Book Review
by John M. Frame
ed.
Since the fall of Adam, many men have
expressed doubts concerning God’s existence; others have gone further and have
questioned the very possibility of God’s existence. In our own century,
however, unbelief has reached a still more radical level: learned men now have
come to question the very meaningfulness of the sentence “God
exists” and, by implication, the meaningfulness of all Christian language.
Others, somewhat less radical, have granted that “God exists” is somehow
meaningful, but have insisted that the sentence does not state a fact; rather,
they propose, this sentence makes a moral resolution, expresses an attitude,
makes an aesthetic judgment, or performs some mysterious function not clearly
specifiable.
Such is the challenge of “analytic
philosophy” to Christianity. Not all “analysts” are that radical, to be sure,
but those with religious interests are characteristically absorbed by that sort
of problem—and the problem is indeed a radical one. Furthermore, this challenge
is all the more significant in view of the fact that analytic philosophy is the
dominant philosophical approach today in British and American universities. And
in those universities the challenge is most effectively articulated. The
analysts present their case with a refreshing straightforwardness, and
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with
higher standards of clarity and logical rigor than any theology of which I
know. It is therefore about time that orthodox Christian scholars came to grips
with analytic philosophy. Why is it that even in those orthodox circles where “epistemological
self-consciousness” is most highly prized there has never (in my opinion) been
any really thoroughgoing critical appraisal of this movement? We have totally
failed to meet the most significant philosophical challenge of our day to the
Gospel, while we have squandered our intellectual skills on movements of far
less substance. We have, unlike Dr. Robert Dick Wilson, “shirked the difficult
questions.”
Well, if anyone at this late date wants
to do something toward remedying this deplorable situation, he will find
Professor High’s collection of essays an excellent place to start. The articles
are written by some of the most prominent analysts of religious language, and
the quality of thought is high indeed (though in my view the contributions of Poteat
and McPherson fall somewhat below the overall standard). The first two essays
introduce us to Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the guiding spirits of the
movement, perhaps the most important philosopher of our century, and surely the
most fascinating philosophical personality since Kierkegaard. The other
papers make various proposals for the settlement of the “religious language
question” and incidentally provide the reader with a valuable survey of current
thinking on the subject. The contributors all represent the “right wing” of the
movement. Not one of them argues that religious language is generally
meaningless or even that religious affirmations are generally non-factual. Yet
all feel to some extent the force of the “left wing” attack on the meaningfulness
of language about God and are constrained to reply to it. All agree that there
is something “odd” (a favorite term in the analytic vocabulary) about sentences
containing the term “God.”
Take the sentence “God exists.” Clearly,
as the logical positivists pointed out earlier in our century, that statement
is not verified in the way that scientific theories are verified (at least on
the positivist account of “verification”). Further, as John Wisdom and Antony
Flew later observed, religious people are strangely reluctant even to conceive
of some empirical fact which might possibly falsify such a sentence.
Since, therefore, this sentence behaves very differently in these respects from
other statements of fact, we are tempted to ask what kind of “odd” fact this
sentence can be used to state—if indeed it can state any fact at all.
All the essays in the present volume may
be read as responses to this problem. One approach is to consider more closely
the relationships between religion and science (particularly scientific “verification”). Ian Ramsey
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argues
that science is not as unreligious as it sometimes seems to be, and that it
requires a religious metaphysic to achieve its goal of a comprehensive
conceptual scheme. Frederick Ferré gives us the other side of the coin: as
Ramsey’s scientists are religious, so Ferré’s religious people are in important
respects scientific-especially in their use of conceptual models (Ferré
incidentally includes a valuable catalogue of information on this much-discussed
subject). Basil Mitchell takes the discipline of history (sort of a borderline
between science and something else) and argues that the historian’s treatment
of evidence is not all that different from the theologian’s. Of course there
are differences between religion and the sciences, and Ramsey, Ferré, and
Mitchell do point these out. All argue, however, that the sense in which
religious statements are “unverifiable” does not disqualify them as
meaningless, or even as scientifically meaningless.
But, now, what are some of the differences between science and religion? The writers in this volume address this question
also, and their answers are in part a further justification for the “unverifiability” of religious affirmations. Ramsey and Ferré, to be sure, come
close to saying that religion and the sciences are so necessary to one another
that they should be amalgamated into one embracive discipline. Still they would
argue that such an embracive discipline must contain elements which are in narrower
senses either religious or scientific. Religion provides the insight necessary
to formulate hypotheses while science provides the techniques for testing and
applying them, though at the higher levels of generality conclusive
verification is not possible. Mitchell, in an article especially important for
those of us concerned about “presuppositions,” adds the point that even at the
highest levels of generality “evidence” still has a role to play, but he seems
to agree with the others that that role is not one of conclusive verification.
Ramsey, in a second essay, discusses what is involved in saying that religious
language is “paradoxical,” and Thomas McPherson explores the concepts of
“analogy” and “symbol,” thus setting religious language off yet more distinctly
from the “straightforward” language of science. Still more interesting is the
thought which intrigues several of the essayists, that narrowly scientific
language is unable adequately to account for persons—human and, a
fortiori, divine. It is particularly unable to analyze statements
containing the first person singular pronoun. William H. Poteat in his two
essays formulates the distinction between “objective, scientific” language and
the language of “personal involvement” so crassly that only the poetic prose of
a Martin Buber could make it plausible. And Poteat is no Buber. Ramsey,
however, along with Robert C. Coburn and C. B. Daly, offers some fascinating
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70) p. 129
“analytic”
variants on Calvin’s theme, that knowledge of God and knowledge of self are
interdependent. Daly’s article is especially interesting, for to him the
analysis of human selfhood is one of many tunnels leading us from
Wittgensteinian analysis back to a traditional—or even Heideggerian—sort of
metaphysics. He suggests that Wittgenstein’s concept of “family resemblances”
is virtually a return to the medieval “analogy of being,” but fails to respond
to Wittgenstein’s explicit strictures against such interpretations.
According to Coburn and Paul L. Holmer,
however, the kind of self-knowledge requisite for knowing God is far more than
a sharp analysis of a personal pronoun. Coburn tells us that statements like “God exists” serve to give “logically complete answers” to “religious limiting
questions” such as “What is the meaning of life?” When such questions are
answered, that personal distress which produced the question is cured, so that
the questioner’s life is changed in highly practical ways. Holmer argues that
theology should not think of itself as endlessly pursuing a set of highly
esoteric and elusive facts, as though the facts about God were inadequately
presented in Scripture and the creeds, but rather theology should aim at curing
the ills of men—the confusions of thought and the complacencies of life which
keep men from feeling the force of the Christian Gospel (cf. Daly on p. 120 for
an interesting parallel, with a stress considerably different from that of
Ramsey et al.).
How shall we as Christians respond to all
of this? Let us look first for a moment at the central problem, the
verifiability of God-language. The reason why a Christian resists conceiving of
a “possible falsification” of God’s existence is simply that to him God’s
existence is a presupposition. Nothing can “disconfirm” God’s existence
because all confirmation and disconfirmation presupposes it. There can be no
“possible falsification” of God’s existence just because it is God who
determines what is possible and what is not. At the same time the existence of
God does have a positive relation to “evidence”; for since all facts presuppose
God, all facts are evidence of his reality. God’s existence, therefore, is
“verifiable”; but because of its logically unique presuppositional status there
is a kind of “oddness” in this particular sort of “verification.” The Christian
resists submitting God to human criteria, for he is under orders to “bring
every thought captive to the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor 10:5). But for that
same reason he must acknowledge God’s own criterion, his
self-attestation! And “self-attestation” is something “odd” indeed; for only
God can attest himself.
Now Ramsey, Daly, and others in the
present volume acknowledge
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that
religious statements are terribly basic, that they provide a conceptual scheme
for interpreting the whole of reality. Yet at every point the writers assume
that in some realm (generally what we have called the “narrowly scientific”)
men can go about their business without listening to God’s voice. The religious
“conceptual scheme” does not, after all, interpret the whole of reality;
not every thought is to be brought captive to Christ. Mitchell, for
instance, argues that it is possible for me to accept arguments against my own
faith without even implicitly and incipiently accepting a rival one; my doubts
may cause me simply to modify my own system in some way. At one level
this is a valid point. There are times when I should recognize
inadequacies in my own system in order to make it more congruent with that of
Scripture. But as Mitchell fails to realize, the Christian is not free to “modify” Scripture itself; and when he “accepts arguments against” Scripture he
is in fact accepting a non-Christian standard of reference. Mitchell like the
other authors assumes that men have an open-ended right autonomously to shape
their own systems; and that assumption the Christian cannot abide. Erich
Heller, not a philosopher but a professor of German, in his heretofore
unmentioned lead essay in our volume, presents this point strikingly. His
remarkable paper attempts to place Wittgenstein in the context of continental philosophy and literature and points up some rather striking parallels between
Wittgenstein and Nietzsche! He argues that Nietzsche’s “death of God” is
parallel to Wittgenstein’s loss of faith in the power of language to “mirror”
reality and his subsequent insistence that man himself must confer meaning upon
language and upon the world through his “form of life.” We have seen similar
autonomous pretensions in Wittgenstein’s followers in this volume. No wonder
that “left wing” analysts have denied the very meaningfulness of Christian
language! For how can it be meaningful on such criteria? Clearly an orthodox
Christian can make no compromise with such idolatry!
And yet we can learn so much from the analysts!
Yes, theology does make use of models. Yes, there is paradox in
theology, and we had better learn to distinguish one type of paradox from
another. Yes, we have much to learn about the function of signs and symbols.
Yes, there are important analogies between “I” and “God” that we have left
unexplored. Yes, Our standards of clarity and logical rigor have been sinfully
shoddy. Yes, we have too often ignored in our theology what is painfully
obvious in Scripture, that practical obedience is a constitutive aspect of the “knowledge of God” (1 John 2:3–6), and that therefore any theology
worthy of the name will aim, by the power of God, to cure men of those
ills of thoughts
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70) p. 131
and
life which inhibit their grasp of God’s Word, even the ills of autonomous
“analysis.”
John M. Frame