Atheists are fond of pointing out that when you talk about God, you have to be clear what God you’re talking about: Yahweh? Allah? Zeus? Thor? But the problem is not just picking a religious tradition to talk about. The problem is also that even within the Christian tradition, there are two very different ways to approaching what the word “God” means: the god of the Bible, and the god of philosophical theology. The God of the Bible is just the being you see described in Christian holy texts, while the god of philosophical theology is the one you hear defined on freshmen philosophy as an all-powerful, all-knowing, perfectly good being.

Many people, perhaps most people in the Christian intellectual tradition, believe these beings are one and the same. Unfortunately for them, the Bible contains plenty of passages that suggest otherwise: the notorious Judges 1:19, which indicates God’s power wasn’t of much help to the people of Judah against chariots of iron. Or Genesis 18:20-21, in which God says he will have to go to Sodom and Gomorrah to find out if the things he has heard about those two cities are true. Or Exodus 32:9-14, where Moses has to talk God down from destroying the Israelites for worshiping the Golden Calf and remind God of his promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to make their descendants numerous. None of these things seem becoming of the sort of God defined by philosophical theology.

Another common response to this distinction is to claim that the god of philosophical theology represents the primary meaning of the word “God”–this approach seems to be especially popular among Christian apologists who would rather not talk about the more difficult parts of the Bible (see, for example, the debate between William Lane Craig and Massimo Pigliucci). The approach also makes some sense, given that there are a fair number of Christians who go deist (reject the god of the Bible while holding on to the god of philosophical theology) while I never hear of Christians who hold on to the god of the Bible while giving up on the God of philosophical theology. Nevertheless, I think it can worth spending time on the God of the Bible, both because the Bible and the ideas contained in it are so central to lots of people’s religious beliefs, and because it obviously makes sense to ask whether, say, the gods of Homer and Hesiod exist (which is different than “makes sense to spend a lot of time asking…”–in an ideal world, we wouldn’t waste much time on either the gods of Homer or the god of the Bible).

I write this post now because of a recent mini-debate between Michael Shermer, Jerry Coyne, and Jason Rosenhouse on the significance of evolution for belief in God. The discussion would greatly benefit from a clear distinction between the two gods: evolution is just devastating to belief in the god of the Bible, much as modern science is devastating to belief in the gods of Homer, who were largely defined in terms of their role in explaining the natural world. It is not quite as problematic for the god of philosophical theology, though Rosenhouse’s point about the cruelty and waste of evolution is certainly relevant to the idea of a perfectly good god (on the other hand, the problem of evil created by simple knowledge of human history I regard as already devastating, so bringing the cruelty of evolution into it is just overkill IMHO).

As an aside, Shermer’s position is weaker than Coyne’s and Rosenhouse’s critiques would suggest, because he lists, among the “baseless fears” of anti-evolutionists, this point:

Belief that evolution is a threat to specific religious tenets. Many people attempt to use science to prove certain religious tenets, but when they do not appear to fit, the science is rejected. For example, the attempt to prove that the Genesis creation story is accurately reflected in the geological fossil record has led many creationists to conclude that the Earth was created within the past 10,000 years, which is in sharp contrast to the geological evidence for a 4.6 billion-year-old Earth.

No matter how you define the word “god,” belief in Biblical inerrancy and the literal truth of the Genesis creation story is obviously an example of a specific religious tenet, one more than a bit threatened by science. This part of Shermer’s article makes it hard for me to believe he’s entirely sincere in his attempts to make religion and science be friends.