Referring to ‘God,’ either directly or indirectly, has been problematic since God is obviously not reducible to a simple description. We assume that ‘God’ can refer to something but finding which mechanism is most promising will help us figure out how we can refer to Him successfully. I argue that the causal theory of reference, with Meghan Sullivan’s theory of semantic inspiration, and the everyday judgments of ‘God’ lead us to conclude that the reference to God is direct.

In this paper I examine Hugh Burling’s inspiring proposal that the reference of ‘God’ is determined by the description: ‘the being worthy of our worship’. I argue that a more detailed analysis of the notion of being worthy of our worship leads to the conclusion that the proposed description is paradoxical, and cannot fulfill the role Burling would like it to play in determining the reference of the term ‘God’. Subsequently, I provide several examples implying that being worthy of our (...) worship is a necessary condition for any candidate to be the referent of the term ‘God’, but the semantics of ‘God’ is considerably more complicated than Burling takes it to be. Finally, I show that religious people who use the word ‘God’ are either idolatrous or trapped in an apophatic paradox of the reference of ‘God’. (shrink)