| Summary: | If any one of Judaism, Christianity or Islam is true, even if only in broad outline, then Jews, Christians and Muslims worship the same God as one another. In the cases of each of the three Abrahamic faiths, the avowed intention is to worship the same God as Abraham worshipped and each tradition supposes that it may trace itself back to him. Moses, a figure again revered by each tradition, is depicted in two of the traditions as having directly received the ancestor-name for the present-day English ‘God’ from God Himself. If one is a Kripkean about the name ‘God’, all this is about as good as it could get for the thesis that if they use the term ‘God’ in attempting to refer to the object of their religious devotion, then the adherents of each these religions refer by it to the same being as one another, presuming any refer by it. In short: if one of these religions manages to refer to God with ‘God’, they all do; if the followers of one of these religions worships God, the followers of all do. Through their interactions with Greek culture and with one another, each of these religious traditions has also come to share what is usually called the theistic concept of God. If one takes more of a descriptivist approach to ‘God’, then again this is about as good as it could get for the thesis that whether one is a Jew, Christian, or Muslim, if one directs one’s worship to a being one calls ‘God’, one is directing it towards the same being as the adherents of the other monotheistic religions, presuming the theistic concept of God is indeed instantiated. The bottom line is the same: if one of these religions manages to refer to God with ‘God’, they all do; if the followers of one worship God, the followers of all do.
Whilst matters are not as clear-cut as this suggests, I shall argue that this line of thinking is fundamentally sound; and I shall close by pushing it a bit farther along the road, towards the claim that if Theism is true, then all who believe in any supernatural being(s) at all are believing of God that He exists and worshipping Him, at least if He has not created anything else supernatural.
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