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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
There are three well-developed sorts of answer to the question ‘What kind of meaning is possessed by religious beliefs?’ The first sort regards religious beliefs as truth claims of the kind encountered in the natural and social sciences and in everyday life. Religious beliefs are claims about how things stand in some part of the world. They are to be counted as true or false depending on whether those claims correspond with how things in fact stand. On this reading, religious beliefs are at least in principle verifiable or falsifiable through experiences of appropriate types. There are of course different notions of ‘experiences of the appropriate type’. A Russian cosmonaut returned from space saying that there was no God. He regarded religious beliefs as falsified by the observations he made when he went into the sky and looked around. Others (for instance, John Hick in his concept of eschatological verification) think of religious beliefs as testable, not through ordinary sense experience, but through rather similar kinds of experiences (if any) after death. In either of these versions, the sort of meaning possessed by religious beliefs and the sort of truth or falsehood of which they are susceptible are not radically different from the sorts of meaning and truth typical of claims about empirical facts.
page 222 note 1 ‘Attitudinal Christianity’, Religious Studies, XVIII (1982), 11–27.Google Scholar Robbins contends that noncognitivism gained its attractiveness against a logical empiricist background, and that the latter is no longer a compelling rationale. However, he defends a non-cognitivist understanding of religious belief as freeing Christianity from dependence on an untenable world-view.
page 223 note 1 Whittaker, John, Matters of Faith and Matters of Principle (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 1981), p. 95.Google Scholar Subsequent references are given in this way: MFMP, p. 95.Google Scholar
page 223 note 2 MFMP, p. 64.Google Scholar
page 223 note 3 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, On Certainty (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969), passim.Google Scholar Subsequent references are given in this way: OC, passim.Google Scholar
page 223 note 4 In ‘Wittgenstein and Classical Scepticism’, International Philosophical Quarterly, XXI, (1981), 3–15.Google Scholar
page 223 note 5 Fogelin, , p. 14.Google Scholar
page 224 note 1 Morawetz, Thomas (in Wittgenstein and Knowledge, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1978)Google Scholar gives an exhaustive catalogue of Wittgenstein's examples and a penetrating account of his arguments.
page 224 note 2 MFMP, p. 119.Google Scholar
page 226 note 1 MFMP, p. 106.Google Scholar
page 226 note 2 MFMP, p. 57.Google Scholar
page 228 note 1 OC, paras 95–9.
page 228 note 2 OC, para. 519.
page 228 note 3 OC, para. 318.
page 228 note 4 OC, para. 319.
page 228 note 5 OC, para. 321.
page 229 note 1 ‘Anselm's Ontological Arguments’, Philosophical Review, LXIX (1960), 41–62.Google Scholar
page 230 note 1 This point is argued eloquently by Putnam, Hilary in Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 113–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar