotent Mind,” The Review of Metaphysics 17 (1963), 187–99, and my “Epiphenomenalism and the Notion of Cause,” The Journal of Philosophy 60 (1963), 141–46.

2 In what follows I am concerned only with the comparison of views, not with their defense or refutation. I neither attempt to prove nor succeed in establishing that my idea of God is preferable to Feuerbach's or Hartshorne's. I concentrate on bringing out some of the ways in which these conceptions differ: assessment will have to wait for another occasion.