A Philosopher Explains What Belief in God Means

Elliot N. Dorff

One important way in which Judaism differs from its daughter religions, Christianity and Islam, is that the latter are creedal religions, while Judaism is not—that is, they have official statements of belief that one must affirm to be a Christian or Muslim. Specifically, unless you believe that Jesus is Christ in some understanding of that term, you cannot be a Christian (and unless you believe a specific version of that claim, you cannot be a Catholic or Protestant). Similarly, unless you believe that there is only one God and Muhammad is his primary prophet, you cannot be a Muslim. You may have been raised in a family or country in which most people believe those things, and you may share ethnic characteristics with such people, but you are not a Christian or Muslim unless you personally affirm each of those religion’s beliefs.

Judaism is not like that. There are certainly Jewish beliefs about God, human nature, the relationships between God and human beings, and the relationships of both God and human beings to the world, but there is no one accepted formulation of those beliefs. In fact, Rabbi Louis Jacobs, z″l, catalogued multiple versions among later Jewish thinkers of each of the thirteen beliefs listed by Maimonides, Joseph Albo wrote that only three beliefs were at the heart of Judaism, and Hasdai Crescas thought that only one conviction, the love and fear of God, was at the core of Jewish belief.1 More to the point, Jewish identity is not a function of belief; it is determined by being born to a Jewish woman or reborn into the Jewish religion and community through the rites of conversion. This raises its own problems, embedded in the multiple debates among Jews, in Jewish law, and in the laws of the State of Israel as to who is a Jew, but what is clear is that beliefs are not at the heart of that question. Because of this, in fact, only with difficulty have Jews managed to exclude those born to a Jewish woman but who believe in Jesus as Christ.

Even with these difficulties, most Jews are happy that Jewish identity is not defined by belief, for that would be restrictive. It would also undermine the deep humility that Judaism embraces about what any one person—or, for that matter, all of us together—can know about anything. We definitely must seek whatever we can know, but the approved way of gaining as much knowledge as we can is not by simply accepting any particular formulation but rather by arguing about what to believe with our fellow Jews and with those outside our faith. Indeed, again as Rabbi Jacobs demonstrated, even those who accepted Maimonides’s formulation of Jewish beliefs disagreed so much about what each of them means that one wonders whether their agreement to his list is actually agreement at all. We Jews instead love to argue about how to understand God, human beings, the environment, and the interactions among them. As my colleague at American Jewish University, Michael Berenbaum, is fond of saying, “We Jews believe in at most one God!”

Yet Judaism is definitely a religion that is filled with references to God, and Jews from the Bible to our own time have done their best to articulate their understandings of God.2 In what follows, I want to zoom out, as it were, to explain the philosophical status of all the understandings of God that Jews have proposed. In doing so, I hope to make clear what, in philosophical language, the “truth-functional status” of any such beliefs is—that is, the way in which, and the degree to which, any claim to affirm or deny a belief in God can claim to be the truth.

Beginning with Ludwig Wittgenstein and especially A. J. Ayer in his book, Language, Truth, and Logic, analytic philosophers in the mid-twentieth century sought to distinguish what they called the “truth-functional” goals of some forms of language—that is, language whose goal is to describe reality—in contrast to the emotional functions of language.3 Moral and religious language, they first asserted, was of the latter sort. Sentences, of course, can also take the form of questions or commands, and later another British philosopher, J. L. Austin, identified yet another function of language—namely, “performative utterances.” Performative utterances use language to do something, to perform a task (hence their name)—for example, “I hereby declare you married.”4 Sentences that ask a question, issue a command, or perform a task are distinct from sentences asserting that x is the case, that x is true not only to our experience of reality but also to objective reality to the extent we can know it. Truth-functional sentences assert a claim to truth—for example, that God exists and is of a certain nature. This latter type of sentence is the subject of this article.

