proximity to God; the etymology of the word (Latin divus/deus; Sanskrit deva) shows this
connection, too. And “nontheistic” is derived from the Greek theos, which is just the
word ordinarily translated into Latin as deus, both of which, in English, become “God.”
In the Nicene Creed, for example, recited in Christian churches all over the world every
week, the English phrase “We [or `I'; the Greek and Latin versions differ on this] believe
in one God” renders the Greek pisteuomen eis hena theon and the Latin credo in unum
deum. To speak of nontheistic conceptions of the divine is therefore a bit like speaking of
nonpolitical understandings of the state: if not quite an oxymoron, at least a close
approach to one.
Perhaps, however, we need not be hamstrung by etymology. In thinking about what a
nontheistic conception of the divine might be, we can begin by stipulating that a theistic
conception of the divine will be any understanding that takes God to be a person whose
names include a good number of the following: creator, redeemer, sanctifier, lover,
knower, holy one, powerful one, eternal one. Most such understandings will be Jewish,
Christian, or Islamic; they will have been
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developed within the vast complex of thought and practice that takes itself to be
identifying and thinking about the God who called Abraham to leave the land of his
fathers for the promised land. But not all will. Some Indian thinkers named God in some
or all of these ways (Ramanuja, who flourished in the early twelfth century, provides a
classical example) and did so without knowledge of anything Jewish, Christian, or
Islamic. For the most part, though, if we define theistic conceptions of the divine in this
way they will be broadly Abrahamic.
On this understanding of theism, a conception of the divine is nontheistic precisely to the
extent that it departs from this tradition of naming the divine. Such departure might be
explicit and self-conscious; this would be so when a thinker reacts against theistic naming
and tries to do better by replacing it with something different. But it might also occur as
part of a tradition to which theistic naming is largely or entirely unknown. This way of
approaching the question does not yield a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for
the discrimination of theistic from nontheistic conceptions of the divine, but it does
provide a point of entry and a rough-and-ready means for such discrimination, and this
will suffice for the purposes of this chapter.
Nontheistic conceptions of the divine could be classified and discussed in many ways.
One approach would be to construct a typology of possible nontheistic understandings,
but this would be tedious and not terribly useful. A second approach—the one followed
here—would collect some representative instances of nontheistic understandings of the
divine and would comment on the concepts and argumentative strategies that inform
them. Because most theistic understandings of the divine will be related in one way or
another to Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, it will be easiest and most useful for purposes
of contrast to take the examples from traditions of thought and practice largely or
completely uninfluenced by the concepts familiar to these Abrahamic religions. This is
what I shall do. The Sanskrit religious and philosophical literature of India provides a
vast and rich set of resources for studying conceptions of and arguments about the divine
that are historically independent (for the most part) of those to be found in the Greek,