Just Wondering
Does anyone know when it was that bloggers, journalists, and others writing about religion made the choice to start using “god” instead of “God” to refer to … well, that’s sort of the problem, isn’t it? And if not when, does anyone know why they’ve made it? I mean, it’s really not at all clear exactly what kind of construction one is using when one writes, e.g., that:
If, however, we live in a vast and varying multiverse, there could be as many as 10 [to the power of] 500 different universes in all, making the chance of ours occurring among them comfortably higher. Thus, multiverse theory eliminates the fine-tuning argument for the existence of god.
Or again:
… it occurs to me once again that there is a very obvious difference between a Flying Spaghetti Monster and god (of whatever denomination): the Flying Spaghetti Monster is a construct designed specifically to ridicule, and god is not.
That second example is especially illustrative, I think: “Flying Spaghetti Monster” is really a (non-referring) proper name, of course, and as such it gets capitalized in English sentences. But in English we just don’t have a rule that allows us to use a non-capitalized singular nominative without preceding it with a definite or indefinite article – or at least, if we do have such a rule, then I can’t think offhand of any cases where it’s used other than (the?) “god” one.
So what’s the motivation? Is it because what’s supposed to be at stake in these discussions is exactly the question of whether God exists? But then why don’t we do the same for mythical spaghetti monsters and the like? Is it because it’s supposed to be left open whether there might be more than one divine being, or because there’s a concern as to whether the word “God” in the mouths of various English-speaking believers doesn’t always have the same referent? But then why not “the existence of a god (or gods)”, “between a Flying Spaghetti Monster and a god”, etc.”? Is there some substantive idea here that I’m somehow blind to? Or is it just one of those subtle ways that languages happen to evolve, something that I, too, will have to fall in with if I don’t want to be the only one left clinging to the linguistic peculiarities of the past?
Like I said, I’m just wondering.
Substitute, say, government, ethics, morality, propriety, etc, none of which we capitalize and all of which we refer to as singular nouns. If you think of G(g)od as a category or concept rather than a person, it makes more sense.
— Freddie · Apr 4, 08:48 PM · #
Yes, but when we talk about “the existence of God”, we’re not talking about the existence of a category or concept, but rather about the existence of something that falls under it. Hence the thing to write would be “a god”, since God, should such a being exist, is a person, and not an abstract thing like government and whatnot.
— John Schwenkler · Apr 4, 08:56 PM · #
Actually, let me put that a bit differently, since it’s not so much the issue of personhood that matters as the fact that God is supposed to be an entity, and so the question of whether God exists is distinct in this way from the question of whether there is, say, matter or justice in the world. And if you want to object that it’s possible that there might be multiple such entities (assuming that’s not excluded by the very concept), and that in this way the use of a general term might be appropriate, the only proper way to do that would be to use the plural or precede it by an article.
— John Schwenkler · Apr 4, 09:19 PM · #
Freddie: If you think of G(g)od as a category or concept rather than a person, it makes more sense.
If you’re using it that way, possibly, but you weren’t. In that post you wrote “god” referring to an entity, e.g. the “existence of god”.
We don’t often speak of the existence of mere categories or concepts, because clearly they exist insofar as we define them. So I think John is right here.
— Gherald L · Apr 4, 10:07 PM · #
I think Hitchens’ book “god is not Great” (note the miniscule g in the title) may have something to do with it, or at least is an extreme example. And Hitchens fastidiously uses a small g even when he is referring not to the general idea of “a god,” but to the personal god of the Old Testament. He does capitalize the G, though, when quoting believers.
But the lowercase g as the first word of a title? My 6th grade grammar teacher would have known how to put the fear of God into him.
— Kevin · Apr 4, 11:28 PM · #
Thanks for the heads-up on Hitchens, Kevin; I hadn’t known that (I don’t think it was spelled that way in most of the reviews I read), and it certainly helps the practice makes more sense. That doesn’t, however, change the fact that it’s simply ridiculous as a matter of English usage.
