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Foundation of Religious Beliefs after Foundationalism: Wittgenstein between Nielsen and Phillips
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
Abstract
Religious beliefs have often been taken either as absolutely foundational to all others or as ultimately founded on something else. This essay starts with an endorsement of the contemporary critique of foundationalism but sets its task as to search for the foundation(s) of religious belief after foundationalism. In its third and main part, it argues for a Wittgensteinian reflective equilibrium (within a belief system, between believing and acting and among people with different ways of believing and acting) as such a foundation. In this reflective equilibrium, religious beliefs are no more and no less foundational to, or founded by, other beliefs and practices. To appreciate this perspective better, I argue,in the first part, that Kai Neilsen's charge of Wittgenstein as a fideist is not accurate, and, in the second part, that D. Z. Phillips's fideistic contentions are unWittgensteinian.
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References
1 For a powerful philosophical critique of foundationalism, see Quine, Willard van Orman, ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, in From a Logical Point of View (New York: Harper & Row, 1953)Google Scholar; Sellars, Wilfred, ‘Empiricism and Philosophy of Mind’, in Science, Perception and Reality (New York: Humanities, 1963)Google Scholar, and Rorty, Richard, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979)Google Scholar. For a similar critique in theology and philosophy of religion, see Fiorenza, Francis Schüssler, Foundational Theology: Jesus and Church (New York: Crossroad, 1984)Google Scholar and Thiemann, Ronald, Revelation and Theology: The Gospel as Narrated Promise (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985)Google Scholar. For the most persistent defence of foundationalism, see Chisholm, Roderick M., Foundations of Knowing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982)Google Scholar. For the most updated survey of various types of foundationalism and anti-foundationalism, see Audi, Robert, The Structure of Justification (Cambridge, UK, New York, USA & Melbourne, Australia: Cambridge University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.
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21 See Kai Nielsen, ‘The Challenge of Wittgenstein’, p. 35.
22 Of course, what Nielsen hopes is the opposite: since we can show that religious language is incoherent from this Archimedean point, it is to be rejected as a whole, and once for all.
23 Kai Nielsen, After the Demise of the Tradition: Rorty, Critical Theory, and the Fate of Philosophy, pp. 175–6.
24 In ‘Wittgenstein and Religion: Fashionable Criticisms’, (in Belief, Change and Forms of Life) Phillips takes up all the main criticisms of his philosophy of religion as fideistic and rejects them all, it seems to me, both forcefully and convincingly.
25 For example, see his Faith and Philosophical Inquiry, p. 81.
26 In this context, Gordon Kaufman maintains that ‘the criteria for assessing theological claims turn out in the last analysis, thus, to be pragmatic and humanistic…because such considerations…are the only ones by which a way of life, a world-view, a perspective on the totality of things, a concept of God, may ultimately be assessed’ (An Essay on Theological Method [Missoula, Montana: Scholars Press, 1979], p. 76Google Scholar).
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30 ‘Lecture on Ethics’, pp. 5–6.
31 In this hermeneutically informed age, even the fact/value distinction might be problematical to many. Yet, to say that the consequence of a scientific belief is value-free is not to say that it is a bare fact. It is always an interpreted fact, but it is scientifically interpreted. Thus, in so far as moral or religious issues are not involved, they are still facts without value in Wittgenstein's sense.
32 D. Z. Phillips, Faith and Philosophical Inquiry, p. 132.
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52 Nielsen's conception of reasonableness is of course not as common as he thinks. It is scientific reason in disguise. For this, he ignores Wittgenstein's comment (‘Lectures on Religious Belief’, p. 58): ‘not only is it [religious belief] not reasonable, but it does not pretend to be.’
53 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 64.
54 Ibid. p. 53.
55 Ibid. p. 86.
56 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, §201.
57 Ibid. §199.
58 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, §567.
59 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, §232.
60 Ibid. §228.
61 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 16.
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64 Phillips, D. Z., Faith after Foundationalism, p. 134.Google Scholar
65 I would like to thank Gordon Kaufman for his critical comments on the previous version of this essay and Francis Schussler Fiorenza for his encouragement. I am also obliged to Francis Soo and the editors of this journal for saving me from many mistakes.