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The End of the Theism–Atheism Debate? A Response to Vincent Brümmer

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 1998

MIKAEL STENMARK
Affiliation:
Department of Theology, Uppsala University, Box 1604, 75146 Uppsala, Sweden

Abstract

Vincent Brümmer has recently, by taking his starting-point in the writings of Wittgenstein, defended the idea that the debate about the truth or falsehood of the claim that God exists has no future. I suggest that the arguments Brümmer develops to support this claim fail. This is so because he does not show why any attempt to prove or disprove the truth or falsehood of the belief in the existence of God is circular or how the purported non-provability of the belief that God exists entails that the theism–atheism debate of the truth or falsehood of this belief has no future. In addition, Brümmer does not acknowledge that there are many different religious language-games, that within the theistic language-games the claim that God exists is used in many different ways and that, as a result, it is not true that, within the religious language-game, the belief in the existence of God cannot be doubted, denied, or treated as a hypothesis.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 1998 Cambridge University Press

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