The Semantic Vacuity of ‘God’: An Argument for Nulltheism
Abstract:
The perennial debate concerning the existence of God has traditionally focused on metaphysical, epistemological, and moral arguments. This paper contends that such debates are premature, as they presuppose the semantic viability of the concept of ‘God’. We advance an argument for a position termed ‘nulltheism’, which holds that the set of individuals who believe in God, as defined by classical theism, is necessarily empty. The argument proceeds in three stages. First, we establish a semantic framework grounded in a moderate form of content externalism, which posits that for a mental representation to possess determinate content, it must be appropriately grounded in external reality. Second, we apply this framework to the standard philosophical concept of God—a non-physical, disembodied, and non-spatiotemporal mind—and argue that it fails to meet the requisite conditions for content determination, rendering it semantically vacuous. Third, we provide a diagnostic account of self-professed theistic belief, arguing that it consists of two distinct phenomena, neither of which constitutes a genuine belief in the God of classical theism: (1) belief in an anthropomorphic super-agent, a cognitively natural concept supported by findings in the cognitive science of religion; and (2) the manipulation of semantically empty terms by philosophical theists, a mental state mistaken for genuine belief. We conclude that, in the strict philosophical sense, theists do not exist.
Keywords: Nulltheism, Content Externalism, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Religion, Semantics, Theism, Anthropomorphism, Reference Theory, Meaning Externalism.
1. Introduction
The question of God’s existence has occupied a central position in Western philosophy for millennia. Arguments for and against the existence of a divine being have been formulated, refined, and contested across nearly every philosophical tradition. These debates, however, proceed from a shared, often unexamined, assumption: that the concept of ‘God’ is sufficiently well-formed to serve as the subject of a genuine belief. That is to say, it is assumed that the term ‘God’ possesses determinate content, allowing the sentence ‘God exists’ to express a coherent, truth-apt proposition.
It is the contention of this paper that this assumption is mistaken. We shall argue for a position we call nulltheism: the thesis that no person can, or does, hold a belief about God, where ‘God’ is understood in the sense of classical theism. It is crucial to distinguish this position from atheism. Atheism is an ontological claim; it asserts that the proposition ‘God exists’ is false. Nulltheism, by contrast, is a semantic claim; it asserts that the proposition ‘God exists’ fails to express a determinate thought, because its subject term, ‘God’, is semantically empty. The atheist denies God’s existence; the nulltheist denies the possibility of even believing in it.
Our argument will proceed as follows. First, we will outline our semantic framework, drawing upon content externalism to establish a criterion for determinate content. Second, we will demonstrate that the philosophical concept of God (God_P) fails this criterion, a failure made clearer when contrasted with the folk-religious concept of an anthropomorphic super-agent (God_A). Third, we will anticipate and rebut several significant objections, including those from descriptivism and mystical experience. Finally, we will offer a diagnostic analysis of the phenomenon of self-professed theism.
2. The Semantic Framework: Content and Grounding
For an agent to hold a belief, that agent’s mental state must have determinate content. A belief must be about something. The question, then, is how such content is determined. We adopt a moderate externalist thesis, which holds that the content of a mental representation is fixed not solely by intrinsic properties of the agent’s mind, but by relations the agent bears to an external environment. This view, famously articulated by Putnam (1975) and Burge (1979), posits that meaning requires grounding.
We derive two key principles from this framework:
- The Belief-Content Requirement: An agent can only have a genuine belief about X if the agent’s mental representation of X has determinate content. A thought that fails to refer to anything specific is not a belief, but a semantically vacuous mental event.
- The Externalist Condition: A mental representation acquires determinate content only if it is appropriately grounded by external relations. These relations can include, inter alia, (a) causal-historical connections to the referent, or (b) deferential grounding in a socio-linguistic community whose expert members have established such connections.
Without such grounding, a concept is a free-floating signifier. To clarify the target of our critique, we distinguish two concepts often conflated under the label ‘God’.
| Attribute | God_P (Philosophical Theism) | God_A (Folk Theism) |
|---|---|---|
| Nature | A non-physical, non-spatiotemporal, disembodied mind. A being of pure actuality. | A powerful, personal agent with a mind, intentions, and emotions analogous to humans. |
| Relation to World | Transcendent; causally disconnected in any empirically verifiable manner. | Immanent; acts within time and space, responds to prayers, performs miracles. |
| Semantic Grounding | None. Defined by negation of all physical, spatiotemporal properties, thus severing all standard grounding connections. | Parasitic. Constructed from a collage of grounded concepts (father, king, mind, creator) derived from worldly experience. |
Our argument concerns the semantic impossibility of believing in God_P.
3. The Semantic Failure of the Philosophical Concept of God
When we apply the Externalist Condition to God_P, the concept is found to be semantically unviable. The primary obstacle for God_P is its lack of a causal-environmental connection. By definition, it is not a physical object or property within the spatiotemporal world. One cannot ostensively define ‘God’ by pointing to a sample of it. Its non-physicality precludes the kind of causal interaction that grounds our concepts of natural kinds like water or gold.
Compounding this issue is the failure of socio-linguistic grounding. While a community of theologians uses the word ‘God’, this community lacks the epistemic access required to anchor the term. The medical community can ground the term ‘arthritis’ by examining joints, but theologians can only defer to sacred texts or traditions. This chain of deference never terminates in an objective, verifiable link to a non-physical mind; it terminates in further descriptions that themselves describe an ungrounded entity.
Therefore, the concept of God_P, being intentionally severed from all standard grounding relations, lacks the necessary conditions for determinate content. From this it follows that no agent can form a genuine belief about God_P.
4. Anticipated Objections and Rebuttals
This conclusion faces several powerful objections, which we shall now consider.
Objection 1: The Internalist/Descriptivist Account.
One might argue that the content of ‘God’ is fixed by a cluster of descriptions: ‘the creator of the universe’, ‘a being of maximal greatness’. After all, we can reason about concepts like ‘infinite set’ or ‘possible world’, which are also collages of more basic concepts.
Rebuttal: This objection overlooks a crucial distinction. Formal concepts like ‘infinite set’ are extensions of a grounded concept (‘set’) governed by rigorous axiomatic rules within a formal system; they do not purport to be substantive, agent-like entities. The concept of God_P, however, purports to refer to a singular, concrete particular with properties like agency and mind. The descriptions used to define it (‘disembodied mind’, ‘non-spatiotemporal agent’) are not just incoherent in a formal sense; they are semantically ungrounded. They combine a term requiring an embodied paradigm (‘mind’) with a negation of that paradigm, resulting not in a coherent abstraction but in a referential void.
Objection 2: The Problem of Abstracta.
If this argument is sound, it may seem to render belief in abstract objects (e.g., numbers, justice) impossible as well.
Rebuttal: This objection is only problematic for a Platonist. We can consistently adopt a nominalist or anti-realist stance towards abstracta. On this view, we do not have beliefs about Platonic numbers. Rather, ‘number’ is a label for a set of grounded practices (counting, measuring). Similarly, ‘morality’ refers to a complex of grounded psycho-social phenomena (preferences, behaviors). This view is philosophically consistent: just as it finds the concept of a non-physical Platonic number unintelligible as a belief object, it finds the concept of a non-physical God equally so.
Objection 3: Grounding via Mystical Experience.
A more formidable objection holds that mystical or religious experience can provide direct, non-inferential grounding for the concept of God, functioning as a form of “ostension by acquaintance.”
Rebuttal: This claim is untenable for three reasons. First is the problem of convergence: mystical experiences vary dramatically across cultures and individuals, yielding reports of a Trinitarian God, a non-dual Brahman, or the Void of Nirvana. They do not converge upon a stable, singular referent. Second is the problem of conceptual parasitism: the interpretation of such experiences is invariably structured by a pre-existing conceptual framework. A Christian mystic has an experience of God because she already possesses the concept; the experience does not ground the concept but is instead filtered through it. Third is the failure of public scrutability: unlike pointing to a physical object, this inner “pointing” is private and unverifiable, failing the public condition necessary for stable reference in a linguistic community.
5. A Diagnostic Account of Theistic Belief
If no one can believe in God_P, what is the nature of the mental states of the millions who identify as theists? The nulltheist position offers a two-part diagnostic analysis.
5.1 The Folk Theist: Mistaken Identity
The vast majority of believers, we contend, hold a belief in God_A. This concept of an anthropomorphic super-agent is cognitively natural. As work in the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) suggests, the human mind possesses evolved systems, such as a “Hyperactive Agency Detection Device” (HADD), that predispose us to conceptualize supernatural agents with minds, intentions, and human-like characteristics (Boyer, 2001; Barrett, 2004). This empirical work supports our philosophical analysis: the folk theist has a genuine belief with determinate content, as it is constructed from grounded concepts. Their error is one of misidentification: they believe in the cognitively natural God_A but use the label ‘God’, which philosophers have defined as the cognitively unnatural and semantically empty God_P.
5.2 The Philosophical Theist: Mistaken Content
The sophisticated theologian who explicitly rejects anthropomorphism and attempts to form a belief solely about God_P falls into a different error. In purifying the concept of all its grounded, worldly analogues, they render it semantically empty. The mental state they achieve is not a belief with determinate content, but an elaborate, syntactically structured thought that lacks a referent. Their error is to mistake this semantically vacuous state for a profound belief.
6. Conclusion
The argument for nulltheism reframes the traditional debate about God. It proposes that before we can meaningfully ask whether God exists, we must first establish that ‘God’ is a semantically coherent concept capable of serving as the content of a belief. Our analysis, grounded in a moderate content externalism, concludes that it is not. The standard philosophical concept of God (God_P) is semantically vacuous, making belief in it impossible.
The population of self-professed “theists” is thus resolved into two distinct groups: (a) a majority who hold a genuine belief in an anthropomorphic super-agent, which they mislabel as ‘God’, and (b) a minority of philosophical thinkers who have a semantically empty mental state they mistake for a belief. Consequently, the set of people who believe in the God of classical theism is empty. Theists, in the philosophically rigorous sense, do not exist.