The Post

The 2014 Albert the Great Lecture, by Dr. Meghan Sullivan
The Rev. John A O’Brien, collegiate assistant professor of philosophy
University of Notre Dame

Naming God: The Problem of Semantic Hiddenness

Thursday, April 3, 2014; 4 p.m.; in Dunleavy 127

The well-known epistemic problem of religious pluralism presupposes that Jews, Christians, and Muslims can have a substantive debate about God. But when making claims using the names “YHWH,” “Hashem,” “God”, “Jehovah,” “Jesus,” “Allah,” do we have reason to believe that members of the different Abrahamic faiths are talking about the same being? Sullivan argues that two somewhat plausible assumptions about language, coupled with the fact of divine hiddenness (i.e., that God has not chosen to reveal even nearly as much about Himself as we would have liked), generate powerful reasons to think that the members of different faiths are not in fact disagreeing about the nature of one and the same being. This semantic problem leads to skeptical worries about the evidential role of religious testimony and forces reconsideration of various underlying theological and semantic assumptions.

The target of these arguments is the theist who believes that the Abrahamic God is importantly hidden but that we are nonetheless able to have substantive interfaith debates about Him. Sullivan aims to show that such a theist’s beliefs are unstable, despite the fact that she counts herself as such a theist, and so hopes that a solution to her problem can be found.