Belief In One Less God
The Form of the Argument
The atheist counts gods. The believer is shown to reject Zeus, reject Thor, reject Krishna and Quetzalcoatl and Anubis and Marduk and Ahura Mazda, until the list runs to several thousand divinities the believer happily rejects without losing a moment of sleep. The atheist takes one step further. Same step, just one more, and the symmetry is complete.
Religious diversity is a fact. Religious incompatibility is a fact. Competing religious claims cannot all be true, and most believers throughout history have rejected most of the gods their neighbours worshipped. The believer who claims certainty in the face of those facts owes some account of why one tradition's particular descriptions survive scrutiny that others do not. Something real sits behind the rhetoric, even if the rhetoric overshoots.
For the symmetry to hold, the word god must mean the same kind of thing in both directions, and that kind has to be a discrete supernatural individual, the kind of being that could in principle be met, photographed, interviewed, or eliminated one at a time. Without that meaning there is no list, no count, no symmetry. The believer who claims to worship the ground of being rather than a being among beings has not been counted at all, because the counting only works on items that share a kind. The substitution does the entire job.
Gods as Furniture
In the form the argument requires, gods are items in a catalogue. Zeus and Thor and Krishna and Yahweh and Allah sit on the same shelf in the same museum, wear the same kind of label, and submit to the same kind of count. Picking one rather than another becomes the kind of choice made at a buffet. Picking none becomes one extra step in the same direction. The whole picture is consistent only if the catalogue has been correctly assembled in the first place.
Apply the same form of reasoning to a different category. Phlogiston turned out not to exist. Caloric turned out not to exist. The luminiferous ether turned out not to exist. Every disproved scientific posit ever floated has been rejected, and the symmetry-loving eliminativist who reasoned by counting would conclude that physical reality itself should be rejected too, since it is one more posit in a long line of failed posits. The conclusion is absurd. Physical reality is not a member of the same class as discarded scientific posits. The category includes what the world contains, not what some past theory mistakenly proposed about the world. Counting only works inside the category.
The same problem afflicts the one-less-god version. If god names a particular sort of being, with a biography and a postcode, then the count is meaningful. If god names something else entirely, something that is not a being among beings at all, then the count is fictional. The atheist who runs the argument has chosen the first reading without announcing the choice. The choice does the entire job. The rest is decoration.
The God of Abraham Is Not a Being on a List
The God of Abraham is not a powerful entity inside reality competing for attention with rival entities, not a celestial monarch ruling some particular jurisdiction in the sky, not even the most impressive item in a catalogue of supernatural beings. He is the answer to a different question entirely, the question of why there is something rather than nothing, the question of what grounds existence and intelligibility and moral order and the brute fact that anything at all is the case.
The classical theistic tradition has a phrase, ipsum esse subsistens, being itself subsisting. The phrase is not decorative. It marks a genuine distinction between things that have being and the source from which being is held. Thor has being. The kettle has being. The galaxy has being. None of them are being. To ask whether being itself exists is not to ask the same kind of question as whether any particular item on a list of beings exists. Yahweh on the same list as Thor is already a misfiled case.
The standard reply runs that ordinary believers do not talk this way. They pray to God as if to a person, they imagine a throne, they ascribe moods and preferences and conversational availability. The reply is true and uninteresting. Ordinary speakers of any technical tradition use approximate language for things their tradition defines more precisely, and the existence of folk physics does not refute physics. The object of worship at the level where the claim can actually be evaluated is what counts. At that level, the Abrahamic God is not on the list and never was.
The Hindu Pantheon Is Not a Crowd of Rivals
The pantheon, in the atheist's reading, is evidence that polytheism is just the same game played at higher volume. Several thousand gods instead of one, the same furniture cluttering the same room. The reading misses what is actually being claimed. In the philosophically serious Hindu traditions the gods are not rival ultimates. They are names, faces, powers, manifestations, or local accommodations of a single underlying reality, Brahman, which is no more countable than space itself. Advaita Vedanta is explicit about this. The plurality is appearance, the unity is real, and the gods are how the unity becomes available to a mind that needs faces to address.
Hindu thought distinguishes Saguna Brahman from Nirguna Brahman. Saguna Brahman is the divine with attributes, the divine as it appears to be addressed and worshipped. Nirguna Brahman is the divine without attributes, the ultimate ground that cannot be captured by any predicate at all. Saguna Brahman is what is approached in temple worship and devotional practice. Nirguna Brahman is what stands behind it, what philosophical Hinduism actually claims to be ultimate. The Gervais argument sees only the Saguna level and treats every name there as a separate ultimate. The tradition itself has been making this distinction for at least two and a half thousand years.
Counting the names of Vishnu and presenting the total as a refutation of Hindu metaphysics is rather like counting the synonyms in a thesaurus and presenting the total as evidence that English has too many languages. The same goes for the elaborate pantheons of folk Hinduism, which are often best understood as regional, functional, or devotional specializations of a deeper unity that the underlying philosophy never let go of. To take the surface plurality at face value and use it against the tradition is to read the tradition through the eyes of its own least sophisticated practitioners. Hinduism evaluated by that standard is a fairly different religion from Hinduism evaluated by the standards of its own metaphysicians.
Two Questions in One Costume
The disagreement between the believer and the Gervais-style atheist is not over the size of a list. It is over whether the word god is even a count noun. The believer says no, or at least not in the relevant sense. The word names a category that lives at a different logical altitude than Zeus and Thor, and the question of belief is the question of whether reality has a ground that is intelligent and necessary and ultimate. The atheist who recites the one-less-god line says yes. The word names a member of a finite catalogue, and the catalogue is empty. These are not two answers to the same question. They are two different questions wearing the same costume.
On one reading, the question is whether any specific named deity from any specific tradition exists in the way that tradition's least careful adherents describe him. On that reading, the classical theist will agree with the atheist on most of the cases. The Abrahamic believer does not believe in a Yahweh who literally lives on a literal throne in a literal cloud-kingdom. The serious Hindu does not believe in a Vishnu who is one bloke among other blokes. The agreement is broader than the rhetoric admits, and it stretches across most of the picture-book versions of every major tradition.
On a different reading, the question is whether reality has a necessary, intelligent, personal ground. On that reading, the atheist who recites the one-less-god line has not yet said anything against it. The line slides from the first question to the second without announcing the slide. The answer to the first question, namely that none of the picture-book deities are real, gets presented as if it were the answer to the second question, namely whether being itself is grounded in something necessary and personal. The two questions are not equivalent, and the answer to one is not the answer to the other.
Bad Taxonomy
The famous one-less-god argument leaves the believer's actual claim unaddressed. The kind of existence being denied is never specified. The victory being claimed therefore has no fixed target. What remains is a man who has confused divine language with a phonebook, taken the phonebook to be the entire claim, and announced that he has stopped calling the numbers.
Bad taxonomy is not the same thing as good philosophy. The Gervais line is the former wearing the costume of the latter, and the costume is starting to look very thin. The better arguments engage the actual claim. The actual claim answers them. Adversity is the condition of becoming. Omnipresence is the condition of communication. Inexpressibility is the condition of variety. The position requires all three from the start. The arguments that fail to account for them are arguing against a position no serious theist actually holds.
What remains, once the bad arithmetic is set aside, is the original question of whether reality has a ground that is necessary, intelligent, and personal. The atheist who recites the one-less-god line has not addressed that question. He has counted phonebook entries.