One source of the appeal of ordinary language philosophy (OLP) is that it reinstates much of what was ruled out as cognitively meaningless by logical positivism (LP) but without rehabilitating the commitments of old-time metaphysics. In particular, OLP allows the reinstating of religious language. This post explains, with blogic brevity, how this works and what is wrong and what right with the resulting philosophy of religion. Since OLP can be understood only against the backdrop of LP, I begin with a brief review of LP.
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1. Crudely put, logical positivism is just Hume warmed over. The LPs take his famous two-pronged fork and sharpen the tines. Hume spoke of relations of ideas and matters of fact, and consigned to the flames anything thing that was not one or the other. In the Treatise, he spoke of "school metaphysics and divinity" as deserving of such rude treatment. Since Hume's day, old-time metaphysics and theology have had a forking hard time of it.
The LPs spoke of two disjoint classes of statements and maintained that every cognitively meaningful statement must be a member of the one or the other. The one class contains the truths of logic and mathematics and such analytic statements as 'Every cygnet is a swan' all interpreted as true by convention. The other class consists of statements empirically verifiable in principle.
Any statement not in one of these two disjoint classes is adjudged by the LPs to be cognitive meaningless. Thus the aesthetic statement, 'The adagio movement of Beethoven's Ninth exceeds in beauty anything Bruckner wrote' is by their lights not false, but cognitively meaningless, though they generously grant it some purely subjective emotive meaning.
And the same goes for the characteristic statements one finds in theology, metaphysics, and ethics. Such statements are not false, but meaningless, i.e., neither true nor false. Imagine a debate between a Muslim and a Christian. Muslim: "God is one! There is no god but God (Allah)!" Christian: "God is triune (three-in-one)." For an LP, the debate is meaningless since theological assertion and counter-assertion are meaningless. The assertions are neither analytic nor empirically verifiable.
Or consider a debate between two Christians. They are both Trinitarians: there is one God in three divine Persons. But the man from Rome maintains that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son (filioque) while the man from Constantinople maintains that the Holy Ghost proceeds directly from the Father. For an LP, this debate about the procession of Persons is cognitively meaningless.
I chose these examples to show how attractive LP is. For many of you will be inclined to think of these debates as in some sense meaningless. "How could one know one way or the other?" Many of you will be inclined to want to tie meaningfulness to empirical verifiability. Nevertheless, LP is untenable. But that is not my present point.
2. My present point concerns the appeal of OLP. The OL boys weren't out to resurrect metaphysics. They took on board the anti-metaphysical animus of the LPs. But their approach allowed the salvaging of ways of talking that the LPs had no interest in preserving. Religious language is a key example. So what I am contending is that one source of the appeal of OL philosophy is that it allows religious talk and thus religion itself to be saved from the accusation of meaninglessness. But it does this without crediting old-time metaphysics. You can see why that would appeal to a lot of people.
To explain this properly would take a lot of scribbling. But the central idea is that religion is a form of life and a language game, a self-contained language game that needs no justification ab extra. Hence it needs no justification from metaphysics or philosophy generally. It is in order as it is — to use a characteristically Wittgensteinian turn of phrase. By the same token, religion cannot be attacked from the side of philosophy. It is an island of meaning unto itself, and is insofar forth insulated from criticism. (L. insula, ae = island.) Nor can it come into conflict with science or be debunked by science. Religion and science are incommensurable: there is no common measure or standard relative to which they can be judged. Thus one cannot say that science puts us in touch with reality while religion does not.
Within the religious language game there are valid and invalid moves, things it is correct and incorrect to say; but the language game itself is neither correct nor incorrect. It just is. It is just there, like our life. Religion is a groundless system of belief, a system of belief that neither needs nor is capable of justification. But the same is true of science. Within language-games there can be well-founded and ill-founded judgments, correct and incorrect reasoning, justification and lack of justification, evidence and proof, correct and incorrect measurements. But there can be no justification of language-games themselves. In this sense, religions are groundless systems of belief. All grounding occurs within them, but they themselves cannot be grounded.
3. There is something about this that strikes me as dreadfully wrong. Suppose a believer, in the context of a religious service, recites, "I believe in God the Father, almighty creator of heaven and earth. . . ." If Wittgenstein is right, this utterance neither makes, nor implies, nor presupposes any claim about reality. Reciting those words, the believer does not commit himself to the view that there is a creator of the universe, or that the universe has the status of being a divine creation, or that the universe does not just exist as a matter of brute fact. Now it goes without saying that there is more to religion than doctrinal commitments. But this triviality is not what Wittgensteinian fideism amounts to. It amounts to the radical claim that religious belief and practice implies or presupposes nothing about the way things are apart from these beliefs and practices.
Thus the beliefs and practices of members of the Abrahamic faiths neither imply nor presuppose that there is any fact of the matter as to whether or not God is real. 'God is real' is a framework-belief comparable to 'Physical objects are real.' Within the framework of talk about physical objects there is a fact of the matter as to whether or not the earth has a natural satellite; but there is no fact of the matter as to whether or not there are physical objects. Similarly, for one who operates within an Abrahamic-religious language game or form of life there can be no question whether God is real: the reality of God is constitutive of such a language game's being what it is. Consequently, questions about proof and evidence cannot arise. Accordingly, all philosophical and scientific arguments for and against the existence of God rest on a misunderstanding. Questions about truth and rationality arise within language games; one cannot ask about the truth and rationality of the games themselves.
4. Taken literally, the Wittgensteinian view, pace D. Z. Phillips, Norman Malcolm, et al., is just preposterous. Surely either some reality corresponds to our God-talk or no reality corresponds to it. Either there is an afterlife or there isn't, and physical death is annihilation of the person. These are objective questions about the way things are and cannot be reduced to framework-features of some contingent ways we talk and behave. 'Does God exist or not?' is not like the question, 'Does the bishop move on the diagonals or on the ranks and files?' It is senseless to demand proof that the bishops move on diagonals in a way that it is not senseless to demand proof that in a certain game there has been a three-fold repetition of position; but it is not senseless to demand proof, or at least evidence, of the existence of God. It makes all the sense in the world.
5. And yet if we are fairminded we ought to admit that there is something to the Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion. Although it is nonsense to suppose that there is no fact of the matter as to whether or not God exists, it is also difficult to believe that the existence of God is like the existence of anything else. Although 'God is real' is not a framework-belief like 'Physical objects are real,' it is not a belief like 'The moon is real.' The claim that there exists a being having the divine attributes is not like that claim that there exists a natural satellite of the earth. Theist and atheist are not disputing over the ontological inventory with the theist adding an item to the inventory that the atheist refuses to add. If God exists, he is 'implicated' in the mode of being of all else. If God exists, this must affect the ontological status of all else: modally contingent beings, for example, cannot exist as a matter of brute fact but must depend in their very existence on God. God is not a being among beings, but a paradigmatic being who is Being itself. I cannot clarify this further at the moment, but I would urge that Aquinas' view of God as ipsum esse subsistens, self-subsistent existence is defensible.
Well, suppose it is. Then I think we have a way to accommodate what is right while avoiding what is wrong in Wittgenstein's philosophy of religion. The conflict between theist and atheist goes deep. It is not a dispute over an ordinary matter of fact but is more like a conflict of Weltbilder in which the data of experience are interpreted in radically different ways. In that regard it resembles the conflict between incommensurable language-games. But talk of language-gaqmes strips the conflict of all seriousness. It is not a conflict merely about language-games and forms of life, but about reality itself.
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Related Posts (on one page):
- The Question of the Reality of God: Wittgensteinian Fideism No Answer
- What is Wrong and What is Right with Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Religion
Phillips was my thesis advisor when I did an M.A. in philosophy of religion at Claremont. A very charming and colorful man, the kind you like pretty much can't help but like as soon as you meet him. We agreed on little philosophically speaking (especially since those were my atheist days), though I always respected the fact that his "anti-realism" about religion (a label I do not think he ever would have accepted, by the way, but more on that in a moment) did not seem to lead him to any watering down of the demands of Christian morality. It was always a delight to hear him ridicule the various trendy left-of-center lunacies that have taken deep root in theology and religion departments everywhere (somehow always in a subtle and gentlemanly way that didn't seem to offend even the many people in his classes who held such views -- I think the Welsh accent helped.)
I certainly agree with you in rejecting Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion, and also (no surprise) that Aquinas's conception of God best expresses the way in which there is a fact of the matter about whether God exists even if His existence isn't like the existence of e.g. the moon.
In fairness to the Wittgensteinians, though, I think they would probably object strongly to your claims that on their view a religious statement "neither makes, nor implies, nor presupposes any claim about reality," that "the believer does not commit himself to the view that there is a creator of the universe," and so forth. In fact they (or Phillips anyway) are very keen to uphold the idea that believers hold God to be real, the creator of the world, and all the rest. It's just that they disagree with certain philosophical construals of what reality, creation, etc. amount to. In general, they accept all the creedal (and other traditional) language and claim only that it has been misunderstood by philosophers.
At the end of the day, I do think the view clearly amounts to anti-realism anyway, but it might, on a charitable interpretation, be read more as an overreaction to certain philosophical errors rather than a completely baseless position. In particular, Wittgensteinians (or, again, Phillips anyway) are hostile to any metaphysical conception of God that makes Him out to be a kind of super-object among the other objects that make up the world. The sort of theology-as-quasi-scientific-theorizing that one finds e.g. in Richard Swinburne is a favorite whipping boy. God just isn't a kind of theoretical posit a la fundamental particles, and to represent religion in this way just badly distorts it and opens it up to all sorts of objections that don't apply to it when it is rightly understood.
By contrast, Phillips seemed much more friendly toward Aquinas and Thomism. Not as friendly as I would like, to be sure; but, largely for the reasons you allude to, he did seem to think Aquinas's conception of God was more in harmony with the sort of view he preferred.
Unfortunately, the Wittgensteinian view nevertheless reduces religion to the expression of a certain moral outlook on the world. The right alternative to seeing it as quasi-science, though, is seeing it as (in part) old-fashioned metaphysics of the classical Plato-Aristotle-Augustine-Aquinas sort. I would say that, ever since Paley and Co., the (mis)interpretation of theological claims as quasi-scientific ones has had a catastrophic effect, transforming what were traditionally understood to be metaphysical demonstrations into empirical probabilistic hypotheses (e.g. transforming the Fifth Way into the "Design Argument") and thereby giving the false impression that philosophical theology is a futile exercise in God-of-the-gaps speculation.
So, the Wittgensteinians' diagnosis might be partially correct, even if their proposed cure isn't much better than the disease.
On foot of your post I spent an hour tracing the story of Wittgenstein's lifelong relationship with Christianity as related by Ray Monk in his biography (L.W. The Duty of Genius). I suppose he could be characterised as a mystic irrationalist who felt that the core of religion was contact with the living God and not a theorem. A talismanic book for him was Tolstoy's 'Gospel in brief', which he recommended to everyone.
"And faith is faith in what is needed by my heart, my soul, not my speculative intelligence. For it is my soul with its passions, as it were with its flesh and blood, that has to be saved, not my abstract mind." (L.W.)
When he was dying he asked Elizabeth Anscombe to get him a priest with whom he could talk about God. 'But not a philosophical one!
I have nothing of substance to add, however I wanted to tell you that it is a delight to read such clear writing on philosophy.
Regards, Bill T
The 'correct' answer was of course that the biblical texts are metaphorical or allegorical or intended to be taken figuratively, and that fundamentalist types misunderstand this metaphorical and figurative character of the texts. Thus I took the deliberately abrasive and uncompromising and incorrect line that they are suspicious of it because, understood for what it is, biblical criticism strongly implies the falsity of much of what is in the Bible. E.g. " And entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, dressed in a white robe;" (Mark) as against "While they were perplexed about this, behold, two men stood by them in dazzling apparel …" (Luke). One angel or two?
This led to endless arguments with the tutors who were all liberal catholic types, indeed, the whole course was liberal theological propaganda from beginning to end. They would make a contrast between what is 'literally true' and what isn't, and I always refused to make any such distinction, and that where no allegory or parable is obviously intended, there is the true and the false, and nothing between. One tutor tried to argue that people in classical times had a different view of truth and falsity than we do in modern times. I pointed out the cogent arguments in Aristotle's metaphysics, and Anselm's disquisitions on truth as suggesting that they had remarkably similar ideas about truth and falsity to us moderns.
Another said that when Mark says there is only one angel, he is trying to make a theological point. I objected that the point is not theological: Mark is setting out the history of the matter, as far as he can determine it, in order to convince his readers. As Augustine says (De Civ. Dei xiii, 21), nothing prevents us from holding, within proper limits, that there are spiritual facts as well as historical ones, so long as we believe in the truth of the events narrated in the Bible as having occurred.
I have a similar antipathy to New Age types and their anthropological views of primitive religion and medicine. The anthropogical viewpoint attempts to be sympathetic to the shaman or the witch-doctor. But you cannot be sympathetic to any belief, indeed, it is profoundly disrespectful to misrepresent it as a language-game or a ritual or something with merely symbolic significance, when the person who practices it has no such belief. The witch doctor or the shaman believe that what they do will will cure their patient, i.e. will bring about or cause a cure. The anthropological view by contrast involves no such belief.
Though I am enlightened enough, I realise, to put scare quotes around 'primitive'.
I think there are bits of religious belief that are commensurable with science, and bits that aren't. And of the bits that aren't, I think the incommensurability is due to the inherent limitations of empirical methods, not to the metaphorical character of the religious bits. This, of course, is anethema to the scientistic descendants of the positivists.
Thanks for your comments which are always appreciated. I didn't know that you had studied under Phillips. I saw him in action only once at a large APA session. He was indeed a charming fellow.
I agree with you that the Wittgensteinians would object to my assertion that, on their view, religious talk neither implies nor presupposes anything about reality. But my assertion seems to be an obvious consequence of the notion that LGs are self-contained and incommensurable. As such, there is no reality external to them against which they can be judged. On their view, it would make no sense to say that science puts us in touch with reality while religion does not. How can one avoid the conclusion that this is a form of linguistic idealism?
In a Phil Quart 1963 article, Phillips writes that "theology is the grammar of religious discourse." That is preposterous on the face of it. You may as well say that geology is the grammar of discourse about the earth, its rock-strata, etc. That is absurd because geology deals with realities transcendent of geology talk, realities that have nothing to do with human beings and their talk. Although the conclusion Phillips et al. comes to is preposterous, their motivation makes sense. As you point out, and as I pointed out, God is not an object among objects.
Seeing that God cannot be a being among beings, they embrace a view that is actually worse, namely, that God is but a feature of a contingent linguistic framework that happens to be a form of life of some people. I think we are in basic agreement. The way forward must avoid both of these extremes. In my 2002 book A Paradigm Theory of Existence I tried to defend in a non-Thomist way the notion of ipsum esse subsistens. If there is self-subsistent existence, then there is a being that is not a being among beings (since it is Being itself) but also does not have a merely linguistic or conceptual or -- most absurd of all -- "grammatical" status.
You are right that the core of religion is contact with the living God. But I reject fideism, whether Witggensteinian, Pascalian, or of any other sort, because it is unbalanced. In part, religion is a matter of the heart and soul; it is about meaning and purpose and escaping the horror of a merely material world. But if it cannot satisfy the head, then it is junk (spiritual heroin) that we should stay clear of.
Aquinas was balanced in a way Wittg, Kierk and Pascal were not. Aquinas was both a mystic and a logic-chopper. You have to be both.
Thanks very much. As Ortega y Gasset once said, "In philosophy, clarity is courtesy." We need to get this message to the French.
You are addressing a somewhat different issue, that of whether the Bible should be interpreted literally or figuratively. I confess to not being able to see how it could be read literally. For example, it surely cannot be true that God created the universe in six days. That makes no sense. Since time is one of the 'things' created, God cannot take a certain amount of time to create time. And that is just one problem.
And of course there is no first man and even if there were God couldn't have created him by taking some dirt in his hands and breathing on it. God does not have hands, etc.
The issue of whether or not religions are language games seems to cut perpendicular to the issue of whether or not scriptures are to be interpreted literally or figuratively. Or do you think these questions are parallel to each other?
You may have something different in mind, but I would say that religion and science conflict at some points but not at others. Theism affirms God, but science says nothing either way: her field is nature. No conflict. Dawkins is a dope if he thinks otherwise. But science affirms common descent while fundie religion denies it. Here there is conflict and fundie religion has to give way.
I think we are in agreement. Where religion and the uncontroversial and well-established portions of hard science conflict, religion must give way.
Bill V.: I've always thought J. L. Mackie pretty much nailed it in The Miracle of Theism: Phillips, Mackie argues, is essentially trying to find a middle ground between interpreting religious language as descriptive of reality and interpreting it, a la R. B. Braithwaite, as the telling of (essentially fictional) stories in aid of moral endeavor. "Phillips swings from one alternative to the other, wrapping both in obscurity, because he is seeking, but cannot find, a view that is different from both. What he wants to say cannot, indeed, be said; but this is a symptom not of depth but of incoherence." (p. 226)
I'm embarrassed to say that I haven't yet had a chance to read your book, though I greatly look forward to doing so -- and I (gladly) paid a hefty sum to get a copy some time back!
Well, and truly, said.
I had forgotten that Mackie discusses Wittgensteinian fideism in Ch 12 of Miracle of Theism. Thanks for reminding me. A quick re-reading shows that he covers the essential points in a very skillful way.
I agree that the via media that D Z Phillips seeks but does not find is that between fictional stories in aid of moral endeavor (e.g., the story that everything one thinks and does and leaves undone is being scrutinized by a just but loving judge) and statements about reality. One question is whether Thomism makes possible a treading of this middle path.
I am somewhat embarrassed that you shelled out a large sum for my inadequate book. It is available in university libraries. One problem with the book is that it is overlong on critique of other theories and too short on development of the positive suggestions. I was pleased though to get favorable reviews from Butchvarov, McCann, Moreland and some others.
Glad we agree!
this is an interesting conversation to which I don't have time to try to add much. One thing that struck me however was your claim that there was no first man. What do you mean by this? Unless you postulate, along with Aristotle, an eternal world with perpituity of every species, it seems like a strange claim to me.
>>> The issue of whether or not religions are language games seems to cut perpendicular to the issue of whether or not scriptures are to be interpreted literally or figuratively. Or do you think these questions are parallel to each other?
Depends what 'language games' means. My tutor who said that Mark was not making a claim that was literally true, but that he was making a theological claim, I interpret as the claim that it is a language game of some sort. Like your example of the Trinity.
In the ComBox I tend to write quickly. What I meant to affirm in my talk of "no first man" is the doctrine of common descent, which is an essential tenet (but of course not the whole of) the theory of evolution. The basic idea is that all organisms on earth had common ancestors. If so, there was no immediate start-up of the human race with a couple of original parents, Adam and Eve. Now the Bible story has it that there were these two original human parents, and they came directly into existence by divine agency with God pictured as a Big Man who makes Adam and Eve (Adam out of dust, Eve out of a rib of Adam) in the Big Man's image and likeness.
Now it seems crystal clear to me that this story cannot be taken literally: God is a not a Big Man; image and likeness has nothing to do with physical image and likeness; The human race is not unevolved. See Against Literal Bible Interpretation: The Case of Imago Dei
Of course, I am not saying that man as spiritual subject can be understood naturalistically. My point is that to read the Bible materialistically is to block out its spiritual message. So perhaps one could say that fundamentalists and their atheist opponents are strange bedfellows in the bed of materialism.
As I see it, there are two distinctions, literal/figurative and matter-of-fact/ matter-of-rule, but figurative is not to be identified with matter-of-rule. The distinction-pairs are 'orthogonal' to one another, i.e., they 'cut perpendicular' to one another.
For example, God is not literally a father: he lacks (or rather has no need of) a penis. God is father figuratively speaking. Literally, God is the nec. existent purely spiritual source of everything distinct from him. In that sense he is father. But that literal statement I just made is true as a matter of fact -- though not as a matter of contingent fact -- and not as a matter of rule. This is a non sequitur:
X is to be interpreted figuratively
ergo
X is to be interpreted as a rule constitutive of a language game.
If that is not a non sequitur, then I have no idea what a language game is supposed to be.
yes, if you simply meant "the first human beings had biological ancestors which were not themselves human", then there's no problem.
2. Disallowing comments from a particular person, or deleting an offensive, off-topic, or otherwise substandard comment, has nothing to do with censorship. People who think otherwise confuse censorship with lack of sponsorship. I am under an obligation not to interfere with anyone's exercise of legitimate free speech rights. But I am not under any obligation to aid and abet anyone's exercise of free speech rights, legitimate or illegitimate.
3. The Comments area is not an open forum for anyone to say anything about any topic. As the name implies, it is primarily for commenting on the author(s)' posts. But to comment on them, one must have read them. And if I have spent three hours on a post, a reader will not understand it in thirty seconds. Secondarily, the Comments area is to facilitate civil discussion between and among commenters as long as the discussion remains on-topic.
4. Some undesirables: The skimmers, those who cannot read but only read-in. The sophists who, abusing argument, argue for the sake of argument. The ideologues, those who are out for power, not truth. The uncivil. The illogical. The politically correct. Worst of all, perhaps, are those who exemplify the anti-Socratic property: those who think they know what they don't know. If Socrates was famous for his learned ignorance, these types are marked by their ignorant unlearnededness.