Ayer’s criterion for truth-functional language was that it could be subjected to the “verifiability criterion”—that is, it could be tested empirically. In subsequent decades, though, it became clear that even some scientific terms like “atom” and “quark” could not fit that criterion, and, as such, that his definition of “truth” was too narrow. In what follows, my explanation of what constitutes truth is, as readers will see, expanded to include an accurate description of anything that we experience through our five senses or otherwise, as long as many human beings experience the same phenomenon. (That last criterion distinguishes truth from fantasy or even insanity). So, for example, it is true that parents may feel proud of their children; even though outsiders can see only physical signs of that (smiles, applause, etc.), many parents feel proud of their children on occasion and so can attest that such feelings are real. Similarly, violations of justice, especially egregious ones, are clear to many people, and so we can assert that norms of justice are real, however much we might argue as to what they are and how they should apply to a given case. What will constitute truth in this article, then, is the description of a portion of our experience that most adequately describes it. Because human beings are not omniscient, many such statements will be only partial takes on the full truth, as the following will explain.

Levels of Experience

We human beings experience the world on three different levels. The first is the concrete level that we experience through our five senses. This includes such diverse things as tables, songs, and people.

Even on this level, it is harder than you might first think precisely to define what is, for example, a table. Is it a flat surface with legs? But so is a chair! And what about the tables in restaurant booths that are screwed into the wall and have no legs? If instead of defining a table in terms of its form you want to define it in terms of its function—for example, a table is a surface on which to put things—how is that different from a desk? Or even a floor? At this point we are talking only about a table, where we are pretty confident that we know what we are talking about. What if instead we were talking about a song? How would you differentiate a song from noise, especially given people’s diverse tastes in music and the existence of atonal music? So even on the concrete level, being able to describe precisely what you mean can be difficult. When asked to define many elements of the concrete world and finding it impossible to be precise, one is sorely tempted to give up and fall back on Justice Potter Stewart’s comment about obscenity (in the United States Supreme Court’s case, Jacobellis v. Ohio (378 U.S. 197 [1964]) when he could not define that precisely: “I know it when I see it.”

Defining precisely what you mean becomes even harder on the second level of experience that we humans have, the first level of abstraction. This level includes some very important aspects of our life that have major impacts on its shape and quality but that we do not experience directly with our five senses., although we do see concrete examples of all of these abstract entities. Examples of this level include justice, goodness, truth, beauty, and all of our associations (such as family, friendship, or nationhood). Defining “justice” is the subject of one of the very first books of Western philosophy, Plato’s Republic, and philosophers, jurists, and legislators have struggled to define it in both theory and practice ever since. There are similarly varying theories of truth (such as the correspondence theory versus the coherence theory), and even a broader set of theories about what constitutes beauty. Modern DNA testing has revealed that some of us are related to people we never would have guessed are members of our family. Adopted children and children created through donor sperm or eggs need to differentiate those who are their family genetically in contrast to those who are their family socially, including the ones who put in the time, effort, and resources to raise them. So defining “family” is also more complicated than one might imagine.

It should not be surprising, then, that precise definitions are even more difficult when it comes to the third level of human experience, the second level of abstraction. This is sometimes described as “the transcendent,” or “ultimate reality.” It is often conceived as the container of all of our experiences. Philosophers try to describe it in the area of philosophy known as metaphysics, which Aristotle, in his book, Metaphysics, called “the queen of the sciences.” As is typical for philosophy, the goal of those thinking and writing in metaphysics is descriptive and analytic: What is the phenomenon that we experience? How does it function? and How is it different from, and related to, other phenomena that we experience?

How Religions Differ from Philosophies
in Their Approach to the Levels of Experience

Like philosophy, the religions of the world think deeply about all three levels of human experience, but they do so with a different goal that is captured in the very word “religion.” The “lig” in that word comes from the Latin word ligare, which means “to connect, tie, or bind.” That Latin root also appears in the English word “ligament,” which can be any connection but in medicine is specifically the connective tissue that binds one bone to another; similarly, when a woman has had as many children as she wants, she sometimes has her tubes tied, called medically “a tubal ligation.” Religions, then, etymologically and in practice, are interested not so much in describing and analyzing the three levels of our experience, which are the central goals of philosophy, but rather in fostering our connections to all three levels.