— John Schwenkler · Apr 4, 11:41 PM · #
N. T. Wright started it.
— Robert Ayers · Apr 5, 05:04 AM · #
Okay, so that is a helpful tip. But Wright, so far as I can tell, usually precedes uncapitalized references to “god” by “a” or “the” or some other article, which is of course what the grammar demands. For example:
(Note, however, that he often capitalizes when he’s speaking of God within the context of Christian theology.) If this is were all that people were doing, it would be fine by me. But when a word functions in a sentence as a proper name, it needs to begin with a capital letter. That’s just English.
— John Schwenkler · Apr 5, 05:40 AM · #
Clearly the authors in question have embraced the notion of God as both one and many and are using appropriate grammar for a collective noun, as one would with money or pudding.
Actually, I think it’s a confused imitation of the decapitalization of Him/His/He etc.
— sidereal · Apr 5, 07:45 AM · #
“That’s just English.”
Many miss the grammar aspect. They’re copying what they think is a style.
I think.
— Robert Ayers · Apr 5, 09:11 AM · #
There’s no dividing line between grammar, idiom and style. Language is a social creation.
— Freddie · Apr 5, 02:18 PM · #
Yes, but the problem is that it’s not such a noun, and if the desire is to leave open the possibility of multiple divinities then there are perfectly grammatical constructions that can do just that.
Right. Which is why it’s not up to a handful of individuals to change it for no good reason; or rather, if they do exercise that option then it comes across to most readers less as style than as foolishness.
— John Schwenkler · Apr 5, 02:57 PM · #
Right. Which is why it’s not up to a handful of individuals to change it for no good reason; or rather, if they do exercise that option then it comes across to most readers less as style than as foolishness.
I just think that you are in fact begging the question about the nature of GAWD when you insist thems can’t be a category.
— Freddie · Apr 5, 03:43 PM · #
I was (I thought plainly) being facetious. My actual guess at an explanation follows shortly thereafter.
I’m curious as to your opinion of the grammaticality of capitalized second person pronouns pour Dieu.
— sidereal · Apr 5, 05:03 PM · #
Whoops. . third person, of course. Although I believe Thou and Thine are customary, so second works as well.
— sidereal · Apr 5, 05:08 PM · #
And am I begging the question about the nature of you if I insist that you are not a potato, or about the nature of unicorns if I insist that they, if there are any, must have horns? No, because such things are simply analytic. Talk about the existence of God is plainly talk about the existence of an entity; if you want to talk about a “category” (whatever that is) instead, that’s fine, but in that case you’re not talking about God, and so what you’re saying has little if anything to do with theism or mainstream religion.
I think it’s entirely optional, and in any case not at all obligatory for non-believers. Here’s a longer discussion of the topic, though.
— John Schwenkler · Apr 5, 06:49 PM · #
Cf. the decapitalization of Man. I will resist the urge to pronounce ominously on the decapitalization of our own names in email addresses, IM handles, and twitter accounts.
— James · Apr 5, 07:31 PM · #
This happens to be one of the things I’m working on right now! Given as few as two epistemically possible futures in a single world, the binary expansion of those possibilities can be shown via Cantorian diagonalisation to be uncountable.
Since the set of all possible worlds is at least isomorphic to the power set of all the possible futures within each worlds, the lowest possible cardinality of all possible worlds is greater than the cardinality of the continuum (this is why David Lewis remarks off-handedly in one of his introductions that the minimum number of gods existing at all worlds is beth-2).
The upshot is that probabilistic calculations about the existence of God (i.e., at the actual world) are undefined. Anthropic principles (e.g., fine-tuning) just don’t tell one way or the other for theism or atheism. This is so whether or not MWI turns out to be the correct interpretation of quantum mechanics.
— Daniel Koffler · Apr 5, 09:31 PM · #
Wrong thread, Dan.
— John Schwenkler · Apr 5, 09:38 PM · #
Well of course it’s not obligatory. What would the punishment be for failure to do so? Or do you mean non-sinful? Or grammatically correct?
