Among those who saw Wittgenstein as a hero was Welsh philosopher D.Z. Phillips. Among those who see Wittgenstein as a villain (sometimes) is The Maverick Phlosopher, William Vallicella.
The Maverick argues that the villainy of Wittgenstein is present in Phillips’ discussions of God. The Maverick Philosopher takes issue with Phillips’ (Wittgensteinian) understanding of God. Phillips wrote:
When God's existence is construed as a matter of fact, it is taken for granted that the concept of God is at home within the conceptual framework of the reality of the physical world. . . . to ask a question about the reality of God is to ask a question about a kind of reality, not about the reality of this or that, in much the same way as asking a question about the reality of physical objects is not to ask about the reality of this or that physical object.
Phillips seems to have argued that the existence of God is not a matter of fact. This can come off as an odd claim. In my younger years, I was taught about facts and opinions. Facts, I was told, contain knowledge. Facts are objective. Facts can be true or false. Opinions are subjective. Opinions can be informed and uninformed. Opinions can never be true or false.
So, when Phillips argued that the existence of God was not a matter of fact, one might infer that he was arguing that beliefs about the existence of God could never be true or false.
Here's another way of thinking about it: Wittgenstein is (in)famous for speaking about language games. In an episode of Red Letter Philosophy, we discussed Wittgenstein’s language games. One quick way to think about a language game is to think of it as a kind of logic. Think of the games of chess. There is a logic to it; a set of rules that make the game possible. Just as chess is a game with its own concepts and concerns (its own rules), so is ethics, physics, and of course, religion, according to Wittgenstein.
Some see a problem in Wittgenstein's analysis. You don’t have to play a game like chess. There are other games. If we say God is a feature of a religious language game are we saying that God exists within the game, but doesn't exist outside the game? What kind of sophistry is this?
The Maverick puts it more charitably and eloquently:
within the game of chess it makes no sense to say that checkmate might not exist. Checkmate and the rules governing it are defining features of the game. They cannot be questioned from within the game, and to question them from without the game is simply to reject the game. For that reason, it makes no sense to demand proof of these rules, nor can one raise the question whether they are reasonable. Is it reasonable that one cannot castle out of check, into check, or though check? It is neither reasonable nor unreasonable. The question of reasonableness cannot arise. The rules of chess are simply rules of the game without which chess would not be the game that it is. Similarly, for Phillips, it is neither reasonable nor unreasonable that God exists. To play a theistic language-game is to presupposes the meaningfulness of God-talk just as to play chess is to presuppose the meaningfulness of talk of checkmate. And just as God exists in theistic language-games, checkmate exists in chess
The Maverick puts the concern more directly here:
God, however, is not a rule, nor a linguistic presupposition, nor a concept, nor anything dependent on human talking and acting. So the necessity of God is not the necessity of a rule. God is a necessary being, which implies that he is a being, which implies that he exists independently of human talk and speech if he exists at all. God cannot be reduced to God-talk and God-ritual. Chess just is chess-talk and chess-ritual: chess has no reality outside of chess conventions and the chessic form of life.
Chess has no reality outside of chess conventions and the chessic form of life. So, is Phillips saying God has no reality outside of religious conventions?
A few things to note: First, wasn't it Bobby Fisher who said, "chess is life." A minor point, I admit. But perhaps one cannot escape chess (in some sense. But more directly, I don't think Phillips would deny that God is a necessary being. He would not deny that God exists independently of human talk and human ritual. Phillips’ point was that we need to know what it means to say God exists independently of human talk. God is not the creation of a language game. Rather, the Bible, the faith, and the tradition (i.e. the language games) inform our understanding of God.
The religious language game teaches us how to make sense of the reality of God; it does not create God, it tells us what it means to say that God creates. In an article titled, What God Himself Cannot Tell Us: Realism Versus Metaphysical Realism, Phillips wrote:
If one is praying to God, seeking God, fleeing from God, one is not praying to, seeking, or fleeing from, a role in human life. One is praying to, seeking, or fleeing from, God. But if one is puzzled philosophically, as many are, about what this ‘praying’, ‘seeking’, or ‘fleeing’ amounts to, Wittgensteinians suggest that it is a good idea to look to those contexts in which such talk is rooted. If one did so, one might begin to ask what is meant by saying God is Spirit, or that he is ‘other than’ the world. One might ask whether that ‘other than’ is a spiritual matter, rather than a quasi-spatial relation. One might ask what it means to be in the spirit, to long for it, or to flee from it.
Phillips was concerned with the grammar (or logic) of religious belief. However, this is not to say that Phillips argued that religious belief was grammar (or logic). So, I suspect for Phillips, the issue would not be whether God's existence is a matter of fact, but what it would mean to say that God's existence is a matter of fact. To be continued.
Comments
Post a Comment