Clear V. True

It's an easy concept to start with. What is the difference between saying a statement is clear or saying a statement is true? In critical thought, these distinctions form a good part of "clear" thinking.

Let us assume there is a question and then an answer. Let us look first at the question. Can we at least agree that if the question is not asking anything, no answer is possible? That is the predicament we are in if we fail to recognize this distinction about clarity and truth.

In Philosophy class a favorite question is, of course, Does God exist? It seems to be a question, right? But let's take a look at it in more detail and see how this fits into understanding the difference between clarity and truth.

Does God exist? is a question that has two important parts. God and Existence. In order to make a question clear we have to what? we have to agree that these two parts make sense to everyone involved?

Existence.

When I say I exist or I say my happiness exists or I say God exists, am I using "existence" in the same way? For instance, my existence is about me in one place at one time. Happiness existing is about a subjective experience. And … God's existence is much different. I can say I am in Austin, but I cannot say that I am, at the same time, in London. About God, of course, as people conceive of him (or her, or it), we can say he is in Austin and London simultaneously. So, the existence, at least in the form we have asked, is different. How is this sorted out? Certainly if we want to be clear, we are going to have to figure out what is meant by "existence."

God.

As fun as the noun is, we can all agree, it is a word thrown around with very little examination. When you are asking about "him" are you asking about the same "him" of which I am thinking? Can we easily agree - as is necessary to communicate - that your conception of this noun is the same as mine? To be clear, one can see, when asking about a noun, one must have an idea what that noun is. Do you? Is God a being that can do anything? Is he omnipotent?

(remember here we are still stuck on this idea of clarity - that without making a question clear, no true answer can be given)

So, let's get down to business. If we believe God is omnipotent, he can do anything. By anything we must mean "any" thing. If we observe with our own eyeballs that the world sucks, what does that mean about God. This is, by the way, the ancient 'stab" at religious belief named "The problem of evil." It is pretty simple and it has been around a while. If God can fix evil why doesn't he? If he can do anything and he chooses not to fix it, he must, at least to some degree, be evil because he chooses evil.

I know, that's a lot.

This has all been argued long ago. And the challenge for religious people was so great that they had to spend considerable time rescuing God from the charge of being either evil or not all-powerful. Because, in light of this challenge, it appears, he must be one or the other.

So when I use the word "God" am I using the evil one or the not all-powerful one? Or something else? Of course, historically, this just would not do. Neither of those options worked for religious people. In response, as we know, they invented the argument from free will. In order to make God's inventions (humans) free he had to give them the choice to be evil or good and, as you can see, many of them chose evil. God WAS NOT able to make them good decisions makers, so he had to provide them with free will. I get here that religious people believe he HAD to provide free will to make them human and real and that it was the "best of all worlds." My problem with it, as we shall see, is that you cannot "provide" free will.

Let's take a break for second. Is this definition of the word God becoming more or less clear? Because if we cannot make it clear, we certainly cannot ask a question about existence. We cannot do this because my definition of the noun, God, will be different from yours and you will proclaim the existence or non-existence of something different from what I was asking about.

And here's the crux of the matter. I can know that the last part of the evolution of the "God-theory" is unclear because of this: God cannot be omnipotent and not omnipotent at the same time. If he can do anything, he can create better decision makers such that they will not always be choosing to do bad things that he must allow. If he cannot create better decision makers and if he can do anything about it, then the sentence and the claim and the question are senseless. It even begs the question about who comes first, God or man? And that's a really silly one. If God came first, he might have just invented a better creature such that the problems related to evil didn't come up. If man came first, then the very essence of the God definition has to be changed.

Wow, so that's a mess. As one might expect. Why is it a mess? Because religious thinkers in primitive times were painted into a corner by logic (for example, the Problem of evil) and had to squirm their way out of it or give up their God concept.

What we can see here, if nothing else, is that the question "Does God exist?" is mostly unclear. There is no way to find out if it is true (which is a completely different question) until it is cleared up. If I ask if birds are real (and I wish they weren't, they are nasty and selfish, like new-age Republicans) I am asking a question you can answer. "Yes, to the best of my empirical knowledge," the winged miscreants are real. But if I ask if God exists, I have now asked a question of which there are many further problems that must be sorted out. Because of this I cannot in good conscience answer. This is why academics rarely answer it at all, even when they are mistakenly religious.

I am not here concerned with God at all. I am concerned with the distinction between what it means to say a question is clear and what it means to say an answer is true. My mentor used to say (God bless his departed soul) that all of Philosophy is Clarity and Wisdom. I think by this he meant some of the same things as what I have written here. He meant that much of the work is clearing this up and the rest of the work is taking those cleared up things and finding the answers to them. For our purposes, we have learned that if you don't clear things up, no answer is possible.