On her birthday, Miss A found a large box on her doorstep; a card identified it as from Mr. B. But, upon opening the box, she discovered another box, which contained another box, and so on through twelve boxes. The last one was quite tiny, and quite empty.

Obviously, with additional specification, more definitive answers are possible. “Yes”, if the boxes are made of progressively more precious metals, or are hand-painted Florentine crafts, or are an intricately nested puzzle, (and A loves that sort of puzzle). “No”, if they are plain cardboard, or must be destroyed in the act of opening, or contain empty wads of tissue paper; (B really wants to end the relationship.) 

When, in pursuing her genealogical research, Ellen found in an Italian village church, some rather detailed records concerning her direct ancestors, she also uncovered the tragic fact that, for a period of 3 or 4 generations — some 70 years — all her progenitors had fallen victim to the plague, and perished as small children. Sitting there in that dusty alcove, she could almost see the innocent tykes of long ago running across the Tuscan hills. Then, they get feverish, slow and fall, and eventually are struck down by the dread disease. Her own great-great .... grandparents.

(Remember the old puzzler kids liked to use to entrap unwary adults? They would present lots of complex details involving an airline disaster, state borders, locations of the wreckage and the bodies, and finally pose the “difficult” question — “So, where should they bury the survivors?” Some will ponder the legalistic issues for a few minutes — I must have been a victim — before realizing — Survivors don’t get buried!) 

Sam couldn’t contain himself when describing the desirable characteristics of his new ladyfriend, Sue. He must have rambled on through 20 or 30 attributes: “What a sense of humor; an expert œnologist; an oriental beauty of pure Siamese stock; so milliary; a perfect figure; quick witted; very , very, sesamoid; a violist of near-professional caliber; piercing blue eyes and curly, natural blonde hair like shavings of gold ingots; at just the right times she was parabolic; a canny epistemologist; a great cook ...

Do we tell Sam that he is confused, lying, or drunk? That he has no lady-friend? That Sue doesn’t exist? Or do we say that Sue is a complex woman, indeed? It is hard to say that his entire description is vague. It isn’t. Does the presence of those inscrutable, inappropriate characteristics make his entire description nonsense? Does the contradiction, once revealed, retroactively cancel all prior meaning? (The branchings of an overgrown concept like “God” do resemble a majestic, vigorous oak. We cannot believe that such a tree would be instantly vaporized were we to discover a bug on one leaf, and an anti-bug on another far-distant leaf.) 

If there are no square-circles (and there aren’t), then there aren’t any pretty, blue, square-circles. If there are no blond Thai women, then Sue, together with her laundry list of fascinating attributes, doesn’t exist. Period. 

Sam can avoid that drastic conclusion by employing the usual techniques; make fine distinctions, retract part of his description, modify, hedge, blur, obfuscate ... (It is worth pointing out that these all amount to a kind of surrender; an abandonment of the original position.) For example, that nasty inconsistency can be eliminated by abandoning just one of the pair of mutually exclusive qualities. Drop “natural” from “blond” and that will do the trick. Sue can be an Asiatic, bleached blond. Any property can be relinquished or drastically reconfigured if the property is not an essential, “defining” property. “Ugly Mermaid” is not a contradiction in terms, if “beautiful” is not a necessary component of mermaidhood.

Those claiming that “God” is meaningless, must grant that it is not prima facie meaningless, like “grod.” Whatever lack of meaning one attributes to terms like “square-circle,” “married bachelor,” or “prime divisible by 4,” it is not the meaninglessness of “grod.” Nor would anyone deny that such terms may have significant “emotive meaning,” or provoke rich, visual imagery. The entire skeptical tradition, including Logical Positivism, proceeded upon the presumption of initial significance for “God.” “God” was then analyzed (a de facto admission that there was some meaning to explore) into other concepts, viz, the package of characteristics listed as the standard meaning in the dictionary. When that package, at some near or far point, is shown to contain either intractable vagueness and obscurity, or a definite contradiction in the form of incompatible attributes, then, logically, the charge of “meaninglessness” may be levied retroactively. “God” is equivalent to the package of properties, some (all?) of which are unintelligible or self-contradictory or incompatible with other properties, given that all the properties are essential ones. It is, of course, tempting to assert that whatever is equivalent to nonsense is itself, nonsense. That may be logically correct, but a trifle too facile. 

What actually happens is this: deferring absurdity through a series of deductive inferences — and, historically they have been long, tortuous, and convoluted sequences of analyses itself creates the illusion of meaning. The chain may end nowhere, but there’s the chain itself, isn’t there? (Remember the nested boxes?) That is what lends the suggestion of substance, of significance. And, there are psychological traps springing from our own natural humility and openness to genuine inquiry. Arguably, “God” is inscribed, voiced, or thought some trillion times daily. Surely, the billions upon billions of paragraphs about God penned by the devout, by theologians, even by philosophers, can’t all be pure gibberish, on a par with “Twas brillig ....”? Those thinkers weren’t all blithering idiots, were they? Here, the weight of tradition, prestige of the author, and the sheer volume of repetition, can combine to produce a semblance of significance — meaning by iteration. The Logical Positivists, in their frequent parodies of Hegel, described how, though our first encounters with that rococo Hegelian prose detailing the activities of the Absolute might appear mystifying, after 100 pages (and metaphysical grogginess sets in), the Absolute’s cavortings will seem as understandable as the antics of an old school chum. 

Another neat bit of self-deception is simply to avoid thinking about those nasty incompatible attributes, a vicious but comforting form of rationalization. Sue did have a terrific figure, and was a great cook, wasn’t she? Never mind that contradiction lurking somewhere down the road. Since any given entity will have many (perhaps uncountably many) properties, we can avoid difficulty by not thinking about the problematic ones. Just concentrate on how pretty, and how blue, the square-circle is. 

Furthermore, is a contradiction literally nonsense? A contradiction is a statement that is false in all possible worlds. False. Not “meaningless.” “Square-circles exist” isn’t meaningless; it’s false. It means that we can find, in the relevant domain, a closed plane figure with the defining properties of a square, and the defining properties of a circle. But no figure simultaneously combining both sets of properties can be or ever will be found. 

Many may recall the first glitch encountered in the theistic definitional picture as being the incompatibility between God’s being All-Just and All-Merciful. Just what does He do when sentencing a dastardly, but contrite sinner? However, it is doubtful that those properties would be considered fundamental, except by fundamentalists. 

My first philosophy instructor, a savagely brilliant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, shocked his introductory logic class by boasting that if you gave him any two of God’s properties, he could derive a contradiction from them. Few, perhaps, believed him, and fewer still would have dared challenge him. However, it now appears that he was absolutely correct, though unduly modest. Take any one property; when unpacked, a contradiction can usually be found lurking therein. 

Let’s try “perfect,” unarguably a fundamental, defining property. These brief, familiar scenarios afford an inkling of just how quickly the analysis can bog down in confusion and inconsistency: 
 

“Perfect” means that God is ultimate Being 
And that means ...? 
He includes all Being within Himself. 
Even germs, cancer, and bad breath? 
No, those are aspects of Non-Being 
And what’s that?

“Perfect” means that God has all perfections. 
What’s a perfection? 
Well, a desirable, positive attribute. 
For people? Or for bacteria? 
For people. 
So God is healthy, wealthy, and wise? 
Wise, yes. Not healthy or wealthy, except metaphorically. 
So God has only those perfections applying to minds? 
Yes, that’s it. 
Then, He must have a great sense of humor?

“Perfect” means that God is the best, the highest, the Supreme Being. 
Can He react, respond, answer prayers, know a changing event? 
Of course! Why not? If He couldn’t , He wouldn’t be perfect. 
But all of those necessitate change in Him. 
So what? 
A perfect being can’t change. That’s “what”. 
Why not? 
If your bowling score changes from 300, it’s worse.  
If a perfect being changes, it’s a change from perfect. So He’s worse. 
O.K. So He doesn’t change. 
But, you just said that would mean He was imperfect, since He couldn’t react, respond, or do anything.

It is [up to] the profession of theologians and the clergy to address the mess; suggest alternative meanings; devise, revise, and compromise; patch and mend, and make excuses for the tumescent growth that is the “God” concept. Indeed, sometimes they don’t even bother with that; they merely announce that mystery is good for us! Atheists, skeptics, and secularists have no need of pretense. They are free to call nonsense, nonsense, and the false, false – to forthrightly declare that the Emperor has no clothes.

The term “God” certainly does have a meaning. It has intentional meaning. It connotes a set of essential, core properties such that anything having all those properties is God, and anything missing one or more is not God. The question is whether it denotes, whether it names any entity.

But the claim that God has a meaning will draw the immediate retort that “God” has millions of public and private meanings, from some tribe’s golden idols, to “money is Sam’s god.” Yes, “god” does have a number of denotative meanings, but “God” doesn’t. The latter probably condensed from all the varied uses of the former, as the common, consensus, concept. (Still, the dictionary meaning must itself be adjudged a compromise, since it does not include properties such as “male,” “bearded,” “savior,” “sits on golden throne,” “answers to the name ‘Jesus’ ”.... Fundamentalists, if not the majority of Christians, certainly convey the impression that they think of these properties as essential ones.)

Moreover, the controversy is about “God”, not “god.” The issue between atheists and theists is whether God exists, not whether a certain tribe actually worships a golden image, or Sam values money above all else. We must deal with the contemporary concept at the center of the controversy, as it has developed over millennia and now stands as semantic hard fact.

