God, Faith and Infinity » Lecture 12
I will assume that religious differences are not merely differences involving commitments to ways of living or differences concerning the presence or absence of feelings of spirituality. They include genuine disagreements. (Feldman 2007: 200)
Here is an argument for taking religious utterances at face value:
Suppose someone said Apulia is in the heel of Italy or France is a hexagon. This is – taken literally – absurd. That is a reason to treat it non-literally – as a metaphor, for example – hence (S4) is false in such cases.
Maybe God exists is like that:
beliefs that there are incorporeal psychological agents, with infinitely great powers… these are the sorts of claims that, in any other, non-religious context, are associated with patently psychotic delusions! … I don’t think for a moment that most religious people are psychotic. … that leads me to speculate there must be something else going on, and this has led me to wonder whether they really do believe them. (Rey 2007: 243–44)
Rey thinks that the claims are to be taken literally, and that religious practice thus involves self-deception (2007: 245). (Religious people at some level ‘nevertheless know better’ (Rey 2007: 246).)
Our previous attempts to explain the fact that people do not suspend judgment on religious matters have been attempts to defend steadfast epistemologies.
But an alternative is that we are in some way misconceiving of religion.
Rather than thinking of religious doctrine as degenerate science (where evidence is inconclusive and opinion is risky) perhaps our reactions indicate it is not a truth-aiming discourse at all:
One response to religious diversity is to argue that it provides evidence that religious claims do not address a real subject matter. According to this argument, genuinely descriptive fields of discourse such as science and mathematics admit convergence of opinion: … [disputes in those fields are] in principle resolvable with evidence and proof. Religion, by contrast, appears to have widespread and apparently irresolvable disagreement, and this … is evidence for thinking that religious judgments are not objective: religious questions do not have correct answers, and there are no religious facts. (Oppy and Scott 2010: 280)
As noted above, there is a tradition of non-literal interpretation of tricky theological ideas. Consider the Trinity, the Christian doctrine that the three divine persons (God the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit) are the same substance and hence one.
There is limited scriptural support, but some admittedly contested passages are explicit:
For there are three that bear witness in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit; and these three are one. (1 John 5:7)
Setting aside the textual controversy: How can these three are one be true? This seems self-contradictory (Tuggy 2021: §1.4)!
That is a compelling reason to treat this supposed identity as a metaphor, rather than literally.
The Trinity continues to cause the spilling of much theological ink.
The First Council of Nicaea in 325 condemned early non-literal views as heretical, and the Nicene Creed appears to affirm as orthodox the idea that we need to take these three are one literally regardless of its apparent inconsistency.
These heretical approaches to the Trinity are examples of what we might call ‘positive’ approaches to non-literal interpretation.
In the present case, saying these three are one isn’t itself to be taken as true, but it is rather an effective metaphor for communicating a ‘covert’ truth.
But positive approaches may identify purposes for religious speech having nothing to do with doctrine:
Positive approaches vindicate religious practice, because these alternative aims might be in themselves desirable. The fact that the discourse doesn’t aim at truth simultaneously explains the persistence of apparent disagreement. (If I’m not getting it wrong in saying \(p\), I don’t need to stop saying it just because someone else says \(¬p\).)
But there are also negative non-literalisms.
The negative views takes attempts at religious speech to be sincere, but (unbekownst to believers) in error, since there is no content in religious doctrines to be communicated.
Persistent disagreement is explained, to an extent: if you aren’t managing to say anything, you aren’t saying anything wrong!
Perhaps the most discussed argument for treating God exists in a way unlike The Queen exists has come from arguments that no theological expression can have a coherent meaning attached to it.
As Ayer puts it, with characteristic bluntness
[A] religious man … would say that in talking about God he was talking about a transcendent being who might be known through certain empirical manifestations, but certainly could not be defined in terms of those manifestations. But in that case the term ‘god’ is a metaphysical term. And if ‘god’ is a metaphysical term … then to say that ‘God exists’ is to make a metaphysical utterance which cannot be either true or false. And by the same criterion, no sentence which purports to describe the nature of a transcendent god can possess any literal significance [i.e., meaning]. (Ayer 1936: 152)
Ayer is an empiricist. He is here starting (at A0) from a famous empiricist doctrine, known as Hume’s fork, from the final paragraph of Hume’s Enquiry (Hume 1777):
When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. Hume (1777), §12.34
Ayer takes Hume’s methodological principle, and elevates it to a theory of meaning.
But now a crucial empiricist doctrine enters at (A8): the verification principle of meaning, that a sentence is meaningful only to the extent that it could make a difference to what is verified through observation:
The basic thought behind the principle is that we could only learn the meaning of an expression through its being correlated with something observable. A notion that, in principle, wasn’t able to make a difference to experience is not one that we could ever learn to associate with an expression, so it could not be the meaning of any expression.
[The] assertions [of the theist] cannot possibly be valid, but they cannot be invalid either. As he says nothing at all about the world, he cannot justly be accused of saying anything false, or anything for which he has insufficient grounds. It is only when the theist claims that in asserting the existence of a transcendent god he is expressing a genuine proposition that we are entitled to disagree with him.…
As far as the question of truth or falsehood is concerned, there is no opposition between the natural scientist and the theist who believes in a transcendent god. For since the religious utterances of the theist are not genuine propositions at all, they cannot stand in any logical relation to the propositions of science. (Ayer 1936: 153–55)
But Verificationism is now universally accepted as hopeless as a theory of meaning.
One main reason: it seems impossible to make the required division into empirical and theoretical claims.
Ayer says that if something is an ‘empirical hypothesis’ iff
it would be possible to deduce from it, and other empirical hypotheses, certain experiential propositions which were not deducible from those other hypotheses alone. (Ayer 1936: 152)
But now consider an empirical claim \(A\).
Surely disjunction (or) preserves verifiability (since anything verifying \(A\) also verifies \(A \vee A'\)). Hence \(A\) or not-\(B\) will be empirical if \(A\) is, for any \(B\).
Now from \(B\) and this empirical claim \(A\) or not-\(B\), the empirical claim \(A\) follows, which does not follow from \(A\) or not-\(B\) alone. So, by Ayer’s criterion, \(B\) is meaningful – but it was arbitrary!
Even if the division were stable, we cannot restrict ourselves, by a division of vocabulary, to purely empirical claims.
any unobservable entity will differ from the observable ones in the way it systematically lacks observable characteristics. … therefore, we shall be able to state in the observational vocabulary … that there are unobservable entities, and, to some extent, what they are like. (van Fraassen 1980: 54)
A restriction to ‘observational’ vocabulary won’t actually restrict us from making meaningful theological claims.
For example: surely is mortal, is imperfect, etc., had better turn out to be meaningful. But now I can say, using meaningful vocabulary, something distinctively theological:
Ayer does offer some positive reasons for the existence of religion:
we are often told that the nature of God is a mystery which transcends the human understanding. But to say that something transcends the human understanding is to say that it is unintelligible. And what is unintelligible cannot significantly be described. (Ayer 1936: 156)
Ayer’s view entails that any discourse about a realm that ‘transcends the human understanding’, including religious speech, cannot aim at the communication of truths by direct assertion.
A scientific understanding of religious speech must therefore seek to understand why this discourse exists, if it cannot be justified in the way ordinary belief-indicating assertions are.
One idea: the point of religious practice is to express a mystical ‘feeling of awe with which men regard an alien world’ (Ayer 1936: 155) – the point of atheistic discourse might be to express the feeling that reality doesn’t transcend the scientific.
Positive non-literalism says that ‘religious discourse isn’t truth-aiming, but religious practice has some other purpose’.
There are at least two ways of understanding how this could work.
