THE PRESENCE AND ABSENCE

OF GOD
PART I
It is pretty obvious, I think, that our system of concepts, that is, the set of concepts
we use to deal with the world, is a changing one. The development of science, of
political institutions, of social practices, constantly forces us to coin new concepts
and to abandon others. Thus, like everything else in this world, concepts come into
existence, evolve, decay and disappear. Now it would be naive to think that the
concept of God is free from the constraints and processes that the rest of our
concepts are submitted to. Once this is admitted, we are automatically bound to
accept, on purely a priori grounds, that it will always be highly implausible to hold
that, throughout its history, humanity has had recourse to just one concept of the
divinity. As a matter of fact, we know that this is not so and that different
civilizations, different cultures, have produced different conceptions of God.
Probably it would be most useful, since there is a variety of views concerning
concepts and their nature, to state, as clearly and briefly as possible, how I conceive
them and, therefore, how they should be investigated. According to the view I
adhere to, the study of concepts is to be conceived of not as a special kind of
research of strange objects, but simply as the study of what it is to have a concept
Thus instead of asking the usual what is ...? kind of question, i.e., the sort of
question which leads nowhere since it indicates nothing about the way it should be
answered, I prefer to ask: when, under what circumstances do we say of someone
that he has got such and such a concept, that he has mastered it? And it would seem
that the answer to questions like this one points, in any context whatever, to both
linguistic and extra-linguistic activities, reactions and so on. That someone has
acquired the concept of a table shows itself in his behavior, actions, demands,
answers, wishes and so on concerning tables and I wish to maintain that the same
holds, mutatis mutandis, for the concept of God. Thus in general to carry out a
conceptual analysis boils down to examining applications of words in the relevant
contexts. This makes it clear that such an analysis cannot simply be purely verbal or
lexicographical research. Unless I am utterly mistaken (which I hope is not the
case), this is, broadly speaking, what Wittgenstein called grammatical analysis.
The possession of a concept, we said, manifests itself in ones being able to
use language in appropriate ways, that is, in accordance with its rules of use. Now
there is a sense in which we can say that language is (and has to be) something
eternally actual. We do not express ourselves in ways which were useful, say, 500

years ago, when other habits, practices and social organizations reigned. Language is
something which develops at the same speed as society as a whole does. It can go
neither more quickly nor more slowly. What this means is simply that we have the
concepts we need, not others. Concepts serve particular goals, they fulfill specific
functions. Nevertheless, since society is in a permanent state of change, concepts too
have to modify themselves in order to go on being useful. So our concepts (i.e., our
uses of words) must be somewhat elastic; thus it would seem as if the alternative for
our concepts were that either they adapt themselves to the new conditions or they
simply vanish from life. Now the adaptation of concepts amounts to a change in the
meaning of words. Words and expressions have to change their meanings because
they cannot avoid being exposed to a sort of disconnection between their original,
first or primary uses and the new practices associated with them. The phenomenon
of conceptual modification is, for obvious reasons, difficult to perceive. One of them
is that it is a rather slow process and therefore it is practically impossible for us to
have a perspicuous representation of it; another is that it is a peculiarity of
language that it can go on functioning as if nothing had changed or happened, even
if the needs, requirements, practices, conventions which first brought it into
existence have passed away. Thus it may very easily be the case that we go on using
certain words or expressions even if as a matter of fact their content has been
emptied, that is, even if the primary or legitimate applications of the relevant words
are no longer required for and by life and, accordingly, have been abandoned.
The fact that several concepts are associated with one and the same word is
nothing but the fact that signs may be used in different ways, that they may have
different modes of application, even if we acknowledge that they are linked to each
other by gradual transitions. What this means is simply that, when used in certain
ways, words allow certain statements (questions, denials, etc.) to be formulated
(certain speech acts can be produced, certain moves in the language-games are
legitimate), while when applied in different ways those very statements may turn out
to be senseless, and the other way around too. That is why we can speak of the
expansion of language and of the evolution of concepts. Nevertheless, uses of words
and expressions (that is, their meanings) inevitably depend upon the kind of society
in which they are employed, by the kind of social relations that people are embedded
in, by their respective technologies and, naturally, all of them change from case to
case. For instance, Mayans, Romans or todays New Yorkers are people, but they
live in completely different situations; so they express themselves and think in
radically different ways. They all have to eat, but they have different needs,
presuppositions, conventions, etc., in connection with eating. They have, we can say,
different concepts of eating. This shows that even words as fundamental as eat
may have different meanings. People do associate different things with them and
clearly this is not something to be explained in purely psychological terms. That is

the way our language works. In sum, one and the same word may have (slightly)
different meanings. Indeed this is a very common phenomenon. Obviously, this is an
outcome we shall have to apply to God.
It follows from what I have said, I believe, that to understand a concept of
another culture is almost an impossible task, for to achieve that feat one has to
reconstruct situations in which the words were actually employed, those situations
being completely alien to us, unknown, difficult even to visualize. We can always
make inferences, make guesses, imagine situations, but it is always on or from our
own linguistic and extra-linguistic basis that these intellectual efforts are carried out.
This shows how much truth there is in relativism: there certainly is such a thing, but
it cannot be put into words, for the simple reason that the very moment we try to do
it, we automatically blur the distinctions we wanted to emphasize. Conceptual
relativism manifests itself in differences of actions and reactions among different
people using the same word or expression. Take, for instance, love. The word may
be the same, but it arouses different expectations, wishes, reactions, etc., among
people from, say, the Middle Ages than from people of the twentieth century. Once
again, one word gives rise to different concepts, which naturally are not completely
cut off from each other.
Obviously it would be sheer nonsense to assume (as, surprisingly enough,
many people tend to) that conceptual change is tantamount to or necessarily involves
conceptual progress, in some axiological sense. Indeed, if the outlook we have
espoused here is correct, we have absolutely no right to say that our concept of love
is better than, e.g., the Roman one. It is simply different. The only thing we can
say is that their concept would most probably be useless in our times, in our
societies (one just has to read Ovidius to understand this). Most probably if a man
tried to relate to a woman behaving and expressing himself as the average Roman
used to do it, he would not only fail but would get into trouble. But it is equally clear
that the argument goes in the other direction as well: a current Londoners concept
of love would be most inappropriate among Romans, it would be rather useless in
their lives. Our concept of love would enable people in those times to do practically
nothing. So concepts are neither better nor worse. They are just different, more or
less apt, more or less useful. Conceptual difference is something that shows itself,
but cannot be expressed in language. This is all relativism entitles us to say about it.
It is clear, I think, that what we have been saying applies to religious concepts
as well and, especially, to the concept of God. Take for instance polytheism. Right
now at least, the idea of a multiplicity of gods is perhaps an intelligible one, but
surely it is also an idea we could do nothing with. We certainly would not go to the
church in order to pray one day to this god and the next Sunday to another one; we

would need a multiplicity of popes, each one representing on Earth one and just one
god; we would perhaps become wholly incoherent, trying to please one god and
being indifferent to others; and so on. So polytheism does not represent a real
religious option for us. Neither does natural religion, i.e., the worship of natural
phenomena. Scientific knowledge has made both options obsolete: nothing
mysterious, fabulous, extraordinary is nowadays associated in the average mans
mind with storms or with rainbows. But for that very same reason it is quite
understandable that people of former ages worshiped the sun, the rain, the sea and so
on. Indeed, it would seem to us as unreasonable if they hadnt! In this sense, it is we
who have lost something, namely, the sense of the marvelous. What is ridiculous are
not the different conceptions and practices that as a matter of fact have prevailed in
different civilizations, but rather the idea that a single concept could possibly be the
right one for the totality of mankind, i.e., the very project of extending ones
conception to cover the whole of history. This is the kind of mistake that a sound
relativism simply blocks. Now, former conceptions of the divinity were associated
with feelings of respect, awe, admiration, fear, etc., for phenomena people were not
in a position to understand. So they construed a concept of God which was linked to
feelings like the ones mentioned. Scientific progress has made those feelings
redundant. Now the question is: what are we to replace them with?
In fact, what we have been saying gets strong support from the empirical
research of linguists working on the origins of languages. As an example, let me
consider for a moment (and take advantage of) certain views put forward in the
excellent book by the Spanish linguist Francisco Villar, Los Indoeuropeos y los
orgenes de Europa (The Indoeuropeans and the Origins of Europe). Villar is
concerned with the people who invaded Europe some 5000 years B.C. and whose
language was the source of all of the so called Indoeuropean languages. Villars
masterful study is a reconstruction of that peoples life, and that includes first of all
language, but also their social organization, techniques of production and religion.
He has lots of interesting things to say about the religious life of that epoch, but I
shall concentrate on a couple of statements which are relevant for the idea I wish to
convey.
One thing Villar confirms is that in their first stage of religious life, the IndoEuropeans worshipped exclusively natural phenomena. However, during the next
twenty centuries something like a process of personification of the gods (no doubt
induced by the structure of language) took place. The word God [deiuos in the
original Indoeuropean language and from which we have devs (in Sanscrit),
daeva (in Avestic), deus (in Latin), Deva (in old Celtic), dievas (in
Lithuanian) and ivar (old Nordic)] was gradually transformed into a proper name
and (allowing ourselves to use Russells theory of descriptions) meant (when used in

sentences) something like the king of gods, the one who is (in some sense) above
all of them. But the really interesting point about this is that the primary function of
the proper name Deiuos was to designate the celestial vault. Surely God was used
pointing to the sky, i.e., that under which everything has to take place. Now this is
both interesting and important, because it tells us something about what the word
God was introduced for and enables us to recall that, according to Wittgenstein, it
is always philosophically interesting to know what the original language-game of a
word is. This raises some important points that I shall briefly consider.
The rough picture of concepts I have just sketched, if acceptable at all, makes
clear that it is simply absurd to suggest that the Indoeuropeans (to go on with our
example) had a false conception of the divinity. The only thing we are entitled to
say is that they had a different one and, in fact, the only conception which could
possibly have been useful to them. I take it as superfluous to argue why such an
abstruse theology as the Roman Catholic one would have been utterly unintelligible
to them. It is worth noticing, however, that those people, that is, the people who
actually invented the concept of God, had one advantage over us, an advantage
which has to be taken into account, namely, temporal priority. Now if priority in
time means something, it will then be admitted that it is us who modified the
original concept (perhaps even distorting it), in the same sense as, e.g., a geneticist
introduces changes when he uses father to refer to the man who gave his sperm to
be artificially inseminated in a woman he does not even know. There is no objection
to his use of the word, as long as he recognizes that he has drastically modified it.
The same happened with God. Whether or not this change was justified is a
different matter. At all events, probably many features of the original concept of
God were lost (though not all of them since, for example, we still speak of the
Heavens as being above us. Surely this is something we owe them. Thus even if a
cosmonaut travels freely in space, he will still accept that somehow God goes on
being above him.) However, our aim here is not to discuss the historical
development of the concept of God and, therefore, since concepts have to be studied
in context, we can leave aside all sorts of speculations concerning its origins.
Accordingly we shall concentrate upon its present situation and, incidentally, upon
contemporary philosophy of religion in general. In this respect, the view that I want
to advocate is simply that in our culture, right now, the concept of God is a wholly
useless one. This is a semantic way of saying that God is no longer with us or, as
Nietzsche would put it, that He is dead.

PART II
The fact that we shall not be concerned here with the origins of the concept of God
does not mean that we have to abandon history altogether. Indeed it will prove

highly useful to recall, however broadly, why and how the concept of God was
important in order to understand why it can no longer be.
Let us concentrate on Western culture. Something perhaps undeniable is that
there was a time in which the concept of God pervaded it. What I mean is simply
(among other things) that people used to take the concept of God very seriously. It is
not only their beliefs, and therefore their behaviours, which were moulded by it, but
also their institutions, habits, traditions, ceremonies, politics, arts, etc. The concept
of God did fill the world. Now something that has to be said in this respect is that
the Western God (or, if you allow me to speak in this way, the Western concept of
the divinity) is a terribly bloodthirsty one. Its victims can be counted by millions.
Witches, Jews, free-thinkers, pagans of all sorts, Muslims, etc., were the target of the
victorious institutions which, from the Fifth century onwards, had the monopoly of
the new divinity. The monopoly was mercilessly maintained during more than
twelve centuries. Here the paradox consists in that although presented as the God of
love, the fact is that the Christian God always required the sword to be accepted by
other peoples and communities. So as a matter of fact our concept of God is
somehow linked to the concept of a warrior, of a being who has to win, to
overcome, to conquer, to impose (through his holy armies) his rules, his commands,
his wishes. No other God has behaved like that or, alternatively, in no other
civilization have people felt the need to impose, regardless of the consequences, of
the social cost, their concept of God upon the rest of mankind. But precisely that
should make us suspicious, for surely there must be a reason why a concept is
imposed by force. Such a fact must mean something, and what in this sense can be
argued is that it had to be that way simply because the concept was in fact an
unintelligible one. Its theoretical foundations were extremely and obviously weak.
When we think of the people who were being indoctrinated, religiously assimilated,
during, say, the sixth century, we cannot but feel sorry for them, for they were
forced to allow as true something that their reason condemned as pure nonsense. No
reasonable person (either then or now) could quietly admit that three persons are
one, that the world had been created ex-nihilo, that logic and arithmetic were subject
to the will of a being, that the Verb may become a person, etc. People simply did not
understand that kind of absurdity. But the reply was ready: credo quia absurdum.
That, however, was not an argument, but an order. It meant: there is nothing else to
talk about. You have to accept these new truths we are teaching you and thats all.
And then, in conscious opposition to paganism (the adoration of the sun, of blood, of
natural phenomena in general), intelligent, persevering, energetic, dedicated men,
like the Fathers of the Church, went ahead with the new programme and made it
triumph. From this perspective, Saint Augustine is, no doubt, simply outstanding,
unequalled. The whole process, from the first conversions to the handling of power
by the Church, was rather complex and lasted some four centuries. What was