Too often, we are discussing personal or private, local, tribal, sectarian, ethnic, ... gods, not God. Too often, the word “God” seems to be an open invitation to speculation, — (“God” means to me ...) — a field day for fantasy, as though meaning were entirely subjective and private. In this respect, “God” is similar to other abstract terms “Beauty,” “Justice,” “Love.” Everyone and his brother stands ready to expound his theory of what “Love” truly means. Consider the chaos if that were to happen for other terms, each having his own meaning for “pi” or “piano.” And try to conceive how a common language, to say nothing of science, could possibly have evolved on that theory of meaning.

Too often, thinkers — great thinkers — have discussed their concept of “God”; or what the term “really, really” means; or how it evolved in another culture; or what it could, would, should, or ought to mean (Dewey). Too often, great thinkers have rejected the given meaning of “God” out-of-hand as unthinkably silly, and gone on to discuss their altered, modified, renovated god, sometimes concluding that that being exists. This is like saying there’s nothing at all wrong with the toaster, after you’ve repaired it.) Too often, intellectuals have thought it beneath them to consider the patently anthropomorphic, juvenile, standard definition of “God” and proceeded directly to expounding their refined, esoteric, interpretation of the concept. (But, after all, it isn’t atheists’ fault that “God” is such an absurdity; they didn’t create the concept; they aren’t responsible for its Freudian origins being so transparent; they’re not the reason God’s Freudian slip is showing.)

In declaring one’s allegiance to a “remodeled” God, thinkers employ a suspect maneuver that sidesteps the nasty business of calling oneself an “atheist,” with all the social stigma attached to that sort of coming out. No, it is far safer, though surely disingenuous, to declaim that one certainly does believe in God, while knowing full well that your meaning is not the ordinary meaning, not the “God” of Aquinas or the Pope, Falwell, or Billy Graham. In fact, this charade takes place thousands of times each Sunday when the liberal, educated priest, minister (or rabbi) perpetuates a shameless deception, knowing full well that his rarefied, theoretical, Tillichian “God” is definitely not the “God” of his congregation. Consistency and honesty are here called for; if you call yourself a theist vis-a-vis your private conception of “God”, then you ought to have the integrity to call yourself an atheist, with respect to the public meaning.

On these matters, I believe it prudent to be a “dictionary philosopher.” “God” means what the dictionary says it means. And that statement should be no more controversial than the assertion that “table” or “piano” mean what the dictionary says they mean. Barring unlikely, extreme scenarios (Webster is a tool of the Baptists), the dictionary is merely reporting and reflecting common usage, as determined by a large, prestigious editorial board and contributing specialists. It is that meaning that comes first; that meaning that must be analyzed and discussed; that meaning that will form the basis for deciding the question, “Does God exist?” No matter how ingenious, provocative, and consistent other definitions of “God” may be, they are all either historical, describing what God has meant at some time or place, or theoretical reconstructions, disguised proposals for adopting a new definition, on the grounds that “God” ought to mean such-and-such. Regarding such proposals, if we are to achieve any semblance of clarity and sanity, we must take them “one deity at a time.” If, for example, a thinker advocates a picture of God as not perfect, where perfect means “complete,” that suggestion, with all its implications, is a new definition, to be evaluated on its own merits. However, our first order of business is to deal with the definition we have, in this time and place.

With understandably Draconian simplification, these remarks have attempted: to deal with the thorny questions of meaning and significance for the term “God” and the statement “God exists”; to show how they can acquire “belated meaning,” psychologically, from the very complexity of the analysis and our propensity for self-deception; to use different models exhibiting “deferred absurdity” cases where there is justification for either the claim of “nonsense” or “meaning.”

Pardon one final analogy. The concept of “God” could be compared to some Byzantine, Rube Goldberg contraption. When switched on, it initiates a sequence of dozens of wacky, clanking, stages that produce nothing. But, there’s a twist: the last step contains a tachyon circuit which, when activated , sends a pulse back in time that demolishes the machine, the moment before it’s switched on. Though endlessly fascinating, vastly entertaining, addictively compelling, our final verdict on such a machine and God must be that it does nothing, accomplishes nothing indeed, it was never there to begin with! But, oh, it was such fun. 

Tony Pasquarello is an emeritus professor of philosophy at The Ohio State University, Mansfield, a professional pop/jazz cocktail pianist, and philatelist. Major articles by him on the philosophy of religion have appeard in Free Inquiry, The Skeptical Inquirerer, and American Atheist. He is on the board of directors of the Mansfield Symphony and serves as its program annotator and pre-concert lecturer. He has given solo lecture-recitals in the Americas and throughout Europe. His quasi-autobiographical book The Altar Boy Chronicles is awaiting publication.