IB Philosophy 5.1.1 Nature of God Notes

What Does the Word "God" Mean?

1. Unit 5 examines the philosophy of religion: the branch of philosophy investigating questions about the existence, nature, and attributes of God, the meaning of religious language, and the relationship between belief and rational inquiry. Unlike theology, which operates within a faith tradition, philosophy of religion examines these questions from a standpoint of critical, impartial reasoning.
2. The difficulty of defining God has been recognized since antiquity. If God is an infinite, transcendent being exceeding all human categories, then any definition risks reducing the divine to something manageable by finite human intellects.
3. This tension, between wanting to say something meaningful about God while admitting that God may be too vast for any human concept to capture, runs through the entire philosophy of religion.
4. The IB syllabus opens with two deceptively simple questions: "What does the word 'God' mean?" and "Can God be defined?"
   1. These matter because every subsequent debate (whether God exists, what religious language means, whether religious experience is genuine) presupposes some understanding of what "God" refers to.
5. Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) offered one of the most influential definitions in his Proslogion: God is "that than which nothing greater can be conceived."
   1. This does not describe what God is like but establishes God as the maximum conceivable being: whatever perfections we can imagine, God possesses them in the highest degree.
   2. This definition becomes the foundation of the ontological argument (5.1.2).
6. To grasp what this means, try to conceive of the greatest possible being. Such a being would possess every perfection: unlimited knowledge, unlimited power, unlimited goodness.
7. Now ask: would this being be greater if it existed only in your imagination, or if it also existed in reality?
   1. Intuitively, a being that actually exists is greater than one that is merely imagined.
8. This is the core insight behind Anselm’s definition: if God is truly "that than which nothing greater can be conceived," then God cannot exist only in the mind, because a God that also existed in reality would be greater.
9. Anselm believed the definition of God itself points toward His existence. Whether this reasoning succeeds is the subject of the ontological argument (5.1.2).

Negative Theology and the Limits of Language

1. However, not all traditions accept that God can be positively defined.
2. The tradition of negative theology (apophatic theology), associated with Pseudo-Dionysius and Maimonides, holds that we can only say what God is not: God is not finite, not temporal, not material.
3. Positive descriptions are always inadequate because the divine nature transcends human language and thought.
4. Maimonides (1138-1204) developed this idea into a careful system in The Guide for the Perplexed. He argued that saying things like 'God is wise' is actually misleading, because it implies that God's wisdom is just a bigger version of human wisdom.
   1. It is better to say 'God is not ignorant,' because that negation (ruling out a limitation rather than asserting a positive quality) avoids the trap of false comparison. Each negation strips away one inadequate human idea, and the accumulated effect is that we edge closer to understanding the divine nature, even if we never fully reach it.
   2. This is not scepticism about God, but a rigorous account of why ordinary language fails when applied to an infinite being.
5. If God cannot be defined, the arguments for and against God's existence face a serious challenge: how can we prove or disprove the existence of something we cannot adequately describe?
6. The question also connects to the analysis of religious language (5.2). If "God" does not function like ordinary descriptive terms, then religious statements may require a special kind of linguistic analysis beyond standard logic and semantics.
7. The debate about whether religious statements even count as genuine truth-claims (covered in 4.2.3) turns out to be directly relevant to how we think and talk about God.
8. This topic provides the conceptual foundation for the entire unit.
   1. The definition of God determines what counts as evidence for or against God's existence, what religious experience would need to be like, and whether religious and secular perspectives can engage in meaningful dialogue.

Types of Theism: Monotheistic, Polytheistic, and Pantheistic Views

1. The word "God" does not refer to a single, universally agreed-upon concept. Different religious and philosophical traditions conceive of the divine in fundamentally different ways.
2. The IB syllabus requires engagement with three major types: monotheism, polytheism, and pantheism. Understanding these distinctions is essential for evaluating the arguments in 5.1.2 and 5.1.3.
3. Monotheism is the belief in exactly one God who is personal, transcendent, and the creator of all that exists. The Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) are the most prominent monotheistic traditions.
4. In each, God is understood as a being with intentions, knowledge, and moral attributes who enters into a relationship with humanity.