But by describing the capitalization of non-sentence-initial pronouns as ‘optional’, you leave open the possibility, even though noncapitalization of pronouns is, as they say, ‘just English’. And to return to the topic of collectivity, I commonly see examples like ‘the God of the Israelites’ in which a determiner indicates the being in question is a member of a set, and yet it receives capitalization anyway.
All of which is to say you seem to believe that non-believers must hew more closely to certain grammatical rules than believers. If the difference is custom, recall that all customs start somewhere and at some time the capitalization of pronouns was novel, but you’re unbothered by its descendants.
— sidereal · Apr 5, 10:23 PM · #
I mean both: it’s optional as a matter of grammar, and not at all obligatory as a matter of respect for the divine.
But can’t that also be read as: “the being whom the Israelites refer to as [or: with the Hebrew equivalent of] ‘God’”?
How so? There’s only one set of grammatical rules – i.e., the ones that specify that proper names must be capitalized, that non-collective nouns must be preceded by articles or otherwise pluralized, and so on – that I’m demanding that anyone hew to, and those rules are rules that I’m arguing are binding on everyone who’s a speaker or writer of English.
— John Schwenkler · Apr 5, 10:51 PM · #
It’s possible, but I think it’s a strained reading, especially when you acknowledge that the Israelites wouldn’t use the (Germanic) word ‘God’ at all, as you indicate. I think if you were referring directly to the term rather than the denotation, it would be both in the native language and almost certainly surrounded in quotes. Something like ‘the “Allah” of the Saudis’, or at least ‘the Allah’. There’s a timely example in Kathleen Parker’s column today: “which makes our God look weak in the eyes of the world”. I’m not sure whether the original quote was written or whether the capitalization there is part of the Post’s style guide in transcribing verbal quotes, but regardless I think ‘which makes our entity which we refer to as God’ is a stilted gloss. All that being said, after my last comment it occurred to me that ‘the Lady of the castle’ and ‘the King of France’ might fall into the same usage pattern. I can’t think of any examples that fall outside the general category of respect-affordance.
My understanding of your previous comment was that you allowed capitalized pronouns (optionally) in reference to God, despite the fact that English does not grammatically support capitalized pronouns. As I stated initially, I think ‘god’ is an error in the context under discussion, but I also think ‘He’ is an error. And to the extent one supports ‘He’ for subtextual reasons, I think there’s equal justification to support ‘god’, if lack of respect is what one wants to convey.
— sidereal · Apr 6, 12:23 AM · #
But look: English plainly does support the use of capitalized pronouns in that context; or at least, that’s a much more common usage than the “god” one under discussion. And moreover, I have no problem at all with the “lack of respect” shown by refusing to capitalize the “G”, and as I said in my remark about N.T. Wright I think there are plenty of good reasons why one might want to go that route; my point is just that if one does want, for whatever reason, to use “god” instead of “God”, then such a usage has to be preceded by an article, as it is in both of the instances you cite. The notion that “god” can be put in the same grammatical category as “matter” or “substance” betrays a lack of respect, not for the word’s referent, but simply for the linguistic conventions governing the kind of word it is.
— John Schwenkler · Apr 6, 01:55 AM · #
Why is this so difficult?
“I praise God the Father and his son Jesus.”—Perfect English
“I praise Allah and his prophet Mohammad.”—Perfect English
“I praise God the Father and His Son Jesus.”—Slightly strained English (justified by long tradition and acceptable to all but atheistic ideologs)
“I praise god the father and his son jesus.” (ridiculous construction designed arrogantly to provoke)
“I praise allah and his prophet mohammad.”—(ridiculous construction designed to invite Jihadist fatwas)
“I praise the essence of the Allness and its manifestations as god and truth and love.” (Nonsensical jiberish)
— tim a · Apr 6, 04:09 AM · #
It’s that nonsensical gibberish at the end there, tim a, that I think is a little unfair.
