The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

The Idea of God 21
They themselves address God daily in prayer, so they must consider him
a person in my sense. I suspect that they bear allegiance to some analysis
of personhood that I would reject.
Someone may want to ask me how I can consider God a person
when, as a Christian, I’m bound to agree that ‘‘there is one Person
of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost’’.
Sophisticated theologians will smile when they hear this question, and
tell the questioner that ‘Person’ is a technical term in Trinitarian
theology and does not mean what it means in everyday life; they will
go on to say that it’s doubtless in the everyday sense of the word that
van Inwagen is saying that God is a person—not that they will approve
of my applying to God everyday terms that apply to human beings,
but they will offer me this escape from straightforward contradiction.
I won’t take the proposed escape route, though. In my view, ‘Person’
in Trinitarian theology means just exactly what I mean by it—a being
who can be addressed, a ‘Thou’—and it is they who are confused. As to
the ‘‘one God, three Persons’’ question—ah, well, that is, as they say,
beyond the scope of these lectures. 3
Before leaving the topic of the personhood of God, I should say
a word about sex—not sex as the vulgar use the word, not sexual
intercourse, but sexual dimorphism—what people are increasingly of
late, and to my extreme annoyance, coming to call ‘gender’. We haven’t
yet officially said this, but, as everyone knows, God does not occupy
space, so he can’t have a physical structure; but to have a sex, to be male
or female, is, among other things, to have a physical structure. God,
therefore, does not have a sex. It is literally false that he is male, and
literally false that he is female. My point in raising the issue is simply
to address this question: What about this pronoun ‘he’ that I’ve been
using? This problem is raised not by any feature of God’s nature, but by
the English language, in which the only third-person-singular pronouns
are ‘he’, ‘she’, and ‘it’. We cannot call God ‘it’, for that pronoun is
reserved for non-persons—like the Dialectic of History or the Force.
It would be nice if English had a sex-neutral third-person-singular
pronoun that applied to persons, but it doesn’t. (Many languages do.)
English does have sex-neutral pronouns that apply to persons—‘they’,
for example—and in fact has a good many sex-neutral pronouns that
apply only to persons, such as ‘one’ and ‘someone’ and ‘who’, but it
lacks third-person-singular pronouns having these desirable features.
(Some of our more enlightened contemporaries have proposed a system
of ‘‘divine pronouns’’, but I can’t quite bring myself to say things like,