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Since you neglect to rebut my most pressing points, I'll asume you haven't read my post properly. Do so.
In the meantime, I will answer your call for a more cogent impeachment of the concept of God. Of course, it will not do to define God and then deny him. For what will this prove but that my definition is the wrong one? My point is not that definitions of God have hitherto admitted too much, or have falsely imputed to him a personality, or even that there is no God. What I want to show is simply that all talk about Him is literally senseless.
My approach, then, will be to delineate what is common to all theological propositions, and to show thereby that all impinge on the bounds of sense. The style will be compressed and dogmatic, and for this I apologise; for razing to the ground your system of belief I apologise none.
Broadly speaking, and at the risk of being presumptuous, there are two sorts of (monotheistic) theological proposition: that which reckon God to be the unknown, and therefore to stand (as it were) over and above reality; and those which transpose Him as the totality of things in the world, in line with the pantheism of Spinoza, Bruno, et al.
We'll begin with the notion that God is unknown (You say "an" unknown, but this suggests that there is more than one unknown: and surely hegemony is implicit in the idea of a God. If he is not everything, then he is not a God at all). The attendant problem here is: how can there be a referent for the unknown? How can one ostensively define the unknown? (Recall that we are trying to prove that no empirical claims about God can be logically countenanced. A referent is empirically verifiable if and only if there is a one-on-one correspondence between it and something in the phenomenal world. Thus, if no ostensive defintion can be established, we must banish it to the philosophical bestiary). Now, pay attention to what a referent does: it distinguishes one thing from another. For example, when I refer to a chair I distinguish fromk its surroundings, the room it is in, the floor, etc. And what do I distinguish the unknown from but the known? Therefore, the unknown is the not-known. But what kind of knowledge can the not-known be? - not least since it is presented in opposition to knowledge. It must by defintion be empty. It is as if someone who was blind pointed and said: "that is a chair". Since he could be pointing at anything, to all extents and purposes he points at nothing. It is logically impossible to refer to the unknown: about it we must accept our blindness and hold our peace. As Wittgenstein said: "Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent".
Next, to tackle pantheism. In philosophical jargon, the view expounded is that the things in the universe which "limit" each other are "modes" of the one "substance" - to wit, that which is self-subsistent, which can only be conceived in terms of itself. Now, the ontological configuration which this embodies seems to me to be this: that since one (infinite) substance subsumes every (finite) thing under its dominion, the universe is composite. What I mean is that if you remove a quality from the universe, you turn it into something with a different essence. (This ties in with the idealism of FH Bradley). But things can be said to be composite only within a certain frame of reference. That is, we can say: "Given conceiving a state of affairs, p, under a frame of reference, s, changing any part of p would change the overall composition of s". But we cannot say: "Given a state of affairs, p, changing any part of p would radically alter p". Why? Because p is determinate only if we blank out everything else in the universe and render a (limiting) frame of reference. Factor the rest of the universe in, and determinacy defers to the macrocosm - whilst relations between the parts become merely incidental (as opposed to composite). And we know, courtesy of relativity, that there is no priveliged frame of reference - or "ether" - which goes under the name of God.
[ Edited by wittgensteins at
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