1. Introduction
One of
Wittgenstein’s (
2009, § 116) most quoted methodological remarks reads, “[w]hat
we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.” In the context of the philosophy of religion, this remark might seem to suggest a Feuerbachian analysis of religion, a translation of religious language into natural language.
1 (One can here think of the trend to describe Wittgenstein’s philosophy as a form of naturalism, even though those who do so often add qualifications that make it unclear what is left of the original term (cf.
McGinn 2022;
Strandberg 2023a)). What a Wittgensteinan philosophy of religion would be thus seems to be quite clear.
However, such a conclusion is premature, to say the least. The alleged conclusion presupposes that the meaning of terms such as “religious” and “natural” (and the distinction that rests on these terms) is well understood. What is needed is a philosophical analysis of such terms; only thereafter, if ever, could the distinction between “religious language” and “natural language” be used in a meaningful way (cf.
Strandberg 2023b).
Furthermore, and more importantly, the “Feuerbachian” take on what Wittgenstein is doing rests on a misunderstanding of Wittgenstein’s understanding of philosophy. The remark quoted above must be read together with another often-quoted remark of
Wittgenstein’s (
2009, § 124), a remark that might seem to contradict it: “Philosophy must not interfere in any way with the actual use of language […] It leaves everything as it is.” A Feuerbachian translation of religious language into natural language would not leave everything as it is.
2How is the above-mentioned retroduction supposed to leave everything as it is? In the context of my discussion here, the key word in § 124 is “actual”. What Wittgenstein could be said to be interfering with is what is not an actual use of language, that is, what is only apparently a use of language. If so, what are contrasted in § 116 are not two different uses of language—a metaphysical use of language and an everyday use of language, whatever that exactly might mean—but an apparent use of language and an actual use of language, a distinction the meaning of which I will reflect upon throughout this section. In a sense, Wittgenstein could be said to use the word “metaphysical” in a non-everyday way, not standing for something more or less intimately identified with religion, the alleged depth of religious mystery, or the allegedly speculative sides of religion, which, in my experience, is the everyday use of the word “metaphysical”. In Wittgenstein’s use of the word “metaphysical”, however, a specific diagnosis of the problems of philosophy is to be found.
At this point, however, someone might claim that it might still be the case that what religious believers say is through and through confused and thus not actual uses of language. Is this possible? How is it to be determined whether this is so or not? Or is the critic’s question confused? What is an apparent use of language in the first place?
In order to answer the latter question, and thus to start answering the other ones, some other famous remarks of Wittgenstein’s are helpful.
Wittgenstein (
2009, § 38) states that “philosophical problems arise when language
goes on holiday.” Later he continues (§ 132), “The confusions which occupy us arise when language is, as it were, idling, not when it is doing work.” To this another metaphor can be added: “a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it is not part of the mechanism” (§ 271). A wheel that does not do any job—an “idling” wheel, a wheel “on holiday”—can be removed without this affecting the mechanism; removing it, although this is a change, in effect leaves everything as it is. In other words, Wittgenstein tries to make us aware of the fact that there are things we tend to say to ourselves, believe, or perhaps rather believe that we believe, that can in fact be dropped without any loss—language is in such cases used only apparently. (Of course, all metaphors break down at some point, also the above ones, for going on holiday is still to do something, even if one is only resting, and restricting the right to rest and leisure would not be to leave everything as it is. Philosophical confusions, by contrast, are illusions; philosophical confusions are nothing, in the radical sense of the word.)
Anyway, in the case of the machine Wittgenstein is referring to, it is clear what removing something without this affecting the mechanism means. But in other cases? If I have constructed a proof in mathematics or logic, someone could show me that some steps are unnecessary and can in fact be deleted, for the sake of greater clarity. Nothing hangs on them, except my difficulty of admitting that my proof was not perfect. Even though something similar might at times happen in philosophy too, the difficulties of the philosophical problems Wittgenstein is discussing cannot be reduced to such factors. It would obviously be incorrect to claim that the adherents of some specific metaphysical theory could just drop it without this meaning anything to them. In fact, a great deal hangs on the theory for its adherents, and not just intellectual pride. Or to put this point differently, in the case of the machine, one can make experiments, removing the wheel to see what happens, but if such an experiment would be possible with philosophical ideas, this would only show that they are not really held.
