Brown, Thomas Patterson;
(1962)
The logic of 'God'.
Doctoral thesis (PhD), University College London.
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Abstract
The purpose of the essay is to investigate the internal structure of the Christian concept of divinity. Section 1 is devoted to defining ’Christian theism’, and to rejecting four criticisms which might be made of trying to analyze the notion 'God' at all. Then, in Section 2, a number of traditional theories about theistic discourse are examined. Particular attention is given to the view that certain theological propositions are necessarily true; four different arguments for this conclusion are repudiated, but the author admits that there is prima facie plausibility to the contention that certain theistic propositions are analytic. Section 3, however, is devoted to rejecting the last-mentioned analysis, in favour of the author's own theory about theological and religious forms of speech. First, three arguments are given in proof that ’God’ means ’most worshipful being’. The author then observes that 'worshipful’ is an evaluative, rather than a descriptive, concept. An analysis of evaluative discourse is therefore proffered, to the effect that there is a necessary hiatus between evaluative meanings and the criteria of application and of truth in evaluative contexts. This leads the author to contend that certain theistic propositions are innocuously synthetic a priori; such statements are christened ’battologies'. The role of certain crucial performative utterances in religion is considered, and the exact form of the specifically Christian criteria of divinity is delineated. The author concludes by suggesting the following as categories for classifying theistic propositions: analytic, battological, evaluatively true, evaluatively false, anti-battological, and necessarily oblique. In Section 4. the author analyzes several of the most basic Christian criteria of worshipfulness or divinity. Regarding omniscience, omnipotence, perfect goodness, (necessary) existence, transcendence, and being the creator of all but oneself, the author examines various interpretations and misinterpretations which have been put forward in the past, and also gives his own analyses. conclusion, the compatibility of the aforementioned criteria of divinity is discussed.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | PhD |
| Title: | The logic of 'God' |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| UCL classification: | UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of Philosophy |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10206175 |
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