The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

The Idea of God 19
my list, is not the God of the Bible or the God of the ordinary believer.
This idea is no more plausible than the idea—Eddington’s—that ‘‘the
table of the physicists’’ is not the table of the home-furnishings catalogue
or the table of the ordinary householder.)
And I think I must add one more qualification: by ‘Jews, Christians,
and Muslims’, I mean ‘Jews, Christians, and Muslims who lived before
the twentieth century’. If you are puzzled by this qualification, I invite
you to examine two quotations from the writings of a theologian of
considerable reputation, the sometime occupant of a chair of theology
in the Divinity School of a great university. As a matter of deliberate
policy, I will not identify him. I assure you, however, that he is real and
that the quotations are exact:
To regard God as some kind of describable or knowable object over against us
would be at once a degradation of God and a serious category error.
It is a mistake, therefore, to regard qualities attributed to God (e.g., aseity,
holiness, omnipotence, omniscience, providence, love, self-revelation) as though
they were features of ...aparticularbeing.
These words mean almost nothing. Insofar as they mean anything, they
mean ‘There is no God’. 2 It is precisely because a significant proportion
of the theologians of the last 100 years would not have agreed with
this judgment that I exclude any reference to them from my criterion.
I therefore propose that we find the properties to be included in our
definition of God by asking what properties Jewish, Christian, and
Muslim philosophers and theologians in the year 1900 or earlier would
have agreed were essential properties of God. (This, at any rate, was
my first inclination. But Richard Swinburne has pointed out to me that
theologians said some pretty odd things about God in the nineteenth
century, too, and on reflection I had to agree with him. Maybe we should
push the date back to 1800, just to be on the safe side. And I suppose I
should apologize to the Muslims for including them, quite unnecessarily
really, in my historical adjustment. There are serious charges that can
justly be brought against some twentieth-century Muslim theology, but
the charge of proposing a meaning for the word ‘God’ that enables
atheists who occupy chairs of theology to talk as if they were theists is
not one of them.)
I shall first present the list that I contend can be so derived and discuss
each item in it individually. Then I shall make some remarks about the
list as a whole. These remarks will address two questions: first, is the list
just a ‘‘laundry list’’, a jumble of historical accidents, or is there some