This brings us to another of Wittgenstein’s famous metaphors, the one that addresses this problem: “To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle”—this is
Wittgenstein’s (
2009, § 309) “aim in philosophy.” The reason the frustrated fly cannot go where it wants to go is not only that there is a glass wall in front of it but also that it has erroneous beliefs about how to get out of the bottle. The direction of liberation is therefore one that for some time seems to lead away from it, and making it see that liberation involves giving up its ideas about how liberation is to be reached is thus not an easy task. However, there is an important difference between the case of the fly and the case of the one who holds on to ideas that should better be dropped. In the case of the fly and the fly-bottle, what prevents the fly from getting where it wants to go is not only its mistaken ideas about how to get there, but also something that is external to it, the glass wall. In the case of philosophical liberation, however, the glass wall is the confused thoughts themselves, which means that it is not possible to experimentally try another route or for the moment remove a wheel from the machinery to see what happens, as I noted before. At the moment when one succeeds at getting out of the fly-bottle, the fly-bottle ceases to exist; before liberation has taken place, one needs to be liberated from something, but afterwards there is no “something.” In this sense, liberation, a real change, at the same time leaves everything as it is. Wittgenstein could thus be said to describe the experiential nature of philosophical insight: up to the point of insight, the idea one has been struggling with really seems to be important, and it is not until the moment of philosophical insight that it becomes clear to one that the idea one has been firmly attached to can be dropped without any loss—and that it is in fact no idea at all.
There are at least two different ways in which this liberation comes about. Up until this point, I have taken it for granted that the problem concerns how to get where one wants to go. This is the immediate impression the metaphor of the fly-bottle gives. But if what prevents one from getting where one wants to go is not an external obstacle but one’s confused thoughts, liberation could just as well be a matter of liberation from illusory goals, as one’s thoughts about where to go is not immune to confusion. Similarly, what is illusory need not be the goal as such but could just as well be one’s relation to this goal, if, for example, the illusion consists in one’s belief that one really wants to go there. As
Wittgenstein (
1976, p. 103) states in a lecture, “I would say: ‘I wouldn’t dream of trying to drive anyone out of this paradise [that Cantor has created].’ […] I would try to show that it is not a paradise”. A different form of such criticism rests on the fact that while a great deal hangs on the theory for its adherents, they might be confused as to what that is, which means that greater clarity will change their relation to it, as well as at the same time leave everything as it is.
Both the metaphor of the wheel and the metaphor of the fly-bottle presuppose that there is something one wants that one does not obtain, at all or not in the most expedient way: whatever it is the machine is for, getting out of the fly-bottle. If what I have suggested is correct, however, the sense of frustration is connected to the cause of it in a less obvious way in the case of philosophy, as one’s understanding of what it is one wants is here intimately connected to what it is that prevents one from getting it. This means that flies that prefer to stay in the fly-bottle are less likely than they might seem to be. A limitation to Wittgenstein’s way of doing philosophy would otherwise be that there is no point in trying to show philosophers who want to stay in the fly-bottle the way out of it. But since most of us are frustrated in some way, or if not frustrated, have a more or less vague sense that things can be better than they are at present, most of us need to be liberated from some kind of fly-bottle. Facilitating such liberation need not always be the task of philosophy, however. The question that has to be asked is therefore whether these senses of, say, frustration or longing are connected to philosophical confusions or not—whether what prevents us from moving forward is such confusion or something else—and if so how.
But what does this mean when it comes to religion? Are the things religious believers say actual uses of language or not? Is religion a fly-bottle or an aid to getting out of it? Or are these questions badly put?