The most substantial tradition in religious expressivism isn’t directly inspired by moral non-cognitivism, but by some remarks of the later Wittgenstein (see O’Leary-Hawthorne and Howard-Snyder 1996: 248ff.):
If this [religious doctrine] is a truth, it is not the truth it appears at first glance to express. It’s less a theory than a sigh, or a cry. (Wittgenstein 1998: 34–35)
To ask whether God exists is not to ask a theoretical question. If it is to mean anything at all, it is to wonder about praising and praying; it is to wonder whether there is anything in all that. This is why philosophy cannot answer the question ‘Does God exist?’ with either an affirmative or a negative reply … . ‘There is a God’, though it appears to be in the indicative mood, is an expression of faith. (Phillips 1976: 181)
An ‘expression of faith’ seems to be involved in adopting a religious form of life, independent of belief.
To evaluate religious life by asking whether God exists is to miss the point. (So what is the point of ‘all that’ without God?)
One standard problem for moral expressivism: embedding (Geach 1965: 463).
This argument is good, but how? If (P2) just expresses disapproval, then what does it express when it is embedded in the conditional in (P1)?
The same problem will arise for religious expressivism:
Many religious people will think this reasoning is unexceptional, but if (R2) is merely an ‘expression of faith’, a ‘sigh or a cry’, then how does it embed in (R1) to make this argument a good one?
How can we reason conditionally from a ‘feeling’ which is not a proposition?
The expressivist problem with embedding arises ultimately because the expressive language has no propositional content, though it has some sort of conventional meaning.
One could try to reinterpret professions and denials of religious faith not as statements of beliefs about how things are but as expressions of commitment to different ways of life or as mere expressions of spiritual attitudes. But any such effort is an evasion. It is obvious that theists and atheists do not merely differ in how they live their lives. They really do disagree about the truth of the proposition that God exists. Any attempt to turn religious disagreements into mere differences in lifestyles fails to do justice to the plain facts of the case and is, perhaps, part of an effort to paper over troublesome questions. (Feldman 2007: 199)
Alongside an account of the non-belief-related benefits of religion, we will need to explain why those benefits cannot be attained in some other way.
Recall our earlier discussion of whether one can be ‘good without God’ – in the context of religious fictionalism, this discussion pivots on whether one can readily acquire a moral compass outside of a religious framework.
The fictionalist would say that the justification for continuing the practice is its efficacy in leading to moral attitudes – for example, they might argue that
Religious stories, particularly when bound together as incidents in the life of a religious figure, can provide models of good behaviour that are more memorable and engaging to the imagination and stimulating to one’s actions than bare moral principles. … [One] fully immerses oneself in religious practice as a means to attain certain benefits, including self-understanding and moral and practical guidance (Scott and Malcolm 2018: 3–4)
The evidence for religion as an effective moral teacher is, however, fairly weak (Hofmann, Wisneski, et al. 2014).
Van Fraassen characterises scientific realism as follows:
Science aims to give us, in its theories, a literally true story of what the world is like; and acceptance of a scientific theory involves the belief that it is true. (van Fraassen 1980: 8)
Rather than object to literalism, as verificationists do, he suggests attacking the account of belief. His constructive empiricism proposes a different notion of acceptance and a different conception of the aim of science:
Science aims to give us theories which are empirically adequate; and acceptance of a theory involves as belief only that it is empirically adequate. (van Fraassen 1980: 12)
This difference is pragmatic: the constructive empiricist takes scientific language literally, but denies it communicates scientific belief. This is arguably a kind of fictionalism about science.
Most think religion is more than theological doctrine. The point of religion is not merely empirical adequacy, but to help make sense of, and respond in an appropriate way to, religious experience.
Van Fraassen himself, in a later book, suggests something like this:
Suppose that, in a philosophical way, I do not understand … science or religion. It might be one thing to take me by the hand and lead me into relevant experience. That might allow me to acquire a deeper sense of insight into those aspects of human existence. It would be quite another thing – and to the empiricists of little or no value – to postulate that there are certain entities or realms of being about which … science, or religion … tells us a true story. Yet, that is what philosophers have often tended to do: [contending that …] religious doctrines the putative true description of a divine, extra-mundane reality. (van Fraassen 2002: 29)