gained? Very important assets for, let us not forget, we are speaking of a period of
decay, of corruption, of social disintegration. Thanks to the new concept of God,
social and personal life were somehow organized anew and in fact reorganized for
the next ten centuries. As I have already said, knowledge, politics, the arts, class
divisions, the sense of belonging to a particular community, the life of the
individual, his ideals, feelings, etc., everything centered around this precious
concept of God. Needless to say that at that stage God (however incongruous)
certainly was alive.
Nevertheless, it was impossible for this universal order to prevail. Thus, in
the name of God, the Church declared war against society as a whole so as to
maintain the order that had proved so effective for so many years. This war was
prompted by the conceptual rebellion led by the first scientists and free-thinkers.
Some isolated people carried out, in the darkness of their rooms, small intellectual
revolutions. These consisted first of modest and, above all, private factual
discoveries. Very soon, however, the discoverers felt the need to make them public
and to act accordingly. The point was simply that, from a particular period onwards,
human knowledge (with all that that implies) simply could not get started and
organized while having as its supreme concept the concept of God: there were too
many and too obvious counter-examples, refutations, invalid explanations, fallacies,
etc., implied by it. Nevertheless, during several centuries the best and most brilliant
minds in the Western world were in charge of the defense of the intellectual status
quo. We could easily name some of the ablest among them: St. Anselm, Ockham,
St. Thomas, Vives. But what for our purposes is worth remarking upon is that it was
from the inside of our own Christian civilization that the concept of God started to
be disrupted and, little by little, displaced. The first battles took place in disciplines
like astronomy and physics, but very quickly they covered other branches of science,
like biology, economics and psychology. So far as politics is concerned, the French
Revolution marked the end of the era of the Churchs success. Napoleon made it
clear to the world that the pope too could be put in prison and yet the world was not
destroyed. At any rate the fact is that, towards the end of the nineteenth century, the
concept of God was no longer the central one in our civilization. Life no longer
centered around it. That is why Nietzsche was in a position to state that God was
dead. And He certainly was.
It can be argued that the last blows to the formerly living and now decadent
and obsolete concept of God were given by the great political ideologies of the
Twentieth century, and especially by Marxism. Within the realm of politics, the
materialist conception of history overran any religious opponent that could possibly
arise. Probably some would like to think now that Marxism itself has been defeated
on many battlefields, so perhaps God could be resuscitated. But this is an illusion

just as much as if someone tried to resuscitate the Indoeuropean conception of God.

PART III
We have now to give an answer to the question: what does the absence of God
mean?, trying to be as specific as possible. In reply, the first point I wish to establish
is that the use of God has almost completely lost its religious meaning. People may
go on using the word God, but what we should be clear about is: to say what? Lets
consider a couple of expressions in order to determine their real meaning.
Let us take first the expression Oh my God!. There is no question that it is a
most popular expression, but how do people apply it? Let us illustrate its use. People
are on the beach and see a particularly attractive woman walking by. They express
their admiration for her physical beauty by saying precisely: Oh my God!. Or, for
instance, take the case of someone who is lying on the street, moaning, giving
expression in a pitiful way to his pain. Nowadays, the natural thing to say would be:
Oh my God!, meaning by that: it is a terrible thing, lets do something, etc.
We could go on with as many examples as we would like, but they would all point,
in one way or another, in the same direction: the expression Oh my God! is mainly
used to express admiration, surprise, fear, gratitude and so on, but it has practically
nothing to do with God, in the real (?) sense of the word.
Let us consider now the name Jesus Christ and ask: when, under what
circumstances, is this proper name used in colloquial language? We can easily
imagine situations in which it is rightly employed. For instance, when someone is
being abused, insulted or swindled, he or she can express his anger by saying (with
the appropriate gestures): Jesus Christ!. In this sense, Jesus Christ! is more or
less equivalent to Bloody hell, which is obviously not a paradigm of a theological
way of speaking. Normally, we could very well use the former expression to speak
in a sardonic way, for instance when everybody around us knows that we are not
Roman Catholic. Surely this is a use which would be unheard of in former times.
That could even have been a rather dangerous linguistic game. The difference, one
would like to say, is that in our days those kinds of expressions lost their literal

meaning. We kept the words (in fact, they are splendid), but we lost their content or,
rather, we gave them a different one, since we use them in different ways. Now if
what I have been saying is true, what has to be inferred is simply that we no longer
use those expressions in a genuine religious way.
One thing that probably I have not emphasized sufficiently is the fact that not
only things like institutions, governments, diplomacy, etc., were moulded by the
peculiar Western conception of God, but also that private, individual lives were
canalized by it. To get married, to have children, to work, to have fun, to joke and
quarrel with friends, to acquire knowledge, relations with ones neighbours, etc.,
were lines of behaviour which already had a pattern to apply. To be happy was to do
all a human being was able to do as long as he followed the instructions of the
Church. A religious outsider was cut off from his own community and that was
something to be avoided at all costs. Accordingly, the defeat of the Western
conception of God was the defeat of a mode, of an ideal of life which, in spite of the
weakness of its theoretical basis, was powerful enough to give a direction to human
life. The meaning and value of life used to come from religion. But now that that
which functioned as a sort of social cement has been defeated and, in fact, rejected,
people feel the need to ask: What now? What are we left with? What is God (or
God) to be replaced with? The fact that we do not yet envisage a satisfactory
answer to this question or, to put it in a different way, the fact that other concepts
available to us, concepts like those of energy, revolution, democracy, liberty,
property, etc., have failed to become the center of our life, is what is called
nihilism. In fact I think that a new concept has emerged which nowadays plays the
role that God used to play, but I shall argue that this change may be regrettable on
different grounds. Nevertheless, it is perhaps not an error to assert that the defining
feature of present life, of our life, is precisely our loss of God, our not having a vital
use for the concept of God. Dostoievski had a striking and well known formulation
for this situation. He said that if God did not exist, everything would be allowed,
everything was permissible. I am afraid that this is precisely the case and, if I am not
mistaken, this is just another way of saying that God left us, i.e., that he is absent for
us.

PART IV
Nihilism, understood as the absence or (to put it in more poetic terms) the death of
God, is then nothing but the expression of the lack of a concept, i.e., the concept of
God. I am not referring to the situation in which a particular person or a particular
set of persons refuse to have recourse to such a concept, but rather to the situation in
which society as a whole does, the situation in which, as a matter of fact, the concept
has been deprived of its genuine application and has been saddled with a spurious

meaning. However, the point I should emphasize now is that the lack of a concept
cannot be represented as a purely verbal hole. Obviously, the lack of a concept
manifests itself in the misuses the word is subject to, but also in the distorted
practices and habits which finally replaced the older ones, which in turn were
associated with the legitimate applications of the word. Thus the lack of a concept
has practical consequences for, and in, peoples lives. In this respect, what can we
say about the nihilist, that is, about the human being of our epoch? In other words,
how does the conceptual change I have been trying to sketch influence or at least
manifest itself in present human life?
I think that the first thing to be said is that any society will always need at
least one of what I would like to call super-concepts. We can replace one by
another, but we seem to need at least one. Now it seems to me that the disappearance
of God as a real option goes hand in hand with the exaltation of the individual and
his rights. What I mean is simply that the concept which nowadays has acquired
the status that God used to have is individual. Everything now turns around it.
We speak of human rights, womens rights, animal rights, childrens rights,
minorities rights, and so on, having in mind the individual conceived or seen from
this or that particular point of view. The concept which now demands from us total
submission is the concept of the individual.
Now although it is a fact that our super-concepts do serve to organize the rest
of our concepts and that conceptual modification is demanded by life itself, it does
not follow that conceptual alteration is necessarily to be welcomed. In the case we
are concerned with (that is, the replacement of the super-concept God by the
super-concept individual) several features of this particular conceptual evolution
can be easily pointed out as being both obvious and negative consequences. First,
we should perhaps mention materialism, in the vulgar sense of the word. It is
relatively clear that to people for whom the belief in God is a useless one, life can
only be understood as a fortuitous adventure, as a purely contingent matter. What we
ought to do, therefore, must be something related to this new perspective. As a
consequence, morality in the traditional sense can only be seen either as something
utterly despicable, ridiculous or, in the last analysis (as Nietzsche would suggest) as
a special kind of weapon to be used in the struggle for power. For let us just ask:
why should I be moral during my life time which, we now are prepared to
acknowledge, begins and ends on this planet and last for no more than, say, 80
years? What could possibly be the point of being moral as if God did exist, as if
there were a second life, as if Hell and Heaven were places in the universe, and so
on, knowing of course that this is not the case? Why should I force myself to behave
in such and such ways, apart from purely external social constraints or, eventually,
personal requirements? So the rejection of the concept of God leaves open for a

coherent nihilist the road of hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure, of social success, of
happiness, in the strictest personal sense of the word as constituting the meaning
of life. What else could be important?
It is obviously wrong to suggest that the conceptual interplay I have been
trying to highlight could not be provoked by speakers voluntary actions. However, I
think it more plausible to suggest that what happens is that we construe and cling to
the concepts which torn out to be essential to actual life. Language adapts itself to
reality, both natural and social, as much as it contributes to its development and
refinement. So the irruption on the conceptual scene of the super-concept
individual should be no surprise to us: it is precisely the concept our age needs.
Thus a criticism of this conceptual alteration amounts in fact to a criticism of our
ways of living, modes of life, social organization and so on. It is the way society is
actually organized and functions that makes us look to the individual as possessing
more value than anything else. We have to emphasize his (or her) importance. This,
however, carries with it social atomism, the desintegration (or transformation) of
families, egoism, consumism, indifference towards other people, animals, nature.
We value instead personal fulfillment, the indisputable right to privacy,
democracy (as the individuals right to choose his governors), etc. All this shows
that human beings have been unable to create societies in which evil is not patently
present: they correct certain evils but create new ones. Indeed, just as peoples
minds were imprisoned within the limits set by the very complex concept of God
when this occupied the central position, nowadays people are induced to fight
everything which could threaten the position occupied by the super-concept
individual. In other words, the individual is the new God. So happiness, success,
failure, pleasure, work, love, friendship, etc., everything has to be understood from
its perspective. This new super-concept fixes the framework for the application of
the rest of our conceptual apparatus, in civil life, politics, scientific research, artistic
creation, etc. But if we judge from the consequences, it is not at all clear that the
change has been for the good of Man and that pessimism and bitterness are not the
most appropriate feelings in this dark age.

PART V
I would like to make it clear that a sound historical perspective on language prevents
us from falling into any kind of nostalgic mood. In the same sense in which we
cannot travel backwards in time, we cannot re-impose older conceptual maps, we
cannot go back to former conceptual structures. So, in the conceptual turmoil we
live in, what can we rationally expect from the future? The de facto (though not de
jure) abolishment of God does not mean the victory of paganism, of older kinds of
religion. Traditional religious patterns of education are obsolete, incompatible with

scientific realities and, above all, powerless. Who is afraid of what may happen to
him or her in the life to come? The very idea sounds like a joke, though in fact it is
simply the manifestation of a deep, radical conceptual change. However, I shall not
pursue this line of thought. My interest lies rather in the diagnosis of current
philosophy of religion. In this connection, I claim that if what I have been saying is
true, then much of it is not false, but simply absurd. For instance, all the attempts to
give a new proof of Gods existence, say, in terms of modal logic, are not only
fallacious but senseless. These are attempts to re-install at the centre of our
conceptual map the concept of God, a concept which is, so to speak, a dead one.
This is precisely, if I am not totally wrong, what cannot be achieved. It is evident, I
think, that if Gods existence could be proved, the concept of God should
immediately occupy the centre of our thoughts, interests, etc. What could possibly
be more important than God? It would be absurd to have the concept of God
subordinated to, e.g., democracy, liberty, human rights, energy, etc. We can
elucidate concepts, but not impose them. Thus it makes no sense whatsoever to try
to resuscitate it. On the other hand, hard social facts, in the broadest sense of the
expression, make it necessary for the concept of an individual to be at the centre of
our concepts and thoughts. It is neither by chance nor the result of arbitrary, personal
decisions. Whether or not this new super-concept will prove to be effective enough
to give coherence to our lives, to bind people in a single, common purpose or
enterprise (as God did centuries ago) or not, could not possibly be determined at
this point in time. Conceptual adjustment takes time. Meanwhile we can only
express our grief for our repeated failures to find an adequate replacement of the
super-concept God and for the sense of loss its decay has left behind it.