Greater>Than Clothing

I majored in Philosophy in college, so forgive me for this little conceptual digression. On the heels of the recent comment bonanza, a few more interesting “x>y” comments trickled in. A clever young man named Diego chimed in with “nothing is > god”. That statement seems simple at first, but as I thought about it more I became less and less certain that I understood it.

I’ll take Diego’s quote at face value first. I think he means it as a statement of faith: “There is nothing greater than God”. Indeed, for religions that conceive of their gods as omnipresent, it’s almost trivial. If God is everywhere, then of course nothing could be “greater” (read “bigger”). Even if we take “greater” to mean “better”, this reading still works. It’s hard to be better than an omniscient and benevolent deity.

But what of Diego’s mysterious non-capitalization of “god”? I’ll bet it’s a typo or a simple oversight, but what if it was intentional? Thinking about this, I realized that using a negative statement (nothing) in conjunction with “>” puts you on semantically shaky ground. If nothing is greater than god, does that mean that god is less than nothing? And if something is less than nothing, does that mean that it is not simply nonexistent but rather a net negative? Perhaps this is a way of expressing the nihilist’s view of God as a broken promise.

So, it seems that the statement works as intended if and only if the opposite statement can also be made: “god > nothing”. I can’t think of another sentence in English that could coexist so peacefully with its own negation. Can anyone?

Far be it from me to inject commerce into such an interesting theological puzzle, but I can’t help but think that this could make a great t-shirt experiment. How would the average person interpret a t-shirt that had a blank space, a greater than symbol, then the word “god”? It could be like a religious Rorschach test; what you think it means depends on your preexisting associations with the concept. I wonder…

Anyway, thanks for the puzzle, Diego. You packed quite a conundrum into three words and a symbol.