Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations appeared posthumously in 1953. The anniversary deserves commemoration. The publication of much more of his late work, not to mention the flood of exposition and commentary, would in any case prompt reflection. But, even after thirty years, with its status as a philosophical classic securely established, the use of the book remains as difficult and controversial as ever. It is appropriate, in these pages, to concentrate on the effect the study of Wittgenstein’s later work might have in the context of theological studies — in fact as an essential therapeutic propaedeutic.

To put it like that is already to suggest that Wittgenstein’s work has had very little effect on the practice of theology in the past thirty years. That is to say, we need not linger long upon the mare’s nest of “Wittgensteinian Fideism”. This nomenclature was introduced, I think, by Kai Nielsen (in Philosophy, July 1967, if not already somewhere else). As an atheist Nielsen wants to go on arguing that religion is nonsense. He therefore objects to the way that certain Christian philosophers, or certain philosophers who are also Christians, try to make out that religion is a practice which can be understood only by the insider. Any outsider, such as a committed atheist, could not even know what he is talking about when he argues against the existence of a god or whatever. Religious language would be intelligible only to those who participate in the “form of life” in which it is at home. Religious discourse would moreover constitute a distinctive and autonomous “language game” which could be understood, let alone criticized only by adepts. This counts as Fideism, in the textbook sense: the propositions and concepts of the Christian faith would simply be unintelligible to people who have not yet been “saved”.

A few days after the publication of the Church of England report, The Church and the Bomb, a Foreign Office spokesman replied to the suggestion that the Church has a duty to give a moral lead to the nation by saying that “giving a moral lead may be good for the conscience but it is not a valid proposition in the real world”. A somewhat more elaborate version of the morality versus reality outlook occurred in Bernard Williams’s talk on Channel 4 on 15 November (now published in New Society, 18 November). He said that something he called the Simple Moral Argument about deterrence works in the abstract but is useless for coming to any conclusions about how to live with nuclear weapons now we have them. It is the business of practical and political rationality to argue about what to do next. (Unfortunately, he went on to say, practical rationality soon breaks down amid the complexities of deterrence theory and we are left with scepticism as our only intellectual resource.)

It is a fact that the apparent divorce between morality and practical reason is brought into sharp focus by the issue of nuclear deterrence. To simplify the picture somewhat: against nuclear deterrence are to be found nearly all those who give priority in international relations as in personal relations to certain inviolable moral principles; in favour of nuclear deterrence — in some form at least — are to be found nearly all those who believe that moral principles must be subordinated to “reason” or “reality”, especially in matters of security. Underlying the difference over nuclear deterrence are undoubtedly some fundamentally opposed value- choices at work, but also some fundamental confusions about the meaning of morality and practical reason.

The title of this paper indicates an exploration; the indefinite article implies that it is (perhaps necessarily) expressed in personal terms. Putting and responding to questions like this one is very much a custom of our time; a time of questioning, when we are disinclined to accept the forms of tradition and the pronouncements of authority. We assume that it is normal and necessary, for Christians, to ask themselves what they mean when they use the traditional language of Christian doctrine: to ask themselves how these are related, on the one hand, to the experience to which they are intended to give intellectual shape and, on the other, to the intellectual processes which we use when we try to understand more manageable kinds of experience. Do we accept such language and in what sense? Do we want to reinterpret it? I suspect that most of us have asked ourselves the question that Bonhoeffer, in his prison-cell, came to see as the central one: ‘What do we really believe, in the sense that we hang on to it with our lives?’ Notice that he uses the word ‘We’; he thought of faith as something shared, something corporate. But he had to do his own thinking. And if you feel that need you can’t.in good faith, suppress it.

It is in this sense that my paper will be an individual and personal one. I haven’t any distinctive experience to offer you; and what I have to say will, I think, be of general rather than of personal interest. Still, since it does come from an individual I ought to say something about the background of temperament, experience, orientation and interest which lie behind it, and which may help you to place what I have to say, and therefore to assess it for yourselves.

God is all-powerful, all-knowing and perfectly good. But there is a great deal of evil in the world. People inflict suffering on others and on themselves. And there is suffering which is not caused by what anybody does. So must we not conclude that there can, after all, be no God? This question is an ancient one, but in what follows, I shall briefly try to indicate how it has been answered by modem philosophers of religion. Then I shall comment on the answers to which I refer.

One popular line of reasoning holds that in view of the existence of evil God’s existence is simply disprovable. The charge here is that someone who believes in God is caught in a straight logical contradiction given that he also accepts that evil is a reality. Many modem philosophers take this line (which is, incidentally, sharply raised as a topic for discussion by St Thomas Aquinas in Question 2 of the First Part of the Summa Theologiae). H J McClos- key, for example, writes:

The late John Mackie expresses a similar viewpoint. He says: