Rethinking ‘God’: the concept of  ‘God’ as a category in comparative religion

Authors

• Ilkka Pyysiäinen Academy of Finland
• Kimmo Ketola University of Helsinki

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30674/scripta.67254

Keywords:

Religion -- Study, God -- Comparative studies, Concepts, Categories, Interdisciplinary study, Dialogue, Methodology

Abstract

Comparative religion should not remain isolated from other sciences. To enable interdisciplinary dialogue with other fields of study, scholars in comparative religion should make use of precise scientific concepts. 'God' is not a scientific but an emic concept used intuitively. Behind our intuitions about the concept of 'god' there are implicit Judeo-Christian assumptions. Substituting 'superhuman agent' for 'god' is no solution. The author provides some possible solutions; A) We might use the concept of 'god' only as a loose heuristic or interpretative term and drop it from theoretical language; B) We might also restrict the concept of 'god' only to Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and conceptualize other traditions preferring their own emic terms; C) 'God' is made to refer to a very broad category of all kinds of entities somehow violating people's expectations of how entities ordinarily behave, and conceived of as superior to human.