6 - ‘It Says What It Says’

Summary

To put it bluntly, when ordinary people pray it is because they think there is a God up there listening. […] You have to be a very recherché sort of religious intellectual to keep praying if you don't think there is any real God outside the language who is listening to your prayer.

– John Searle, quoted in Phillips, Wittgenstein and Religion

John Searle makes this remark in a television talk with Bryan Magee about the philosophy of Wittgenstein. He is expressing a difficulty about understanding Wittgenstein's thoughts about religion, accusing him of wishing to have it both ways, both accepting and rejecting the reality of God. Here I shall not discuss Searle's reading of Wittgenstein, rather I quote him because his words seem to me to be representative of a type of response often made to certain ways of regarding religious faith.

I take the phrase ‘a God up there’ as Searle's way of emphasizing that he wishes his words to be taken literally. He is reacting to Wittgenstein's observation that in order to get clear about what people say in speaking about God we should start by looking at the practices to which their words belong. Searle, it appears, is giving vent to a kind of impatience, insisting that, philosophical subtleties aside, what gives point to those practices and ways of speaking, quite simply, is the belief in the reality of God. The words and practices are secondary to the belief, he wants to say. This type of impatience is not uncommon. ‘When all is said and done’, someone may say, ‘the bottom line is this: either there is a God up there or there isn’t’. She may feel that there is a great deal of hedging going on, for instance, when some theologians speak about spiritual matters: ‘God is present in our love for one another’, ‘The story of the resurrection is a symbol of hope’, ‘When the bread is turned into the body of Christ, what this really means is that we are all united in the church’, ‘Saying that there is something of God in each one of us means that even the lowliest among us is infinitely valuable’, or ‘It means that everyone is entitled to dignity and respect’, etc.