So, in the concrete world, religions concern themselves with creating and shaping our interactions with the environment and the people within it. Some of the ways that religions do this are: (1) rituals to call our attention to, and mark the change of, the seasons and the life cycle and/or to bring us together as families and communities; (2) art, music, literature, and dance to help us make an art of life; (3) stories to articulate our sense of historical connection to our past, present, and future; and (4) moral norms that are taught in educational materials, sermons, and environments (schools, camps, youth groups, and houses of worship) to guide our interactions with each other in every aspect of life and to motivate us to do what we can to eliminate or at least ameliorate the moral problems of everyday life, including (but not limited to) poverty, illness, and prejudice.

On the first level of abstraction, religions provide both materials and formats to bring us together to discuss what a given religious group’s stance should be on moral issues. Among the issues discussed most in religious settings these days are climate change; poverty; prejudice; inequity in housing, education, health care, and jobs; immigration; sexual ethics; business ethics; the proper and improper use of social media; and medical issues at the beginning and end of life. Grappling with such issues in light of each religion’s vision of what is a good human being and a good society, as well as its more concrete articulations of what that vision entails in practice, is a major function of religion.

Another issue on this first level of abstraction is the relationships that a particular religious group should have with other religious and secular groups. Putting it starkly, if we believe that x is true and good, do we have enough humility to believe that other groups who see things differently can nevertheless consist of smart and moral people and deserve to be respected as such—hopefully to the point of entering into respectful dialogue and maybe then mutual action but at least friendly disagreement?

It is on the second level of abstraction that the word “God” appears in religious language. That word is defined in many ways, but two common ones are these: a separate being with a will and personality who created and sustains the universe and who actively interacts with it and cares about it (“theism”), or, alternatively, the force that created the world and sustains it, or that is the world (“deism”). Each of these two major groups has subsets. So, for example, there are rationalists and existentialists among theists, and among deists there are those who think that the world was created in a particular time and is static (for example, Platonists) and those who think that the process of creation is dynamic and ongoing (Aristotelians, including, but not limited to, “process theology”). Religions use the word “God” or some other name or metaphor rather than just saying “the transcendent” or “ultimate reality” because, again, they aim to help us relate to that reality, not just describe or analyze it, and it is much easier to relate to the world if it is imagined in an anthropomorphic image or some other concrete term.

Precisely because we are talking about the second level of abstraction, precise descriptions of that ultimate reality, let alone precise definitions of it, are not just difficult, but impossible. That is expressed in theological language as God being “holy”—that is, wholly other than anything we human beings can comprehend. It is important to state clearly that recognizing God as holy should not stop us from learning whatever we can about the world on all three levels of experience that we have of it. On the contrary, if God created the world, then learning more about it through the various relevant sciences is also learning more about God’s plan for us who live in it. So the recognition of God’s holiness should not deter us from studying all aspects of the world that affect us or from trying to live in it more robustly through whatever changes we make, taking into account, as we must, the need to preserve the world as well as to manipulate it for our purposes. While doing that, though, the recognition of God’s holiness should make us aware of the awesome nature of the universe, our dependence on it, and our inability to comprehend it all, thus fostering in us a sense of humility and gratitude.

God’s holiness should also inspire us to live a righteous life. Leviticus 19 makes this clear: one of the opening verses, with “you” and “shall be” in the plural and so addressed to the entire People of Israel, asserts: “You shall be holy, as I, the Lord, your God, am holy” (verse 2). That verse serves as a header for the rest of the chapter, which defines what holiness entails, including respect for parents, taking care of the poor, having honest weights and measures, coming to the rescue of those in distress, observing one day a week as Shabbat so that work does not become an idol, refraining from vengeance and bearing a grudge and instead reproving someone who needs rebuke, and, ultimately, “Love your neighbor as yourself” (verse 18). As a society, we should strive to become “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exodus 19:6). So the point of relating to God is not just to gain knowledge; it is to model ourselves after God and thus become better individuals and communities.

We find it easier to relate to God—that is, the transcendent element of our experience, ultimate reality—through metaphors that make it possible for us not only to understand what we can, but also to relate to it, and so the Bible itself refers to God in many ways. One is the generic word “god” (’el or ’elohim in Hebrew) and God’s proper name: (the Tetragrammaton, which is written as the four Hebrew letters, yod, heh, vav, heh but is pronounced as Adonai, “my Lord,” as a matter of respect, much as we call our parents “Mother” and “Father” or the affectionate “Mom” or “Dad” rather than by their proper names). In addition to these generic and proper names for God, the Bible refers to God through multiple metaphors, as, for example, Father and Creator (Deuteronomy 32:6), Sun and Shield (Psalm 84:11); and eight metaphors in two consecutive verses (Psalm 18:2–3): “I adore you, O Lord (the Tetragrammaton), my strength, my crag, my fortress, my rescuer, my God, my rock in whom I seek refuge, my shield, my mighty champion, my haven.” (verses 2–3). Then, of course, there is the famous verse, “The Lord is my shepherd…” (Psalm 23:1). These are all partial windows into the nature of God. The classical rabbis aptly name this higher level of abstraction “the Place” (hamaqom), asserting that “the Holy Blessed One is the place of His universe, but His universe is not His place” (Genesis Rabbah 68:9)—namely, that God encompasses space, but space does not encompass God.

What Belief in God Means

What does it mean, then, not to believe in God? It could mean that one is blind to the third level of abstraction altogether, that one lives one’s life on the concrete level alone or perhaps also on the first level of abstraction. Alternatively, it could mean that one experiences the second level of abstraction, but it does not matter much in a given person’s life. Most often, it means that someone identifies God with a particular metaphor or vision of God that has not panned out in his or her life, especially when they prayed to God for something that did not happen and then become an agnostic or atheist because that particular understanding of God did not materialize. In those cases, one may want to rethink the ways in which one understands God rather than ignore or deny one’s experience of transcendence. In particular, as the classical rabbis already assert, a prayer to reverse something that has already happened is a vain prayer (m. Berakhot 9:3). They also assert that we may not depend on miracles in the sense of violations of the laws of nature (b. Qiddushin 39b), so we should not expect prayers that such miracles occur to be fulfilled. That is very different from our daily prayer in the Amidah to thank God for “Your miracles that are daily with us,” where the “miracles” are the very laws of nature that enable us to live and function. The word “miracle” in this context means something that is awesome and should not be taken for granted.

Conversely, what does it mean to believe in God? It is to be aware of the second level of abstraction and to make it an important part of how one understands oneself and lives one’s life. The metaphors by which one refers to that level of experience (how one conceives of God) and the patterns of action that are motivated by that experience will undoubtedly change over time and as one gains experience with all levels of experience.

Martin Buber made an important distinction between “belief that” something is the case, which he called “p-faith” from the Greek word pistis, “knowledge,” in contrast to “belief in” something or someone, which he called “e-faith” from the Hebrew word emunah, meaning “trust.”5 Adopting his distinction, along the lines that I described in the introduction to this essay, I would say that in Christianity and Islam, belief in God, while involving matters of trust, is primarily a matter of assertions that the world and anything beyond it is of a particular nature, articulated in their beliefs, respectively, that Jesus is Christ or that Muhammad is God’s ultimate prophet. Judaism certainly has beliefs—for example, that God is one, that the Written and Oral Torahs articulate what God wants of us, that the People Israel are in Covenant with God—but Judaism does not define itself or who is a Jew in terms of an official statement of beliefs that one must assert to be Jewish. As noted above, Rabbi Louis Jacobs has demonstrated that when a variety of rabbis during the Middle Ages, influenced by the Muslims and Christians among whom they lived, formulated lists of beliefs that they thought defined Judaism, those lists were reformulated and reinterpreted by later rabbis, and so no such formulation became authoritative.6 Instead, in Judaism e-faith is dominant, so that belief in God is primarily a statement that one’s experience of the transcendent, the second level of abstraction, can be trusted to be real and true, and that one should therefore live one’s life with humility, gratitude, morality, and aspirations for holiness.

Rabbi Elliot N. Dorff, Ph.D. is Rector and Distinguished Service Professor of Philosophy at American Jewish University and Visiting Professor at UCLA School of Law.