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    What Do We Mean by 'God'?
    What Do We Mean by 'God'?
    What Do We Mean by 'God'?
    Ebook46 pages58 minutes

    What Do We Mean by 'God'?

    By Keith Ward

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    About this ebook

    Language about God is something like the language of poetry—intended not to increase our information about the world—we know facts about the world already—but to evoke in us a certain attitude or way of looking at things or feeling about things. What sort of view of the world, then, is language about God trying to convey? Keith Ward suggests it is that the world is an expression of a reality beyond it. In this book, he unpacks the meaning of the word God and explains why we need to get rid of the crude and unhelpful assumptions that still abound. This is a book for all who are curious about how God, and God’s actions, can be understood today.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherChurch Publishing
    Release dateJan 1, 2018
    ISBN9781640650343
    What Do We Mean by 'God'?
    Author

    Keith Ward

    Keith Ward is the Regius Professor of Divinity Emeritus at Oxford University, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He has taught philosophy at a number of British and American universities.

    Read more from Keith Ward

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      Book preview

      What Do We Mean by 'God'? - Keith Ward

      1

      Who or what is ‘God’?

      For many people today believing in God is really quite difficult. There are lots of ideas of God around which people find distasteful or unacceptable. For example, two of the best known paintings in the Western world portray God in ways that, unfortunately, give rise to quite false ideas of who, or what, God is. One is Michelangelo’s painting of the creation of Adam, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. In that painting, God is shown as a very well-developed, well-muscled specimen of humanity with long white hair and a flowing beard. He is just like Adam but a little older and with a bigger beard. This sort of representation of God in art was, of course, quite unknown in ancient Jewish tradition, which expressly forbade the making of any images or pictures of God at all. In Islam, too, no pictures are allowed in mosques, which is why such beautiful techniques of writing in decorative Arabic script evolved in that tradition. It might well be held that Michelangelo, for all his genius, broke that ancient prohibition on picturing God, and subsequent Western thought has paid the price.

      Another well-known picture of God creating the universe is seen in ‘The Ancient of Days’, by William Blake. Again, God is a well-muscled human being with a flowing beard and long white hair. In his hand he holds a pair of compasses, with which he is measuring out the world. When Blake drew this picture, he was in fact portraying the sort of God that he thought was a bad God, an interfering measuring God who squashed and repressed the human imagination. For Blake, this was a sort of anti-God. Unfortunately, most people do not realize that, and they take Blake’s picture to be a depiction of God as he really is.

      These paintings have had an unfortunate effect, because they are such good paintings and because the power of visual imagery is so strong that we find it hard to get out of our minds the idea of God as a man with a long flowing beard sitting just above the clouds or in the sky. We can get more sophisticated, and say, ‘Well, I know that there is no actual physical form in the sky. We have been up there in space-ships and satellites, and we know there isn’t anything there. And I know that he isn’t just a little bit further away either, just beyond Alpha Centauri. No, God is not physical at all. He is a purely spiritual being.’ But even if we try to get sophisticated, we might still think of God as a particular being: a purely mental being, who thinks in much the same way as we do, one thing after another; who decides, in much the same way as we do; who makes up his mind whether to do this or that, and perhaps changes it at a later date; and who feels in much the same way that we do, so that he feels sad when we do something wrong and happy when we do something good (which must mean he’s depressed most of the time). In general, he has pretty well human feelings.

      So God is seen as very much like an invisible human being, an immortal one; like the old Greek gods, he is human in character but immortal and invisible. This God is still a mind, rather like ours though better; he is out there somewhere; he is apart from us. He is perhaps just beyond the edge of the universe; he is a separate being. So we say that God is transcendent; he transcends everything in the physical universe. But he is, nevertheless, another mind.

      But this

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