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On the Rationality of Radical Theological Non-Naturalism

More on the Verificationist Turn in the Philosophy of Religion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Kai Nielsen
Kai Nielsen
Affiliation:
Professor of Philosophy, University of Calgary
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Extract

In my Contemporary Critiques of Religion and in my Scepticism, I argue that non-anthropomorphic conceptions of God do not make sense. By this I mean that we do not have sound grounds for believing that the central truth-claims of Christianity are genuine truth-claims and that we do not have a religiously viable concept of God. I argue that this is so principally because of three interrelated features about God-talk. (I) While purporting to be factual assertions, central bits of God-talk, e.g. ‘God exists’ and ‘God loves man-kind’, are not even in principle verifiable (confirmable or disconfirmable) in such a way that we can say what experienceable states of affairs would count for these putative assertions and against their denials, such that we could say what it would be like to have evidence which would make either their assertion or their denial more or less probably true. (2) Personal predicates, e.g. ‘loves’, ‘creates’, are at least seemingly essential in the use of God-talk, yet they suffer from such an attenuation of meaning in their employment in religious linguistic environments that it at least appears to be the case that we have in such environments unwittingly emptied these predicates of all intelligible meaning so that we do not understand what we are asserting or denying when we utter ‘God loves mankind’ or ‘God created the heavens and the earth’ and the like. (3) When we make well-formed assertions, it appears at least to be the case that a necessary condition for such wellformedness is that we should be able successfully to identify the subject of that putative statement so that we can understand what it is that we are talking about and thus understand that a genuine statement has actually been made. But, where God is conceived non-anthropomorphically, we have no even tolerably clear idea about how God, an infinite individual, occupying no particular place or existing at no particular time, and being utterly transcendent to the world, can be identified. Indeed we have no coherent idea of what it would be like to identify him and this means we have no coherent idea of what it would be like for God even to be a person or an it. He cannot be picked out and identified in the way persons and things can.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , June 1978 , pp. 193 - 204
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1978

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References

page 194 note 1 Penelhum, Terence, Problems of Religious Knowledge (London: Macmillan Press, 1971)Google Scholar and Penelhutn, Terence, Religion and Rationally (New York: Random House, 1971).Google Scholar All references to these two books will be made in the text. Problems of Religious Knowledge will be referred to by RK and Religion artd Rationality by RR.

page 194 note 2 Braithwaite, R. B., An Empiricist's View of The Nature of Religious Belief (London: Cambridge University Press, 1955)Google Scholar and He, R. M., ‘The Simple Believer’ in Outka, Gene and Reeder, John P. Jr. (eds.), Religion and Morality (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1973), pp. 393–427.Google Scholar

page 195 note 1 Phillips, D. Z., Faith and Philosophical Enquiry (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970)Google Scholar, Holmer, Paul L., ‘Atheism and Theism’, Lutheran World, XII (1963)Google Scholar, Brown, Stuart, Religious Belief (London: Open University Press, 1974)Google Scholar and Dilman, Ilham, ‘Wisdom's Philosophy of Religion’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, v, 4 (December 1975), pp. 473–522.Google Scholar

page 197 note 1 This has been clearly and decisively argued by Hepburn, Ronald in his Christianity and Paradox (London: C. A. Watts, 1958)Google Scholar, chapters n1 and rv. John Hick in his in many ways perceptive discussion of Christianity and Paradox does nothing to unsettle that claim. See Hick, John, ‘A philosopher criticizes theology’, The London Quarterly, XXXI (1962), pp. 103–10.Google Scholar

page 199 note 1 See my Contemporary Critiques of Religion (London: Macmillan Press, 1971) and most particularly pp. 28–30.Google Scholar

page 199 note 2 Tooley, Michael points out that Hick actually vacillates at times about whether he is trying to show the factual intelligibility of key strands of theistic discourse or whether he is simply concerned to show how we can verify theistic claims. But there are repeated claims about the former and a realization of its central importance. In his inaugural lecture Theology's Central Problem (University of Birmingham Press, 1967), Hick makes it clear enough that he takes theology's central problem to be intimately linked with problems of meaning. He sees theology's central problem, when viewed philosophically, as ‘a problem concerning religious language’ and he remarks that in ‘a sentence the issue is whether distinctively religious utterances are instances of the cognitive or of the non-cognitive uses of language’ (p. 1).Google Scholar(See as well page 15 of the same lecture.) He is concerned to show how religious utterances are cognitive by showing that they are factually meaningful because verifiable. This is a very central point in his ‘Theology and verification’, Theology Today, XVII (1960), pp. 12–31, and comes out definitely in his exchange with Binkley.Google ScholarSee his remarks in the journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 11, 1 (Fall 1962) and 11, 2 (Spring 1963).Google ScholarMichael Tooley's key remarks on this are in his ‘John Hick and the concept of eschatological verification’, Religious Studies, X11 (1976),. pp. 177–99.Google Scholar

page 202 note 1 Putting it just as Penelhum does in the above quotation obscures the force of radical theological non-naturalism. They say that it is not irrational to refuse any theistic conclusion until we have a sufficient understanding of God-talk such that we can understand what kind of truth claim, if any, is being made or presupposed in its characteristic use.

page 202 note 2 I have accepted for the sake of this discussion the claim that talk of life after the death of our present bodies is coherent talk. In reality I would challenge that as I do in my ‘Logic, Incoherence and Religion’, International Logic Revie, forthcoming.

page 203 note 1 I do this at some length in my Contemporary Critiques of Religion.

page 204 note 1 If the general thrust of my arguments is well taken here, they would also tend to undermine, with only slight modifications, Mitchell's, Basil criticisms of my account in his The Justification of Religious Belief (London: Macmillan Press, 1973), pp. 7–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar