The debate surrounding the concept of “God” in theology often mirrors the philosophical conundrum presented by Gottlob Frege (1880), who provocatively claimed: “The concept horse is not a concept.” This paradoxical assertion highlights a distinction: while philosophers may debate the nature of concepts, all agree that the concept of a horse is not the actual, rideable animal. Confusing the two—the concept and the thing it represents—is a fundamental “use-mention error.”
This error is prevalent in theological discourse, as noted by Daniel C. Dennett in Breaking the Spell (2006). He critiqued books like Karen Armstrong’s A History of God (1993) by suggesting they are, in reality, histories of the concept of “God”—or, equivalently, “A History of the Easter Bunny.” Dennett argues that Armstrong traces the evolving concept over time, just as one could track the concept of the Easter Bunny, a concept atheists like Dennett can acknowledge without believing the entity exists. The fundamental confusion lies in conflating the concept with the actual being.
Theologians, according to Dennett, often leverage the conceptual ambiguity. He contrasts a “sophisticated theology” represented by Armstrong’s quote, “God is no being at all,” with what he labels the “crude primitive atheism” of the New Atheists, summarized as “No being at all is God.” Dennett views this as a “transparency of theology,” akin to a visible magician’s trick, where the conceptual maneuvering is easily detectable.
Dennett observed a similar pattern in Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God (2009). He contends that the book’s true subject is the evolution of the concept of God, not God itself. Wright’s title, Dennett argues, attempts to subtly substitute the concept for the reality, making the book seem like a history of a real entity rather than an evolutionary account of an idea. Had it been titled “The Evolution of the Concept of the God,” it would be demoted to the level of studying the evolution of the concept of the Easter Bunny, without asserting the reality of the subject. Dennett identified this as another instance of the use-mention error.
Rodney Stark’s One True God (2001) also falls under this critique. Stark asserts, “all of the great monotheisms propose that their God works through history, I plan to show that at least sociologically.” Dennett interprets this as another use-mention error, suggesting that the “triumphs as well as disasters” made in the name of God are sociological facts about the concept’s impact, not evidence of an anthropomorphic God actively intervening. Stark’s approach suggests a God that is a product of conscious human creation and cultural evolution—an “agent of bargain,” evolving over time as a “reasonable and satisfying conclusion” from available religious culture. For Dennett, discussing the evolution of the God’s role is essentially discussing cultural evolution and the evolution of a concept.
