THESIS
HOW DOES RELIGIOUS
LANGUAGE HAVE
MEANING?
A WITTGENSTEINIAN PERSPECTIVE
Submitted by
Max Goodwin Brown
10847308
In partial fulfilment of the requirements
for the degree of Master of Arts in Philosophy
University of Amsterdam
Summer 2015
Contents
Table of abbreviations……….3
1. INTRODUCTION………4
1.1 Wittgenstein’s philosophy………..4
1.2 Wittgenstein and religion………...8
1.3 Moving forward………...12
2. BEYOND THE WORLD ...15
3. DOGMA………..22
3.1 Pictures……… ………23
3.2 Miracles………29
4. LANGUAGE IN A RELIGIOUS CONTEXT (THE ‘EVERYDAY’) ………36
4.1 Pictures II ………36
4.2 The unsayable………...40
5. CONCLUSION……… ………..48
Table of abbreviations
The following abbreviations are used to refer to works by Wittgenstein:
TLP Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by D.F. Pears &
B.F.M. McGuiness. Routledge 1961
LE ‘I: Lecture on Ethics’. In: The Philosophical Review, vol. 74, no. 1, 1965 pp. 3-12
LRB Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and
Religious Belief. Edited by Cyril Barrett. Basil Blackwell: Oxford
1967
OC On Certainty. Harper Torchbooks 1969
PI Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe.
Basil Blackwell: Oxford 1974
LF ‘Letters to Ludwig von Flicker’. Edited by Allan Janik. Translated by Bruce Gillette. In: Luckhardt (ed.) Wittgenstein: Sources and
Perspectives. Hassocks: Harvester Press 1979 pp. 82-98
RFGB Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough. Translated by A.C. Miles and
Rush Rhees. Edited by Rush Rhees. Retford: Brynmill Press 1979 CV (plus the year in
which the particular remark was written, e.g. CV 1947)
Culture and Value. Translated by P. Winch. Edited by G.H. von
Wright. Basil Blackwell: Oxford 1980
PO Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951. Edited by James C. Klagge
and Alfred Nordmann. Hackett 1993
1. INTRODUCTION
In the following essay, I will try to give an answer to the question ‘How does religious language have meaning?’ The question is, I think, a fundamental one. Note the difference between ‘How does religious language have meaning?’ and ‘What does religious language mean?’ It is not just that the latter question, thus formulated, is nonsensically vague; even if we changed it so that it was about a specific aspect of religious language, the former question would still take priority. If you say that a noun has meaning by virtue of referring to an
object, you are giving a description of how nouns have meaning and you can then go on to ask what particular nouns mean.1
Within philosophy of religion, one finds an ongoing dispute between those who think religious beliefs are cosmological in nature and that religious utterances are like expressions of theories or hypotheses about the world (and thus either true or false) and those who think that something else is going on.2 I am one of the ones who thinks that (in many cases anyway) something else is going on.
I will be taking a Wittgensteinian approach to answering the question – that is, an approach that draws heavily on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). Wittgenstein wrote comparatively little on religion and religious language, but what he did write served as the basis for a unique method of doing philosophy of religion, which method was brought to fruition in the work of such philosophers as D.Z. Phillips and Rush Rhees (whose work I’ll be drawing on also).
To begin with, I will give an overview of Wittgenstein’s philosophy in general, and his views on religion in particular, so as to provide some context for the following chapters. Then, at the end, I’ll explain how I intend to move forward.
1.1 Wittgenstein’s philosophy
Wittgenstein produced two major works, the Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus (1921) and
Philosophical Investigations (1953), which was published posthumously. Much
supplementary material (from which most of his ideas on religion are gleaned) was pieced together from his notebooks, letters and reports of conversations he conducted with friends. Broadly speaking, his philosophy can be divided into two phases, early and late, represented by the Tractatus and the Investigations respectively. While there are some very significant differences between the two phases, there are also some continuities. As we shall see over the course of this essay, one of the things that remains more or less consistent throughout
Wittgenstein’s philosophical life is his attitude towards the language of ethics and religion. The Tractatus
1 Plus answer all the lively follow-up questions that some philosophers of language would no doubt have for you.
With the Tractatus, Wittgenstein aimed to identify the limits of language and to explain the connection between language and reality. This he did using his picture theory of meaning, which states (roughly) that “…language is related to the world in that it ‘pictures’ (possible or actual) factual situations in the world, and is meaningful only insofar as it fulfils that
function.”3 The point, for Wittgenstein, is to be able to compare a proposition (i.e. a statement or assertion) to reality in order to ascertain whether it is true or false. This allows for the drawing of a sharp line between sense and nonsense. A proposition has sense by virtue of being a representation of a factual state of affairs. If it fails to represent a (possible or actual) state of affairs then it’s not true or false but meaningless.4 Sense-wise, ethical language is out: an assertion such as ‘Murder is wrong’ does not represent a possible fact and is thus
senseless. The same goes for religious statements such as ‘The eyes of God are on us all’, since what in the world can we compare this sentence to in order to establish its truth or falsity?
The Tractatus had a profound impact upon publication (and its legacy continues). Notably it was adopted by the Vienna Circle, a group of Austrian philosophers, who used the Tractatus as the basis for a movement known as Logical Positivism, according to which a sentence must be amenable to being verified in order to be meaningful. Since the bulk of religious assertions aren’t what you’d call verifiable, the view of religion taken by Logical Positivists’ was dim indeed.5 However, this was not a view shared by Wittgenstein, despite his being the inspiration for the movement. For him, the ‘unsayable’, under which heading is subsumed both ethics and religion, was far from being unimportant. In a letter composed sometime between the completion of the Tractatus and its publication, he wrote:
“…my work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and everything else I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one. For the Ethical is delimited from within, as it were, by my book; and I’m convinced that, strictly speaking, it can ONLY be delimited in this way.”6
In connection with this, consider the following excerpt from the book itself:
3 Clack 1999 p. 4
4 Which does not mean that it is necessarily nonsense. On Wittgenstein’s view, a tautlogy (e.g. ‘Either ‘p’ or ‘not p’ [is true]’) is meaningless in that it tells us nothing (expresses no meaning), but it still makes sense. 5 Clack 1999 pp. 30-31
“There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.”7
The meaning of this and other such cryptic Tractarian remarks will (hopefully) become clearer as we go along.
The Investigations
Wittgenstein subsequently rejected the view of language advanced in the Tractatus, feeling that it was too dogmatic and that it didn’t take into account the myriad ways in which language is actually used. In Philosophical Investigations (which exemplifies his later thought), he puts forwards the concept of ‘language-games’, which is meant to bring to the fore the fact that speaking is part of an activity:
“Making up a story; and reading it— Play-acting—
Singing catches—
Making a joke; telling it—
Solving a problem in practical arithmetic— Translating from one language into another— Asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying.
—It is interesting to compare the multiplicity of tools in language and of the ways they are used, the multiplicity of kinds of word and sentence, with what logicians have said about the structure of language. (Including the author of the Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus.)”8
On this new view, language is not one big homogenous thing that functions in a particular way, but an amalgamation of distinct language-games. Language-games have no one feature in common, but rather are connected by a series of overlapping similarities, or ‘family resemblances’. From this comes the notion that the meaning of a word depends on how it is used in a particular discourse or context:
“It is like looking into the cabin of a locomotive. We see handles all looking more or less alike. (Naturally, since they are all supposed to be handled.) But one is the handle of a crank which can be moved continuously…another is the handle of a switch, which has only two effective positions…a third is the handle of a brake-lever, the harder one pulls on it, the
7 TLP 6.522 8 PI §22
harder it brakes; the fourth, the handle of a pump: it has an effect only as long as it is moved to and fro.”9
And the notion that words have different uses while ‘looking more or less alike’ does not just apply to words that have several wholly different meanings (e.g. there can be ‘bears in the woods’ and one can also ‘bear something in mind’). Consider the following:
1) I believe we’ve found the Higgs-Boson. 2) I believe in God.
3) I believe we’re on the verge of a breakthrough. 4) I believe she’ll arrive at 4pm.
5) No, I don’t believe he’d do such a thing.
All of the above sentences are about beliefs. But would we want to say that they’re about the same kinds of belief? That is, is the word ‘belief’ being used in the same way in each of these sentences? (1) seems like the kind of sentence that would be uttered in a scientific context, thus the belief expressed will presumably have been formed on the basis of hard data and evidence, in a manner completely unlike the belief expressed in (2). The belief in (3) is likely based on a cocktail of evidence, experience and gut-feeling; the belief in (4) will probably be based on something the speaker was told in the past combined with their personal experience of the reliability of the person the sentence is about; the belief in (5) is probably also based on a mix of instinct and experience, but of a subtly different kind to that underlying (3) and (4). Etc.
For Wittgenstein, all this is a matter of grammar. Here he is using ‘grammar’ in a unique sense to indicate the implicit rules that govern how words are used and what it is and isn’t appropriate to say in a particular context. He calls this ‘depth’ grammar’ which he contrasts with ‘surface grammar’, i.e. what is usually meant by grammar.10 One of the purposes of the
Investigations was to expose the fallacies in the traditional ways of thinking about “language,
truth, thought, intentionality, and…philosophy”11, most of which arise from not paying proper attention to depth grammar. The task of the philosopher, therefore, is not to explain anything
9 Ibid §12 10 Ibid §664
(“…[s]ince everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain”12) but rather to describe – that is, to clarify the grammar in which words and expressions have sense (the stuff about ‘belief’ above is a rough sketch of how you might go about doing this). No longer is
philosophy about identifying the ‘best’ or ‘most meaningful’ form of discourse:
“What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand.”13
1.2 Wittgenstein and religion
Most of Wittgenstein’s meditations on the subject of religion and religious language are to be found in his later (i.e. the late 1920s and beyond) work. Importantly, for Wittgenstein, the point isn’t to try to assess the meaningfulness of religious language, or to establish whether religious statements are true or false. Rather, we should look at the grammar underlying religious language, at the contexts in which religious expressions have their sense and the meaning that these expressions have for those who utter them. One of the questions we ought to ask is: if words get their meaning through use, and religious utterances (along with ethical utterances, as well as others) aren’t used in the same way as in ‘normal’ discourse, then how are they used? The answer, such as it is, is not particularly simple, but, according to
Wittgenstein, one thing is for sure: religious utterances are not: “…connected with any speculative beliefs, nor in any straightforward way with historical occurrences.”14 Culture and Value
First published in 1977, Culture and Value is a collection of fragmentary remarks written throughout Wittgenstein’s life. The remarks are arranged chronologically by year, but the actual order in which they appear, the way in which they are grouped together, was chosen by the book’s editors not by Wittgenstein himself. Thus it is better to treat the book as a
collection of aphoristic insights that supplement and, at times, elucidate his other writings. The remarks are sometimes confessional in nature. Wittgenstein speaks of his own religious inclinations (“What inclines me to believe in Christ’s Resurrection? It is as though I play with the thought”15) and discusses what he feels to be the true nature of Christianity. He is adamant – and this is a key feature of his thoughts on religion – that true religious belief is not based
12 PI §126 13 Ibid §118 14 Clack 1999 p. 54 15 CV 1937 p. 33e
on evidence, that is, that no proper religious person comes to believe as a result of being convinced of the empirical truth of religious teachings. One does not reason one’s way to faith (“Wisdom is passionless. But faith in contrast is what Kierkegaard calls a passion”16 ). Moreover, the religious significance of a doctrinal text like the Bible is not a matter of its reliability or evidential validity. The believer does not treat like the Bible like a normal historical document. One trusts a normal historical document dispassionately and tentatively, aware that it could be revised or entirely discredited if new evidence were to come along. For the true believer, the historical accuracy of the Bible is not the point, and the idea of its ever being ‘discredited’ is ludicrous (“Queer as it sounds: The historical accounts of the Gospels might, historically speaking, be demonstrably false and yet belief would lose nothing by this”17).
Remark’s on Frazer’s Golden Bough
Written, as the name suggests, as a sort of response18 to The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic
and Religion (1890) by anthropologist James Frazer. Frazer’s book is an investigation into
the ritual behaviour of ‘primitive’ cultures. Magical rituals (things like rain dances) are explained by Frazer as bad science, correctly-intentioned but primitive attempts to understand and influence the workings of the world. Religion begins at the point where magical rituals are found to be ineffective; primitive peoples cannot influence nature, so they posit a god or gods who can. Magical rituals are then supplanted by rituals designed to curry the favour of a Supreme Overseer. Since magic and religion are, at bottom, attempts to influence the
workings of the world, and since neither magic nor religion actually bring about what they’re meant to bring about, science, says Frazer, is the logical culmination of all these practises, “…a golden key that opens many locks in the treasury of nature.”19
The Golden Bough was deeply influential and Frazer’s attitude towards religion, i.e. that it is
at heart theoretical and thus a form of bad science, is reflected in the work of many
contemporary thinkers, from the second half of the twentieth century up to the present day.20 Wittgenstein, however, was scornful of Frazer’s thesis, writing that, “Frazer’s account of magical and religious notions of men is unsatisfactory: it makes these notions appear as
16 Ibid 1946 p. 53e 17 Ibid 1937 p. 32e
18 Though the remarks were not written all in one go but in two distinct periods: the early ‘30s and “‘not earlier than 1936 and probably after 1948’” (PO p. 115).
19 Frazer 1922 p. 712
20 See, for example, Anthony Flew’s 1971 symposium ‘Theology and Falsification’. Or, more recently, Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion (2006) and Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell (2006).
mistakes.”21 But: “There is a mistake only if magic is presented as science.”22 Here we see illustrated a crucial characteristic of Wittgenstein’s view on religion, namely that religion cannot be assessed in scientific terms, and that it is wrong to assume that the overall project of religion is essentially that of the natural sciences.
Wittgenstein asks why primitive people would bother to cultivate practical skills at all if, as Frazer claims, they believe they can affect their environment using magic:
“The same savage who, apparently in order to kill his enemy, sticks his knife through a picture of him, really does build his hut of wood and cuts his arrows with skill and not in effigy.”23
Off the back of this point, he presents a very different account of ritualistic behaviour – ritual as catharsis, as expression of passion, as release of tension:
“Burning in effigy. Kissing the picture of a love one. This is obviously not based on a belief that it will have a definite effect on the object which the picture represents. It aims at some satisfaction and achieves it. Or rather, it does not aim at anything; we act in this way and then feel satisfied.”24
It ought of course to be acknowledged that Wittgenstein’s remarks do not decisively refute Frazer’s claims. For example, Frazer gives an account of an Abysinnian king who supposedly has the power to make the rains come and who is stoned to death by his people if he fails to do so25; such a reaction suggests that those people do indeed believe that their king is able to influence nature. Still, Wittgenstein raises some legitimate concerns. And one of the things his remarks highlight is the spontaneity or naturalness of certain ritualistic behaviours. How much thought, for example, does one put into angrily tearing up a photo of someone one thoroughly dislikes? Not only does it not seem right to say that a person who does such a thing thinks that they are managing to inflict pain on their foe, it doesn’t seem like they are
thinking at all. Rather they ‘act in the way then feel satisfied’. It is easy to see how this could
be brought to bear on modern Christianity – for example, a believer who cries ‘God save us’ during some disaster is not necessarily making a request for divine intervention. What they are doing (or might be doing) will hopefully become clear over the course of this essay. For
21 RFGB p. 1 22 Ibid p. 4 23 Ibid 24 Ibid
now, the important thing to bear in mind is that religious discourse, like all forms of discourse, is rooted in activity, in a way of life.
Lectures on Religious Belief
The Lectures on Religious Belief (1967) constitute Wittgenstein’s most comprehensive discussion of his views on religion, and they weren’t even written by him. They consist of notes taken by students during a course on belief which Wittgenstein gave around 1938. Nevertheless, they are generally agreed to be an accurate reflection of the views that Wittgenstein held at the time (though it is unlikely he would have approved of their publication26).
In them, he addresses, among other things, the vast gap between the subjective worlds of believer and nonbeliever. For Wittgenstein, the difference between someone who believes in, say, the Last Judgment and someone who doesn’t is not like the difference between someone who believes it will rain soon and someone who doesn’t:
“Suppose someone were a believer and said: ‘I believe in a Last Judgment,’ and I said: ‘Well, I’m not so sure. Possibly.’ You would say there is an enormous gulf between us. If he said ‘There is a German aeroplane overhead,’ and I said ‘Possibly. I’m not so sure,’ you’d say we were fairly near.
It isn’t a question of my being anywhere near him, but on an entirely different plane, which you could express by saying: ‘You mean something altogether different, Wittgenstein.’”27 This is a further illustration of one of the ideas put forward in Remarks on Frazer’s Golden
Bough, namely that when it comes to matters of religion, the believer and the nonbeliever are
not necessarily talking in the same terms. The nonbeliever may assume that ‘There is a God’ is the same kind of sentence as ‘There’s an aeroplane in the sky’, i.e. both are assertions about an object that either is or isn’t there. According to Wittgenstein, we need only to look properly to realize that the two sentences do not say anything like the same thing. The upshot is that being an atheist can simply mean not being religious, rather than being opposed to religion. That is, the difference between religious people and nonreligious people is not necessarily a matter of contradiction of belief:
26 LRB p. vii 27 Ibid p. 53.
“…there is this extraordinary use of the world ‘believe’. One talks of believing and at the same time one doesn’t use ‘believe’ as one does ordinarily. You might say (in the normal use): ‘You only believe—oh well…’”28
1.3 Moving forward
What general picture of religious belief do we get from Wittgenstein’s work? It is “…
something like a way of responding to the world, a mode of orientation, or a way of living in the world”29 and thus it is incorrect to say that religious utterance functions “…as a
description of supernatural entities in a fashion analogous to science’s descriptions of natural entities.”30
Religious language should not be assessed in scientific terms. Scientific discourse is not the ultimate arbiter of meaning, but one discourse among many. Understanding religious
language is not a matter of, for example, establishing which object ‘God’ refers to, or which date ‘the Last Judgement’ denotes. It is a matter of appreciating the role the utterances, and the beliefs underlying them, play in the life of the believer. In addition, I submit that religious language provides believers with a way of saying the unsayable. We could think of a
religious utterance as a signpost, pointing beyond the limits of language, in the direction of what the believer means to say. These are the main claims for which I will be arguing throughout the course of this essay.
As mentioned above, I will be drawing on Wittgenstein’s work on religion, as well as on the work of those philosophers of religion who Wittgenstein inspired, chiefly D.Z. Phillips and Rush Rhees. I will rely mainly on Wittgenstein’s later writings, but I will also refer to some of his earlier work. Is this okay, given the considerable disparity between Wittgenstein’s early and late modes of philosophy? I think so. In fact, I hope to show that the unsayable is the thread connecting all Wittgenstein’s thoughts on religious language, from the Tractatus onwards.
For reasons that might already be obvious, but which will in any case become clear shortly, Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion is often accused of misrepresenting religion. In describing religion as a way of life and arguing, contra people like Frazer, that words like ‘God’ do not refer to objects, Wittgensteinian philosophers of religion essentially ‘get rid’ of
28 Ibid p. 60 29 Clack 1999 p. 66 30 Ibid p. 55
God and reduce faith to adherence to a system of ethics (so, roughly, runs the objection31). There no doubt are people who mean to refer to a supernatural being when they use the word ‘God’ and to an actual metaphysical realm when they speak of an afterlife. But religious belief comes in many forms. In this essay, I will be focusing on a specific ‘type’ of believer, whose views can be characterised as follows:
1) Actually believes e.g. in the reality of God, that there is a sense in which death is not the end, in a Last Judgment and, and so on.
2) But not literal-minded in their beliefs, e.g. they don’t believe that God is accurately depicted in ‘The Creation of Adam’. Moreover, even if similar images pop into their head when they think of God, they don’t believe that God looks like these images either.
I am not aiming to give an expressivist account of religious language. Expressivism is a theory or set of related theories primarily concerned with the meaning of ethical language and at its core is the idea that ‘ethical sentences’ (e.g. ‘Stealing is wrong’) do not express matters of fact; rather they express the speaker’s attitude towards a particular subject (e.g. saying ‘Stealing is wrong’ is equivalent to saying ‘Boo stealing!’32). Though I don’t think religious sentences express matters of fact, there is a sense in which they refer to things, and in this they are ‘aided’ by the kinds of images mentioned in (2). This will become clearer as we go along.
In the second chapter I will attempt to give an account of how the word ‘God’ has meaning. In the third I will address ‘dogmatic language’ and look at how Biblical stories and Biblical imagery are used by believers. Finally, in the fourth chapter, I will try to give an account of how ‘everyday’ religious language has meaning for those who use it.
31 See Clack 1999 pp. 124-129
32 Schroeder 2008 p. 5. See also Mark van Roojen’s article ‘Moral Cognitivism vs. Non-Cognitivism’ in the
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, URL= <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2014/entries/moral-cognitivism/>
2. BEYOND THE WORLD
“Philosophers who say: “after death a timeless state will begin”, or: “at death a timeless state begins”, and do not notice that they have used the words “after” and “at” and “begins” in a temporal sense, and that temporality is embedded in their grammar.”33
The above remark was written in 1932 (some six years before the Lectures on Religious
Belief) and, what with the emphasis on the importance of being aware of the context in which
a word is used and the allusion to the deeper grammar underlying discourse, is characteristic of Wittgenstein’s later mode of philosophy. I think, though, that it is by taking the remark in conjunction with some of his earlier writings that we start get a picture of how to shed a sort of Wittgensteinian light on the meaning of the word ‘God’. To begin with:
“Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.”34 33 CV 1931 p. 22e
The last sentence loosely illustrates how we perceive and comprehend the world. It is not that one’s visual field actually has no limits; it does. But its functionality is independent of those limits. When a person (who, for the sake of argument, we’ll assume has perfect vision) looks off into the distance, she does not feel as if the reason she cannot see past a certain point is to do with the limited capabilities of her visual apparatus, even if she knows that this is the reason; rather, it seems to be to do with the weather, or because obstacles are blocking her view, or simply because the earth drops away at the horizon. That is, she doesn’t experience the limits of her vision. I don’t think it particularly outlandish to assert that nobody feels what is actually the case, i.e. that each of us stands beneath the apex of our own personal dome that describes how far we can see; we find ourselves to be in the world, surrounded by it, and the reason that we cannot perceive all of it in one go seems more to do with its expansiveness rather than our limits.35
Nor can we really comprehend what it might be like to totally lose our sense of sight: closing one’s eyes for a long time does not, presumably, provide an accurate simulation of the experience of being stone-blind. Nor, even more so, can we really comprehend what death might be like, since death is the absolute antithesis of life, that is, the antithesis not only of everything we have ever experienced but of experience itself. One knows that one will die, but this fact can only mean so much. There is a clash of reason and experience. Somewhat paradoxically, we know to be limited that which we feel to be total.
Moreover, and this, I think, is one of the things Wittgenstein is getting at in the above remark from Culture and Value, our tendency to attempt to make comprehensible what is
incomprehensible is exposed by the way we speak. Take ‘what death might be like’. This phrase isn’t, on the face of it, nonsense, but of course death isn’t ‘like’ anything: ‘like’ implies a system of reference within which one experience can be legitimately compared to another,36 and, as D.Z. Phillips puts it: “[m]y death is not an event in the world for me, but the end of the world”37. Similar grammatical problems arise from phrases beginning: ‘after death…’ The way we think, the way we act and the way we speak are inextricably tangled, and our language betrays the fact that we cannot think our way ‘outside of’ space and time, as
35 Obviously, people who are short-sighted or long-sighted or otherwise visually impaired are very much aware of the limits of their vision and will say so: “I can’t see that far”, “I can’t make that out” etc. But what they are recognising are the limits brought about by faults in their visual apparatus, not the natural limits of their visual field, which limits apply to every person.
36 I take it that by ‘death’, Wittgenstein means death itself, as opposed to the moment of dying, which is arguably at least partly an experience in life and could theoretically be described.
it is in terms of these that our experience of the world is framed. Since one’s own death removes one from space and time, that is, from existence, the notion of the ‘experience’ of death is incomprehensible. The upshot is that there are limits to our understanding: being of this world, we cannot think what might be beyond it. It is telling, though, that the question even comes up.
To wonder what happens ‘after’ death, or to ask what is ‘beyond’ the world, is to demonstrate that both temporality and spatiality are embedded in our grammar. ‘Beyond’ implies
boundaries, length, distance, and ways of qualifying and measuring these things. In other words, it is a concept that can be applied to things in the world but not to the world itself38, and yet we attempt to do so, because the first-person perspective from which each of us confronts the world is informed by such concepts. Thus, it is possible to feel the world as a “limited whole”39. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein describes this feeling as “mystical.”40 About a decade later, in the Lecture on Ethics, he speaks of having a particular experience that is for all intents and purposes impossible to put into words, but which can best be described as ‘wondering at the existence of the world’41. Now, this expression is technically meaningless – one could wonder at the existence of a particular thing in the world, since it is conceivable that that thing might not have existed, or existed in a different form, but one cannot imagine what it would be like if the world did not exist, or what might be there instead if it didn’t. Nevertheless, in the lecture, Wittgenstein assumes that many people have had similar
experiences which they are similarly at a loss to describe. He also states that while attempting to describe these experiences is a natural human tendency, one for which he has deep
respect42, it is a tendency which leads people to run against the “boundaries of language”43, as we can’t meaningfully speak about what we can’t comprehend.
We are now beginning to get a picture of faith as something instinctive, an affective reaction to the existence of the world and the feeling that it is a limited whole, which feeling evokes the idea of there being something beyond those limits, however nonsensical that may strictly speaking be. In the beginning, it is a matter of passion rather than reason.44 Only when a 38 That is, the world of our experience— thanks to physics we now know that the world, i.e. the universe, might be finite. 39 TLP 6.45 40 Ibid 41 LE p. 8 42 Ibid p. 12 43 Ibid 44 CV 1946 p. 53e
person wishes to articulate her feelings of wonder does reason, or the appearance of reason, enter the picture. To clarify: given that any attempt at verbally expressing religious-type feelings is technically “absolutely hopeless”45, a person will need to think about the best way of mounting such an attempt, just as Wittgenstein admits to having done when he prefaces his ‘I wonder at the existence of the world’ with “I believe the best way of describing it is to say that…”.46 It is comparable to the way one imposes narrative on a dream when one attempts to tell someone else about it.
Indeed, it seems reasonable to assert that the use of the word ‘God’ in a monotheistic, beyond-the-world-type sense must have arrived ‘later on’ in language, since being able to ‘wonder at the existence of the world’ involves already being in possession of somewhat sophisticated concepts, e.g. ‘the world’, ‘existence vs. non-existence’ and so on. As Wittgenstein puts it:
“…is it being assumed that men, as it were, suddenly woke up and, noticing for the first time these things that had always been there, were understandably amazed? – Well, as a matter of fact we might assume something like this; though not that they become aware of these things for the first time but that they do suddenly start to wonder at them.”47
And wondering at the existence of the world itself seems a more complex notion than
wondering at the existence of things in the world. Language facilitates that wonder, but it also necessarily does not provide one with a means of expressing it. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein posits a strict relation between language and the world (language reflects thought, thoughts picture facts); his later work eschews such dogmatism, focusing on the myriad ways in which language is actually used, but both views acknowledge that there are limits to what can meaningfully be said: if we can think it then we can say it, and, as mentioned above, human thought is limited to the world. Really it is nonsensical to call this ‘limited’, since we can’t imagine it any other way. Nevertheless, we can still conceive of it as a limit and the meaning, or rather the use, of the word ‘God’ is based on just this impasse. Worshipping or invoking the name of capital-G God is a more sophisticated version of the spontaneous ‘primitive reactions’ in which religion is rooted: a believer learns to use the word ‘God’ when
45 LE p. 12
46 Ibid p. 8, my emphasis 47 CV 1930 p. 5e
expressing her religious-type feelings like a child learns to use ‘ouch’, and other such verbal expressions of pain, in place of crying.48
It should not be supposed, though, that ‘God’ is a term to be taken “as you choose”49, that is, it is not a term which, when it is spoken, refers only to the religious-type feelings of the speaker. An atheist (or a particular type of neo-Wittgensteinian) may contend that this is all such usage amounts to, but we ought to take the believer to be attempting to refer, or at the very least gesture, to something, something unsayable, beyond the world. Some religious traditions (e.g. most forms of Hinduism) feature gods that manifest themselves in the world (as trees, animals – i.e. objects about which we can speak) and can be represented by statues and shrines and so forth. By contrast, the God of Christianity (insofar as that is a homogenous concept) ‘dwells’ outside of the world.50 We could think of the word ‘God’ as a linguistic signpost, pointing in the direction of what the believer means to say. Thus, there is little to nothing that can be offered by way of an ostensive definition of ‘God’, but this ineffability is part of the essence of the term:
“And now we might say: There can be a description of what it would like if there were gods on Olympus – but not: ‘what it would be like if there were such a thing as God’. And to say this is to determine the concept of ‘God’ more precisely.”51
Clearly, then, it should also not be supposed that ‘God’ refers to a being, especially not a humanoid being that dwells in a realm that is beyond the limits of our world but remarkably similar to it. Such pictures fall well within the scope of human imagination and therefore within the limits of language. One might object immediately that God frequently is described in these terms, as well as in terms that are considerably more explicit. This I will address in detail in the next chapter. For now, let me state that I think the idea that God is literally an all-powerful being who takes the form of (say) a white-bearded man is based on a
misinterpretation of religious scripture and iconography, neither of which were developed for the purposes of accurate representation: “‘I never believed in God before’ – that,” says Wittgenstein, ‘I understand. But not: “I never really believed in Him before.’”52
48 PI §244
49 Rhees 1997 p. 34
50 Though he is described (in the Old Testament, for example) as having visited from time to time. And, of course, God is sometimes represented within the Judeo-Christian tradition (e.g. Michelangelo’s ‘The Creation of Adam’), but, paradoxical though it sounds, these representations do not perform a representative function. Or such is my claim at any rate. This will be examined more closely in the next chapter.
51 CV 1949 p. 82e, my emphasis 52 Ibid 1946 p. 53e, my emphasis
In ‘Theology and Falsification’53, Anthony Flew challenges the believing person to state what would constitute, for her, a disproof of religious claims such as ‘God watches over us all’ or even ‘God is real’. If, in the face of arguments or evidence to the contrary, there is always some saving qualification the believer can make to the claims, then they are unfalsifiable and therefore meaningless. Wittgenstein would probably accept this. That is, he would accept that most religious language is meaningless, but he would no doubt also reject Flew’s challenge entirely, and advise any serious believer to do likewise; religion, on his view, is not in the business of proof and disproof: “…evidence […] would in fact destroy the whole business.”54 The point is that on any prominent account of the meaning of a term (Russell’s denoting phrases; Kripke’s rigid designators), ‘God’ is technically meaningless, but to assert that this meaninglessness somehow invalidates or undermines belief is to miss the point. With the term ‘God’, the believer aims outwards, motivated by feelings of wonder at being confronted (and contained) by the world. A sentence like ‘God watches over us all’ is interesting in the same way that ‘after death a timeless state begins’ is interesting. Both show the human tendency to speak outside of our means, that is, to use language to allude to something that language cannot adequately capture and which thought cannot adequately picture.55
Concluding remarks
My aim, in this chapter, has been to sketch a rough and roughly Wittgensteinian picture of the meaning of the word ‘God’, when used in a monotheistic sense. I have also speculated about where belief in God ‘comes from’. Many religious people were raised that way, but many were not; a cynic might say that all those who come to religion of their own accord do so because they are scared, or weak, or whatever. On the view I have outlined, belief in God can
53 Flew et al 1971 54 LRB p. 56
55 Importantly, this view does not rely on a drastic misdescription of faith. It is not the case that belief in the Christian God necessitates a belief in a Supreme Being, a Creator, an Overseer or similar. Take, for example, apophaticism, a prevalent theological position in Eastern Christianity, which maintains that “Earth-bound predicates” (Fronda 2010 p. 198) cannot be ascribed to God. According to apophatic theology, it is not even appropriate to describe God as a being: “The term ‘God’ is designated as “Being” but not predicated with the word ‘being.’” […] If God is not a being, then God is beyond knowledge, and thus beyond referability.” (Ibid pp. 199-203) Moreover: “If God is ontologically transcendent, then it follows that God is also epistemologically transcendent, i.e. God is not anything like humans can think God is. And if God is epistemologically
transcendent, then it follows that God is semantically transcendent.” (Ibid p. 204) Clearly this notion is consistent with the above-sketched Wittgenstein-style picture of the meaning of ‘God’. Which doesn’t, of course, mean that the view ought now to be considered to bear a stamp of Christian vindication; it merely demonstrates that Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion is not as at odds with belief-as-traditionally-conceived as some detractors claim it is.
stem simply from a reaction to the world. This quote from Culture and Value sums it up nicely:
“Life can educate one to belief in God. And experiences too are what bring this about; but I don’t mean visions and other forms of sense experience which show us the ‘existence of this being’, but, e.g., sufferings of various sorts. These neither show us God in the way a sense impression shows us an object, nor do they give rise to conjectures about him. Experiences, thoughts, - life can force this concept on us.”56
That the term ‘God’ doesn’t so much contain its meaning as lie at the boundaries of language pointing outwards is essential. Consider the way in which the ideas of the Tractatus were re-appropriated by the Logical Positivists57; drawing a “boundary line”58 between the word ‘God’ and its meaning can be seen as Wittgenstein’s way of protecting rather than rejecting God.59 However, perhaps more interesting are the practical-ethical consequences that belief in God has for the life of the believer. In the next section, I focus on religion in its organized form, as it is in organized religion that we find articulated systems of ethics, and by means of it that many people first experience religious-type feelings. It is also the source of those unique terms which, meaning-wise, seem to straddle the line between the world and the beyond, e.g. ‘miracle’.
56 CV 1950 p. 86e 57 Clack 1999 pp. 29 & 34 58 PI §499
3. DOGMA
In using the term ‘God’, the believer aims outwards, beyond the world. To feel the world as a limited whole is to (among other things) recognize that there are limits to human
understanding. We cannot, for example, understand the meaning of life. Indeed, as
Wittgenstein would no doubt argue, the question ‘What is the meaning of life?’ is not even understandable. It makes sense to ask the meaning of a symbol or a story, but not of life itself. In asking the question, we are attempting to bring the word ‘life’ into a context in which it does not fit. Positing an afterlife does not shed new light on the question, or make an alternative question any easier to formulate:
“…is some riddle solved by my surviving forever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of riddle as our present life? The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside of space and time.”60
We ought, therefore, to occupy ourselves with questions that we can answer, or at the very least grapple with, namely questions about life in the here and now. Upon the term ‘God’, religious dogma is built, the source of a myriad of practical-ethical systems. This does not, of course, mean that one needs to be a believer in order to take a practical-ethical stance with respect to one’s own life and actions. Nevertheless, for most religious people, faith is the starting point, a quality it is essential to possess, and, as I am about to attempt to illustrate, this notion pervades dogma.
A word on language-games
In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein includes ‘praying’ in a (non-exhaustive) list of language-games.61 Elsewhere in the book, he refers parenthetically to “[t]heology as
60 TLP 6.4312 61 PI §23
grammar”. From this we could infer that religious belief is a set of language-games (between which there are resemblances) underlain by distinctive grammatical ‘rules’. This is certainly a view to which many Wittgensteinian philosophers of religion subscribe.62 It is also a view that is much objected to63, largely because it seems to imply that religious discourse, and, by extension, the form of life in which it is embedded, is “cut off”64 from the rest of discourse, thereby rendering it intelligible only on its own terms and thus immune from non-theological criticism. But is this what the view implies? I will return to this question at the end of the chapter, but it seems worth flagging it up here at the start, as the means of answering it will gradually emerge as we go along.
3.1 Pictures
Consider the following two statements: ‘This is the right way to Amsterdam’; ‘This is the right way to behave’. The former is an example of what Wittgenstein calls a relative judgment of value; the latter is an absolute judgment of value and is markedly different in nature.65 Whereas ‘This is the right way to Amsterdam’ doesn’t compel me to do anything in particular (I might not want to go to Amsterdam, and even if I did I might want to try a different route just for the sake if it), ‘This is the right way to behave’ implies that, from the point of view of the speaker, one ought to behave in whatever way is being indicated.
Importantly, the statement only implies; it does not justify. In response to the question ‘What if I don’t want to behave like that?’ all one could really say is, ‘Well, but you should; it’s the
right way.’ According to Wittgenstein, when one makes value judgments of an absolute
character, one ‘runs against the boundaries of language.’66
Wittgenstein drew this distinction between absolute and relative value in order to make a point about the nature of ethics, but it can also be brought to bear on matters of religion. If someone were to say to me ‘You ought to worship God’ there would be little sense, on Wittgenstein’s view, in my asking ‘Why?’ Of course, an answer could be given, e.g.
‘Because if you don’t, you’ll go to hell.’ But such a response would smack of irreligiousness. It implies that there would be little reason to worship God if the threat of eternal punishment were removed. If I accepted this answer and began to regularly engage in worship, I could not be said to believe in God in an absolute sense; rather, I would believe in the best thing,
62 Phillips 1993 p. 56 63 Ibid
64 Ibid 65 LE p. 5 66 Ibid p. 12
relatively, for myself. I would have, as Phillips puts it, “…a policy, not a faith.”67 The same could be said of someone who, on learning that they have a terminal illness, prays to God for a cure.68 For Wittgenstein, this type of behaviour, which implies a belief in non-existent causal connections between one’s individual actions and the mechanics of the world, is more superstitious than religious: “[r]eligious faith and superstition are quite different. One of them results from fear and is a sort of false science. The other is trusting”69.
Rush Rhees echoes this notion of belief as “an attitude of ‘trust in God’”70. He also, in the following quotation, makes a point that I wish to press, namely that one of the functions of Biblical stories or other religious pictures is to instil or enforce, in the apprehender, religious-type feelings, akin to Wittgenstein’s wonder at the existence of the world:
“Suppose you had to explain to someone who had no idea at all of religion or of what belief in God was. Could you do it in this way? – By proving to him that there must be a first cause…Would this give him any sense of the wonder and glory of God? […] On the other hand if you read to him certain passages in the early Isaiah which describe the beauty of the world… then I think you might have given him some sense of what religious believers are talking about. I say some idea: I am talking of how you might make a beginning.”71
From a Wittgensteinian point of view, it is essentially impossible to argue someone round to believing in God. The only arguments one could make would be based on presupposing the truth of scripture rather than the Truth of God, e.g. to say: ‘You should try to believe in God because if you don’t you’ll go to hell’ is to bring in scripture as evidence, since where else but from scripture does the idea that a lack of faith leads to eternal damnation come?72 One could try ‘Belief in God will improve your life’ but how to qualify this, given that it is an absolute judgment? The problem is that ‘God’, from which everything else follows, is ineffable; the believer cannot verbally express what she means by the term. Faith is, at least to begin with, felt rather than known.
67 Phillips 1993 p. 59
68 It would be possible for such a prayer to have an absolute character; for example, if it were suffixed with ‘… if it be your will.’ This would indicate hope – e.g. in the possibility of spontaneous remission, or that a radical form of treatment may yet emerge, both events that the believer would be able to, in some sense, attribute to God – but also an acceptance of the world as it is. Importantly, it would negate the sense of the prayer’s being a
request, addressed to God-as-cosmic-orderer, that the world to be rejigged for the benefit of the speaker.
69 CV 1948 p. 72e 70 Rhees 1997 p. 36 71 Ibid
Which does not mean that nothing at all can be said about it; only that some degree of creativity is required (and this is what Rhees is suggesting in the above quotation). Consider the countless works of devotional prose, poetry and art inspired by religion, most of it in some way representative. As Wittgenstein wrote in 1917:
“…if only you do not to try to utter what is unutterable then nothing gets lost. But the unutterable will be—unutterably—contained in what has been uttered!”73
That Biblical stories are evocative is crucial; scripture does not invite numb, coerced submission, but wholehearted, passionate commitment. One must believe not because relatively it is the most sensible thing to do; one must believe because one believes. Biblical accounts of God’s power oughtn’t to be terrifying in the same way as (say) a show of nuclear force is meant to be terrifying – that is, such accounts oughtn’t to be considered ‘deterrents’. Rather, they should be terrifying in the same way a volcano (when seen from a reasonably safe distance) is terrifying, i.e. they should be awe-inspiring or wonder-inducing.
This can be applied to the pictures by means of which religion is taught. ‘Picture’ is here meant in a broad sense, one that accommodates literal depictions, e.g. of God in robes, a beard etc., as well as the imagery of the Bible, and simple (seemingly descriptive) sentences such as ‘God’s eye sees everything’. Such pictures should not be taken, as it were, at face value. That is, they should not be treated as representations (asks Wittgenstein, drily: “Are eyebrows going to be talked of, in connection with the Eye of God?”74). Nor should they be taken as metaphorical, since a metaphor can, if necessary, be stripped away so as to give a clear view of the thing for which it stands, e.g. if someone failed to catch my drift when I said of a mutual acquaintance of ours ‘She’s a walking encyclopaedia’, I could discard the
metaphor and simply say, ‘I mean she knows, by heart, an impressive amount of interesting facts.’75 One cannot do this with religious pictures. The pictures should be used “in an
73 Engelmann 1967 p. 7 74 LRB p. 71
75 Of course, this is just one conception of what a metaphor is. There are others. Donald Davidson has argued, in a not un-Wittgensteinian sort of way, that a metaphor doesn’t ‘stand’ for anything, since its meaning depends on the literal meaning of the words of which it is comprised. On this view, a metaphor can be interpreted in any number of ways, none of which are built into the metaphor itself (see Davidson 1978). Thus, when I say to my friend ‘I mean she knows a lot of facts’, I am not paraphrasing the metaphor but describing the picture that I meant for my friend to form in his mind as a result of hearing it. In a sense, the phrase ‘God’s eye sees
everything’ does work like this; that is, it is meant to be evocative and doesn’t carry its meaning in the way that non-religious (or non-God-related) sentences do. However, I don’t think it’s right to say that the sentence relies, for its effect, on the literal meaning of the words of which it is comprised, given that, as I have suggested, the word ‘God’ does not strictly speaking have a literal meaning.
entirely different way”76. When a believer stands in the Sistine Chapel and looks up at ‘The Creation of Adam’, she does not, presumably, find herself struck by how good of a likeness Michelangelo managed to achieve. And this is not because she has never seen God ‘in the flesh’ and therefore has no basis for comparison.77 It is because, as discussed in the last chapter, God does not ‘look like’ anything; God is not a being, indeed is not even something imaginable, let alone something that can be depicted.78
I submit that religious pictures – aside from serving to instil feelings of awe and wonder in the manner described by Rhees – function similarly to the term ‘God’. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein writes that there are “… things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.”79 Religious-type feelings are just such manifestations, manifesting as they do in the subjective world of the believer. This needn’t imply that they are ‘all in the head’ of the believer; just that their emergence is a matter of the attitude with which the apprehender encounters the world. Religious pictures, like ‘God’, provide believers with a means of ‘saying’ what cannot be put into words, thereby
establishing a framework within which religious discourse can take place. “The absurdity is,” says Wittgenstein, “I’ve never taught him the technique of using this picture”80 – because faith is the technique. If a person is moved by the picture, accepts it, feels that they understand it, this is the technique of using the picture and this is part of what it is to be a believer.81
76 LRB p. 63 77 Ibid
78 On a tangential note, it would be interesting to explore the ways in which this Wittgensteinian analysis of religious pictures could be brought to bear on religious prohibitions against idol-worship and image-making, as featured in the Ten Commandments – “Thou shalt not make any graven images” – and found in Islam generally. The main purpose of the aforementioned Commandment is to ban the worship of ‘other’ untrue gods, but the prohibition also extends to representations of the ‘true’ God. Perhaps this is because they give rise to the potentially blasphemous notion that God is a thing that can be represented, that humans can know the face of. Or perhaps it’s because to worship a representation of God is to worship an intermediary, a physical object, and thus to lose sight of His immense, ineffable nature. There are various Wittgenstein-style explanations one could offer; unfortunately there is not room to properly discuss them here. Let me just say, though, that with all this in mind, it is easy to appreciate how fundamentally significant it is for Christianity that Christ was a man, i.e. God made flesh, God in a graspable, comprehensible form, capable of feeling pain, of being subjected to punishment, of sacrificing himself.
79 TLP 6.522 80 LRB p. 63
81 Indeed, we could easily imagine a religious person who doesn’t believe that God can be depicted but who nevertheless associates certain pictures with the term. This needn’t be dismissed as the lingering mental traces of a religious education; the pictures could be said to ‘bolster’ the belief by lending it descriptive content,
This notion sheds an interesting light on the controversial question of the historicity of the Bible. In the past two hundred years82, a whole field of biblical criticism has opened up, one which is “…concerned with that meaning of the text which is in principle available to everyone who is prepared to read the text attentively and to do the work necessary to answer the questions of interpretation the text may raise.”83 Partly this involves attempting to
establish certain facts about the origins and composition of the Bible, no mean feat considering it is made up of different texts written at different times by different people. Thus, the historical accuracy of the Bible has become the focal point of much scholarly research, and this has had a profound knock-on effect on contemporary attitudes towards the book. The common assumption is that if, as is probable and has, to an extent, been
demonstrated, the Bible is largely historically inaccurate, then this somehow undermines its validity as a piece of religious doctrine. The sometimes heated debate surrounding the topic is complicated by the fact that the Gospels, which are central to Christianity, are clearly meant to be viewed as documentary accounts of actual events, and indeed are traditionally taken to be such.84 But we can legitimately question, as Wittgenstein does, whether or not it is helpful or illuminating to assess the significance that the Bible has for believers in terms of its historical accuracy. Of the historical narrative that the Bible offers us, Wittgenstein says:
“Here you have a narrative, don’t take the same attitude to it as you take to other historical narratives! Make a quite different place in your life for it. – There is nothing paradoxical
about that!”85
Notice the similarity between this enigmatic remark and the one he makes in Lectures on
Religious Belief (quoted on the previous page) on the technique of using religious pictures.
One could even, I think, re-appropriate the remark and substitute ‘Bible’ for ‘picture’. What the Bible does is offer us stories in the form of historical narratives, many of them
implausible and some of them (the story of Jonah, for example) utterly fantastical, and says “now believe!”86 For this is the nature of faith. One does not (or ought not to) come to believe as a result of hearing a convincing argument or seeing some convincing evidence – as Rush Rhees puts it: “I do not know of any great religious teachers who has ever awakened men to religious belief in this way”87. Rather one feels compelled to believe as a result of having had 82 Moore 2004 p. 9 83 Ibid p. 10 84 Ibid p. 13 85 CV 1937 p. 32e 86 Ibid 1932 p. 32e 87 Rhees 1997 p. 36
religious-type feelings awakened in oneself. Acceptance, not to say servility, seems presupposed in, or, as it were, built into, the grammar of the Bible:
“…Moses’ natural reaction, on seeing the burning bush, is to enquire what is happening, but he is told not to do this but to kneel”88.
All this is not meant to trivialise one of the major points of contention in the debate
surrounding the historicity of the Bible, namely that, as mentioned above, large parts of the Bible are written as if they are meant to be read as historical, in a manner quite unlike most other religious texts (compare the stories in the Gospels with the mythology of the Bhagavad Gita, or the ahistorical injunctions that make up the majority of the Qur’an). Indeed, the enormous significance that the Gospels have for believers must be at least partly to do with the fact that they purport to depict the life and deeds of Christ. With regards this point, Wittgenstein says:
“God has four people recount the life of his incarnate Son, in each case differently and with inconsistences – but might we not say: It is important that this narrative should not be more than quite averagely historically plausible just so that this should not be taken as the essential, decisive thing? So that the letter should not be believed more strongly than is proper and the
spirit may receive its due. I.e. what you are supposed to see cannot be communicated even by
the best and most accurate historian; and therefore a mediocre account suffices, is even to be preferred.”89
Here again we have the notion of the unsayable, which in this case makes itself manifest in the text rather than in the world. In this respect, the Bible reflects the subjective world of the believer. I take it that for most, if not all, believers, it is beyond question that Jesus was a real person who really did walk the earth, preach, and sacrifice himself to redeem humanity, but this is not because they are convinced of the unimpeachable reliability of the Bible
as-historical-document. Rather than providing the evidential support for the believer’s continued faith in Christianity, the Bible is one of the sources from which faith can be gleaned and a stone on which one’s faith can be sharpened:
“Queer as it sounds: The historical accounts of the Gospels might, historically speaking, be demonstrably false and yet belief would lose nothing by this: not, however, because it concerns ‘universal truths of reason’! Rather, because historical proof (the historical
proof-88 Bloemendaal 2006 p. 289 89 CV pp. 31-32e
game) is irrelevant to belief. This message (the Gospels) is seized on by men believingly (i.e.
lovingly).”90
This last sentence gets at the crux of the matter. The significance the Bible has for believers, the meaning it has in their lives, cannot necessarily be grasped by investigating the ‘meaning of the text which is in principle available to everyone who is prepared to read the text
attentively’. There is, of course, nothing wrong with attempting to discover facts about the origins and composition of the Bible. But if what we are interested is the religious
significance of the Bible, it will of little help to view it as a historical text describing
contingent historical events. When we analyse it according to this assumption, we bring our own language-games, our own forms of life, to bear upon the events about which we read. We compare and contrast. We identify certain behaviours as primitive. We assume, like Frazer, that when Jesus told a crippled man to stand up and walk and he (the man) did so, those who witnessed the event or wrote about it much later understood what they witnessed or were told from a primitive medical-scientific point of view.91 Even if this is the case – and there’s no way to prove that it isn’t – it seems misguided, not to say blinkered, to suppose that the huge importance that the Bible in general, and the Gospels in particular, has for believers is dependent on its being an authentic historical account of a man who was part sorcerer, part miracle-healer. Which brings me, sort of neatly, to the subject of miracles.
3.2 Miracles
D.Z. Phillips, perhaps the most prominent advocate of Wittgensteinian philosophy religion, had much to say on the topic of miracles. It therefore seems appropriate to use his views as a jumping-off point for this section. Unsurprisingly, his primary focus is on lingual ground-clearing92, i.e. elucidating the contexts in which talk of miracles has its sense.93
Firstly, what is a miracle? A common way of describing it is as a transgression of the laws of nature. But this conception is problematic, as illustrated by the emphatic criticism to which it is subjected by David Hume in his essay ‘Of Miracles’94. His argument has two strands: 1) there is insufficient evidence for believing that a miracle, in the given sense, has ever
occurred; 2) what’s more, a miracle never could occur, precisely because that would involve
90 Ibid, second emphasis mine 91 Moore p. 9
92 PI §118
93 Bloemendaal 2006 p. 271 94 Hume 1975
a violation of the laws of nature and such a thing is impossible.95 Moreover, even if
something seemingly inexplicable did occur, this would not mean that the laws of nature had
in fact been transgressed; rather, it would imply that our understanding of the laws of nature
is not as comprehensive as was previously supposed. There would still be the possibility of an explanation and so Hume’s point would still stand. This brings out the distinction between ‘physically possible’ and ‘logically possible’. It is logically possible, for example, that Jesus turned water into wine, but to claim that it is also physically possible is to make the rationally indefensible move of rejecting Hume’s second premise.
However, Phillips would say that the definition from which Hume proceeds misses the mark, as would any attempt to formally state what a miracle is. Indeed, out of context, we cannot even know what it means to say that water was turned into wine.96 For Phillips, ‘Jesus turned water into wine’ is not a descriptive statement which can be explained by adding ‘It was a miracle’. ‘Miracle-talk’ is not “…talk which describes the events that defy explanation. It would be misleading to suggest that ‘brought back from the dead’, ‘turning water into wine’, are familiar descriptions to us, the only thing missing being the explanations of them.”97 What we need to do is clarify the grammar which underlies miracle-talk and which gives it its sense. If we discuss a supposed miracle in a scientific context, we make it seem like something that is amenable to explanation, and we will not be satisfied until one is found. According to Phillips, the religious context in which talk of miracles has sense is largely lacking in our modern culture: “[w]hat has declined is a pervasive religious culture in which the language of miracles has its significance.”98
One might be tempted to argue, contra Phillips (and in a manner reminiscent of Frazer), that ‘miracle’ is, essentially, a synonym for ‘a transgression of the laws of nature’. After all, its use dates back to a time when pretty much everyone’s causal and technical understanding of the natural world was extremely limited, especially compared to that which prevails today. It’s not at all implausible that those who witnessed the miracles of Jesus simply lacked the kind of scientific knowledge that would have prevented them from interpreting what they saw as anything other than a transgression of natural laws. Never mind that even now, in our more scientifically enlightened times, many people still claim to have witnessed miracles; one need
95 Phillips 2001 p. 74 96 Bloemendaal 2006 p. 283
97 Philips 2000 p. 130. One might object that those descriptions are familiar to us, as indeed they would be to anyone living in a society in which Christianity is present.
only point to the widespread belief in things like astrology or homeopathy to show that numerous people alive today do not have what you might call a proper understanding of the workings of the world, the advances of science notwithstanding. But this argument is weakened by the fact that religious people today – like, presumably, people who lived thousands of years ago – do not deem every inexplicable event a miracle. Phillips insists that without context (i.e. a religious context) we cannot even know which inexplicable event qualifies as a miracle. What is required is the presence of some kind of religious
significance.99
This significance is illustrated by the fact that the term ‘miracle’ is sometimes used in response to occurrences that are easy to explain rationally. Take R.F. Holland’s well-known example, which runs roughly as follows. A child rides his toy car over a railway crossing. One of the wheels gets stuck in the track and the child sets to work trying to free it.
Meanwhile, a train is approaching, but, because the crossing is positioned just beyond a bend in the track, the driver cannot see the child and the child, who is anyway preoccupied with freeing the wheel, cannot see the train coming. At the last minute, a highly unlikely but utterly unmysterious set of circumstances results in the driver fainting and taking his hand off of the control lever, which causes the automatic application of the brakes, stopping the train just in time. The child’s parent, who is a believer, and who has stood helplessly by and witnessed everything, calls the event a miracle.100 For Phillips, this does indeed qualify as a miracle. Granted, Holland’s is a fictional example. But it is not, I don’t think,
unrepresentative of actual reports of miracles that are sometimes made by believers. The
99 It is worth noting that, in a 1978 document, the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith gives a list of criteria for determining whether or not a particular event qualifies as a miracle (see Stravinskas 2000). What to make of this? Certainly such methodology flies in the face of Phillips’s, or any Wittgensteinian, account of miracle-talk. It would be difficult, also, to argue that this kind of approach to miracles is unrepresentative of the views of many believers, since the Sacred Congregation is directly affiliated with the Vatican, which many thousands, if not millions, of Catholics look to for spiritual guidance. Given the nature of this essay, we could simply ignore the issue; if the Sacred Congregation wishes to view miracles as things that can be tested and verified, i.e. as things that can be assessed in scientific terms, then they exempt themselves from any
Wittgensteinian-style protection against Humean-type arguments, which, I’m sure, no one in the Congregation is going to lose any sleep over. However, there may be an interesting contradiction here. I assume that from the point of view of the Catholic Church it is absolutely beyond question that Jesus did indeed turn water into wine, walk on water etc., and, moreover, that the idea of applying the Congregation’s criteria to Jesus’s miracles, even if it were possible, would be at best unthinkable and at worst blasphemous. As I say, I do not know whether or not this is indeed the Catholic Church’s attitude to Jesus’s miracles. But it seems likely that it is. And if it is, then could we not say that within this attitude is the germ of the conception of miracles which Phillips promotes, i.e. miracles as events to be marvelled at rather than questioned? Hence, an interesting contradiction. (Though perhaps it was decided that the criteria had to be put in place lest excessive miracle-talk undermine or devalue the concept.)
