Objective Words

One of the odd things about language, which we normally do not notice, is that it does latch on to the physical world around us. We refer to an object. I do not wish (even if I understood it) to get into the philosophical debate over referring. Sometimes it seems only a way for philosophers of language to pretend to be a bit racy, by referring to some bits of language as copula and hence copulating. It perhaps tells us all we need to know about philosophers of language.

Anyway, it is certain that some bits of language refer, and refer to objects in the world. A sentence ‘She drives the car’ has a subject, the person doing something, a verb, the doing word, and an object, the thing to which stuff is done. Hence ‘she’ in the sentence is the subject, ‘drives’ is the verb, and ‘the car’ is the object. The sentence refers to two things in the world, the driver and the car, and the subject doing something to the object.

This is all very fine and clear, but mostly we do not talk about the world in quite this way. At least, if we did talk about the world in only this way it would be a rather boring world. We say lots of other things about objects which are not necessarily in the world. For example, we talk about the future: ‘I will see you tomorrow’ has subjects and objects and verbs but refers to the meeting in the future, that is, the meeting does not exist at the point the sentence is uttered.

We can also speak of objects which we have never observed for ourselves, for example, ‘Sydney is the capital of Australia.’ I have never been to Sydney, nor to Australia, and doubt that I will, but I can still construct the sentence and utter it. You might also have noticed that the sentence is wrong. Sydney is not the capital of Australia, but that did not stop me constructing the sentence nor you understanding what I mean. As such, of course, the sentence fails because it does not refer to an actual object correctly. I believe Sydney exists, but it is not the capital of Australia.

Language, even in these fairly simple cases, is clearly a lot trickier than we normally give it credit for. This is probably just as well, for if we spent our time wondering whether our sentences referred to the world we would be a lot slower in communicating than we are. But there are implications of these problems in both science and theology.

In science the problem is one of inferring. We have inferred the existence of electrons, for example, from a great deal of evidence. However, we have never seen an electron directly, not even with the most powerful microscopes we have, or can imagine. It is not that they are so tiny, but that the mere act of shining a light (a photon) on one will cause the electron to move and thus whatever we see will not be an electron. This is called the Compton effect, but is not the only issue at play here. There is no such thing as a ‘bare’ electron in the world according to quantum electrodynamics, it is always surrounded by a cloud of virtual particles, so even if we could get around the Compton effect we still would not be seeing an electron. But we still refer to electrons as objects in the world.

In theology, however, God is not an object in the world. If God were an object in the world the sentence ‘God is great’ would simply mean that got was a lot bigger, better, whatever we interpret ‘great’ as meaning than anything else in the world. But as atheists are keen to observe, we cannot point to God in the world and, therefore, our sentence may not refer to an object.

We have to grant something of a problem here, in that God is not open to direct observation. We speak of God through models and metaphors. We say that ‘God is my rock’ and do not expect to direct our attention to a lump of granite somewhere in the world. This is in fact similar (with differences, of course) to the electron. We can say ‘the electron hops from one energy state to another’ without being able to observe an electron doing that. It is an inference from other evidence and, at the end of the process, a model for the behavior of electrons.

Similarly, ‘God is my rock’ is a model for an aspect of God – his faithfulness to us. If we push the model too far and start speculating as to the sort of rock God is, or even most like, we land up looking and sounding extremely silly. But then if we start pushing the model of electrons hopping too far we sound similarly daft. Our models are only useful in limited regions of applicability. Part of the trickiness of both theology and science (and, for all I know other subjects) is to work out the regions of applicability of our models, and where they become invalid.

We can, then, claim that God exists, but just not as an observable object in the world. We have therefore to argue that the physical world is not all that there is. In a sense, this is a fairly easy thing to do, given what we have already said about language partially constructing the world. A marriage is not a physical object within the world, but it does not stop us talking about it, arguing and debating about its meaning, creating and dissolving marriages and so on. A marriage may not be a physical object in the world, but we cannot deny that we can refer to it. Of course, a marriage has manifestations in the physical world, but then, a theist would argue, so does God. We have concepts, models, and metaphors for both.