— Freddie · Apr 6, 12:53 PM · #
Freddie’s right – it’s not nonsensical gibberish, or at least it needn’t be, so long as some substantive interpretation can be given to what it says. (Paging F.H. Bradley …) The problem here is that, in particular in its talk of “god”, what that sentence says isn’t at all the sort of thing that ordinary religious believers believe when they talk (in English) about “God”, and so on, and hence any dispute over whether that statement is true is, just as in the case disputes over “the existence of god”, not a dispute over whether ordinary religious believers are right – and it’s precisely that discussions of e.g. the multiverse are supposed to amount to.
— John Schwenkler · Apr 6, 02:15 PM · #
so long as some substantive interpretation can be given to what it says.
There’s the rub. The “gibberish” remark surely wasn’t directed toward the thoughts/beliefs behind that sort of statement (or else I would have labelled either the “Allah/prophet” or “Father/Jesus” statement as gibberish as well, depending on whether I’m Muslim or Christian). So if I was “unfair,” it must have been in the arrogant dismissal of the re-purposing of language. True, I am very skeptical of this sort of thing, but admit that new insights sometimes require new usages. If you’re a Nietzsche or Kristeva, you can pull it off. Your commenter “matoko chan” seems to take it to an extreme that is often hard to decipher (at least for a yeoman nn 3llt, whatever that is).
It is at the point that the new usage is backfilled into existing contexts that useful communication breaks down. Evolution within the standard rules is fine; it doesn’t require breaking down the rules. This is what I suggest that the standardization of “god” would be. Unless that usage were carefully limited to a specific “new” context, be it New Age or whatever.
I thought this was sort of what Schwenkler was getting at in the first place.
— tim a · Apr 6, 03:13 PM · #
Yes, it is – thanks!
— John Schwenkler · Apr 6, 03:59 PM · #
I’m one of those people that don’t always capitalize God. I do it out of a combination of laziness and some kind of weird anti-authorityism (is that even a word). Clearly this practice doesn’t follow the rules of standard english grammar, but sometimes there are more important things thanfollowing the rules of grammer, and one of those things is sticking it to the man. Everytime I write “god” the man cringes a little bit. He feels in his blackened and powdery soul another little piece of the dried blood cementing together the blocks of compressed bones that make up his castle of authority become friable and blow away. That is not a good feeling that I am making the man feel and eventually the man’s castle will tumble to the ground and we’ll all be free. ANd on that day, as we dance arm and arm through the burning streets, I will be able to look my fellow insurectionists in the eye and know that I did my part.
— cw · Apr 7, 03:32 AM · #
After reading through that discourse, I’d say Tim nails it, particularly with his gibberish line. But cw illustrates the real motivation, admitted or not, underlying this kind of grammatical sneering: an antipathy toward the mere idea of the divine, which they would rather indulge than suborn to the rules of the language.
— Bill · Apr 7, 04:16 PM · #
I’m not going to suborn (are you sure you’re using that word right) to yer freakin rules of language either, daddy-o. I’m a descriptionista as are all good insurectionists.
— cw · Apr 8, 03:27 AM · #
Nicely done, cw. And does the undergraduate e-mailer’s refusal to capitalize the first-person singular nominative constitute a similar form of postmodern protest against the hegemony of the Cartesian subject?
— John Schwenkler · Apr 8, 05:41 AM · #
Mr. Schwenkler,
I’m thinking you read that as satire (not always easy to know what people mean in the comments, they lack facial expression and tone of voice clues), but most of what I wrote about myself was sadly fairly true. I don’t always capitalize god and the above is the result of me examining my motives for this. I was satirizing myself mostly.
— cw · Apr 8, 03:09 PM · #
cw: That’s pretty much how I took it, actually; I suppose you’re a more expressive commenter than you might think!
— John Schwenkler · Apr 8, 03:52 PM · #
I just need to learn to trust the reader more.
— cw · Apr 8, 05:08 PM · #
I’m the author of the article in question. In this post on my blog, I offer some context about the matter of “god” in it. There’s also a good discussion in the comments with some comrades of mine on the issue.
Great blog, by the way. I just discovered it a bit before this post went up and have enjoyed it a lot.
— Nathan Schneider · Apr 15, 02:58 AM · #