owleye

Detached9...

This is directed to your first post on this topic and is my inaugural post here.

"An object must first exist in order to hold any attributes."

If this were true, I think you may have solved the problem everyone has in fact been seeking, particularly on this board. However, I suspect this interpretation is not quite what you had in mind. As stated it could imply that if we understand something to have attributes, like unicorns and God do, then it must exist. Of course this rendering is not quite what you asserted. Unfortunately if this is not what is asserted, it runs into the trouble that it doesn't really say anything. That is, the statement could very well be analytic. Thus, 'in order to hold any attributes' implies, by virtue of what you mean by 'holding' an already existing object. Do you see what I'm getting at?

"So my question is, does someone need to prove God exists before they can define God?"

I think this depends on what you mean by 'define'. Since Wittgenstein, many folks believe that definitions refer to what is in public usage. In this respect, definitions are given to us and we have little choice but to determine for ourselves whether there is anything factual or fictious, on the one hand, or considered as a standard and ideal, or real, on the other. However, if what you have in mind is to investigate the essence of that which you wish to define through some sort of analysis of the relevant concepts, then I should say that a definition could be the outcome of such an analysis. This is, for example, the way Kant proceeded.

But, as you can see, it is not the existence of God that is being analyzed, but God's essence. It is then the intent of the ontological argument to prove that God's essence implies His existence.

"How do people define the divine; a being beyond mortal comprehension? If we can't define the being, is belief in the being meaningless?"

I think it would be helpful to distinguish "meaning" from "definition." Without getting too hung up on the various understandings of meaning, I think we can understand the distinction in this way.

Consider our ability to know a horse when we see one. How is this possible? One way of thinking of this is to say "We know this object is a horse because we know what it means to be a horse and this object qualifies." (Some philosophers would substitute the word "is" for "means" in this sentence, but for my purpose, I think "means" comes closer to what is going on.) Now, consider our ability to define a horse. What this means is that we are trying to define the concept under which we recognize a horse when we see it. This amounts to doing what is called a conceptual analysis.

However, the definition so resulting doesn't necessarily capture the hidden concept of a horse that allows us to recognize a horse when we see it, though over time it may approach it. Interestingly, the more abstract the concept (say law, justice, truth, and so forth), the greater is the variety in the results of this conceptual analysis. The concept of law is particularly noteworthy here for having a highly diverse set of definitions among those philosophers dealing with it.

So, now that we have this distinction, we could easily argue that an object like God cannot be meaningless merely on the basis that God has not been defined. Indeed, I'm told that many believe that they know God by His presence to them. Given this, I think it is warranted that God has meaning. That such a person is unable to define the God that is present to them, would not in the least change that.

owleye