One issue, highly relevant in relation to these questions, has perhaps already been noticed by the attentive reader. The metaphors of Wittgenstein’s I have been discussing point to ends that one is prevented from reaching. But what is the end of religion? I see no better answer than this: a religious end. Of course, it might be possible to give some answer that seems to point to an external end, in the sense of not explicitly mentioning religion. The end of religion might be, say, truth, happiness, or eternal life. The problem is, however, that even if one would find such answers to the point, the meaning of the terms used will not necessarily stay fixed when one starts pursuing them in a religious spirit, which means that the end will effectively become a religious one nonetheless. In other words, the machine does not only produce things intelligible without it but also possibly the very intelligibility of its products; on one’s way out of the fly-bottle, one may come to understand what life outside of it means in a very different way than at the start of one’s journey. If this sounds obscure, pay attention to the fact that throughout life, we come to know new ends, otherwise we could only strive for the same things as newborn babies do. Any instrumental understanding of religion or of philosophical clarification—an understanding that Wittgenstein’s metaphors might seem to invite—is hence of limited relevance at most. This means, furthermore, that if one believes that all it takes to do Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion is to describe the various religious language games, one overlooks the fact that in order to be able to describe something, one must first have come to understand it. For the believer, understanding faith is as such a religious question, a topic of, say, struggle, prayer, and growth, which means that any attempt to describe faith from a position external to this process risks mischaracterising it. (In other words, the visual metaphor in the term “surveyable representation” (übersichtliche Darstellung;
Wittgenstein 2009, § 122) risks being misleading, for the possibility cannot be ruled out that, say, it is precisely by praying that one comes to understand the grammar of prayer better.) Faith will potentially change what religious belief means, as I just noted. The question as to whether the things religious believers say are actual uses of language or not, raised by my imagined interlocutor, is therefore a question the meaning of which is not as obvious as one may take it to be, for one cannot take for granted that one’s understanding of what “actual” involves cannot be deepened. And in a sense, we have already noticed this, when realising that one’s thoughts about where to go is not immune to confusion.
In addition to this, what I have said thus far makes it possible for us to draw two main conclusions as to the consequences of these methodological considerations for a philosophical discussion of religion. First, it would be a mistake to read § 116 as critical of religion and § 124 as precluding all such criticism. What one needs to be liberated from can only be told post factum. As I said, one reason this is so is that understanding the nature of one’s attachment to the idea in question is part of the process of liberation. I come to realise what I am really able to mean by meaning it; there is, hence, no external criterion for what is “actual”. (In fact, such an external criterion would not leave everything as it is.) This brings us to the second point. Even though we all might be trapped in the same fly-bottle and there may only be one way out of it, which we all hence must take, every fly still needs to
fly out of it; knowing where the opening is located is not the same thing as having left the fly-bottle. In other words, “[p]hilosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity” (
Wittgenstein 1961, § 4.112). This means that in philosophy, my own active involvement is pivotal, by contrast to the case of doctrines, where someone else could do the job for me, formulating teachings I only need to learn. This is especially important to bear in mind in the case of the philosophy of religion, as it deals with questions that cannot fail to be of an existential, often life-changing character, and trying to keep a professional distance to the questions will mean that one does not understand them as the questions they are.
3 Expressed in slightly different terms: for a religious believer, there is no metaperspective on her relation to God, as the alleged metaperspective will still be just another version of her relation to God (cf.
Ebner 1963, p. 258). On the other hand, such “religious” concerns are never fully absent in philosophy, thus not just one possible object of philosophical analysis, since the process of liberation is an activity in which coming to understand the nature of one’s attachment to specific confusions will be a not insignificant part, as I pointed out above, thus an activity of a more or less existential kind.
Let us at this point return to the remark I started with: “[w]hat
we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use” (
Wittgenstein 2009, § 116). For there is another way of reading it. The “everyday use” Wittgenstein is here referring to would then in this context be the real use of religious expressions, by religious believers in the context of faith, in contrast to a “metaphysical” employment of them within philosophy. Instead of discussing the validity of standard arguments for and against the existence of God, or in a Kantian fashion the very possibility of such arguments, what one should then ask is whether the word “God”, as it occurs in such metaphysical contexts, is “ever actually used in this way in the language in which it is at home” (quoting from the same paragraph, but applying it to a different case than the ones Wittgenstein mentions). A comparison could here be made with
Pascal’s (
1977, p. 454) “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of philosophers and scholars.” For Pascal, it should be noted, this distinction is part of his own religious struggle, not a distinction the making of which requires only intellectual capacities; the sentence is to be found on a document Pascal had sewn into his own clothing, carrying it with him all the time as something he thought necessary to constantly remind himself of. The distinction between religious language and misunderstandings of it is hence also a religious distinction, a distinction internal to what one is trying to understand when one tries to understand religious language. So where exactly is the word “God” at home? A house is not someone’s home just because he spends much time there, and that you have never really felt at home in the place where you live is a realisation that may come creeping upon you gradually.
The relation of religion and metaphysics is thus a far more complicated issue than many Wittgensteinian philosophers of religion have realised. D. Z. Phillips, a central figure here (perhaps the central one), has throughout his works tried to show that religion is not metaphysical speculation, in the spirit of the above interpretation of § 116. As important as such an analysis may be, that would still mean to approach the issue from a misleading direction, I believe. For the contrast to the metaphysical is actual use, and actual use only takes place in the life of a real person. Someone like Phillips can only give a (good or bad) description of a possibility, but such a description is not the use of what it describes, is not an instance of an actual use of it. This means, furthermore, that the question whether that which is described is in fact ever actually used is always an open question, as even the one who deliberately tries to put it into practice might still live it in a confused way and thus fail to put it in use in the relevant sense. Likewise, the relation of religion and metaphysics is in an important sense internal to religion itself, as I have tried to indicate by means of the example of Pascal. Even though
Phillips (
1965, pp. 83–84, 158;
2007, pp. 39–41) does not deny the interconnections, he still stresses the distinction between a believer’s philosophical account of her faith and her faith, thus underestimating the degree to which the confusions of the former will affect the latter and the degree to which religious difficulties may give rise to confused philosophical attempts at dealing with them, with the result that philosophical clarification will not be able to remain as “cool” as
Phillips (
1999) wants it to be. Conversely, since the distinction between philosophy and religion is not clear-cut, it is not surprising that it is easy to find in religion what at least on the face of it seems to be examples of the same confusions that Wittgensteinian philosophers have targeted in philosophy. But the context—of use?—is still different, and is this significant or not? And how is that to be determined? Especially since it cannot be taken for granted that two people, even if they belong to the same religious tradition and are close to each other in many ways, put the possibly confused expressions into use in their lives in the same way, if at all, the distinction between a metaphysical, apparent use and a real one is at the end of the day drawn in the first person (cf.
Winch 1987, chap. 9), which certainly does not exclude that one comes to such insights in the conversation with others.
However, the central difficulty is not one that Phillips in particular succumbed to but concerns the form of philosophical writing as such. There are things that can be done in the standard form of philosophical writing today, the academic paper, otherwise I would not write one. There are limits to its philosophical possibilities, however, possibilities to be found in other forms of writing, such as the exchange of letters or the thought diary, to say nothing of the possibilities to be found beyond writing, such as in conversation. In fact, if philosophy is an activity, as Wittgenstein claimed it is, then a paper is not philosophy; philosophy takes place only in the writing of one, the reading of one, or the discussion with others of one. (The styles of Wittgenstein’s writings, early and late, could be understood to reflect this and are hence not the result of personal idiosyncrasies.) Since the academic paper is directed to no one in particular, and since for its reader the author is no more than a name, the form makes all questions that are first and foremost answered in the first person difficult to address as such (hence the difficulties of doing philosophy of religion in this format), and the discussion in the paper will acquire a more or less abstract character, whatever attempts are made to avoid this. The same obviously applies to this paper and the two examples I will discuss in what follows, and it would be a simple task to criticise what will follow in light of what I have said this far. All I can hope for is that the reader will turn it into philosophy when reading it, and that it was philosophy for me when writing it.
2. Divine Command Theory
A couple of paragraphs ago, I mentioned, as an example of a metaphysical employment of religious expressions within philosophy, discussions concerning the validity and possibility of standard arguments for and against the existence of God. Another, and even clearer example is when God (or “God”) is used as a principle to refer to in order to solve philosophical problems, especially to provide a missing ultimate grounding of the metaphysical edifice. One possible religious criticism of such attempts is obvious: it would then be seen as a case of sacrilege, and Pascal’s criticism of the God of philosophers can clearly be understood in such terms. In any case, the Wittgensteinian criticism is also obvious: the grounding principle receives its possible intelligibility from what it allegedly supports, which means that the “house” is the ground of its “foundation.” As
Wittgenstein (
1969, § 248) puts it, in a somewhat different context: “I have arrived at the rock bottom of my convictions. And one might almost say that these foundation-walls are carried by the whole house.”
One example of such a use of (the principle of) God as a solution to a philosophical problem is divine command theory, the idea that moral responsibility is ultimately grounded in commands issued by God.
4 One problem here, as I just suggested, is that this presupposes that the understanding of who God is and what a command is does not yet include any moral understanding. The problem is not only that knowing what a command is is to know that commands sometimes need to be questioned but primarily that commands are issued and followed in a world that already has a moral dimension, which is the precondition for following commands having the importance it has. For example, it makes sense to say of a command that someone was wrong in disobeying it, but in the case of a command that is the ultimate ground such an utterance would be meaningless—and in what sense is it then a command? (This problem is obvious in
Anscombe’s (
1981, p. 41) claim that “in a divine law theory of ethics […] it really does add something to the description ‘unjust’ to say that there is an obligation not to do it; for what obliges is the divine law—as rules oblige in a game.” This would at most oblige in a relative sense, relative to one’s desire to play the game; what would a rule in a game be that obliges one to play this specific game?) More important however is to ask—in this way beginning to try to stop the fly from pressing on in a direction that does not lead anywhere—why a grounding of moral responsibility is sought in the first place. For example, the ground is not supposed to give us the answer to a genuinely asked question about what should be done, which is obvious when such a question is asked because of empirical uncertainties, since a command is not supposed to supply the missing empirical knowledge, but it is not supposed to answer such a question even when the difficulty is taken to be truly moral, because looking for an answer would not be seen as urgent unless one is already concerned for, say, the people who might get hurt, which means that the difficulty is not one of a missing ultimate ground. In this regard, the desire for such a ground is a moral temptation, the temptation to try to position oneself in a state of complete moral deafness, for only in such a state could there be such a thing as a first principle, and thereafter live a supposedly moral life against the background of this fundamental deafness. The problem, however, is that the very point, importance, and urgency of listening to God, supposedly issuing the commands, would then also be lost. The problem, in other words, is that there is no outside to morality; morality is a dimension of existence as such.
Making use of one religious possibility could shed more light on this. For it is only to be expected that morality is a dimension of existence as such if God is the creator, bringing forth existence out of themselves, out of their own being of love. Love would then not be one form of relationality among other ones, possible to join or not take part in, but a dimension of existence as such, only possible to consummate or try to repress.
5 However that may be, the philosophical point of such expressions is only to highlight other possibilities, that there are other ways of understanding the relation of God and morality than in terms of a fundamental command. To some religious apologists, taking something like Ivan Karamazov’s “[w]ithout God […] everything is permitted” (
Dostoevsky 2021, p. 624) as their starting point, divine command theory is supposed to be some kind of argument for the existence of God, and what I have said this far makes it clear why this does not work. For the argument is not convincing to someone who is not worried of such “permissiveness,” whereas the one who is worried does not need a fundamental command, ordering her to care about morality, for she already does, and her worry is hence more of a “ground” than the command could ever be. But something like divine command theory is also used by the opposite camp to the religious apologists, by people such as
Slavoj Žižek (
2024), who thinks that belief in God cannot be but an understanding of morality as grounded in divine commands, which for him means that the criticism of the latter is necessarily also a criticism of the former. The fact that there are other ways of understanding the relation of God and morality, such as the one I just mentioned, will hence be a criticism of such arguments as well.
As can be seen in this short discussion, divine command theory belongs to different theoretical contexts (if one wants to trace the development of similar ideas within philosophy, one could start already with Plato’s
Euthyphro, eventually arriving at Anscombe’s description of modern moral philosophy as divine command theory without God), which means that my critical discussion could be questioned: the use of the theory might indicate that its import, if any, might be a very different one than the surface of the theory seems to imply. This goes especially for the explicitly religious context, as
Lars Hertzberg (
2022, pp. 154–55) suggests:
For a Jew or a Christian, for instance, reciting the Ten Commandments could be seen as a form of worship. The words, in that case, would not be intended as a piece of information, telling the listener that he had better abstain from certain courses of action which he might otherwise have undertaken without compunction. […] Obviously, the commandments are not meant to tell anyone anything, rather they are a focus of meditation, conferring a special dignity on the abhorrence we normally feel for killers and the killing of human beings […] At the same time, the Decalogue gives substance to the conception of God: these are the commandments through which He lets Himself be known. The divine law setting, we might say, provided a context in which the recital of certain moral principles had a place of its own, regardless of their application to the situation at hand.
(Something similar might be said about the arguments for the existence of God. Superficially considered, the same arguments might be presented in a philosophy seminar room and as a subject for religious meditation, but the different contexts might give rise to a change in meaning.) That the commandments, recited in the way Hertzberg mentions, will have a meaning very different from the way in which they are taken in divine command theory does not mean that there cannot be any confusion involved in such recitation, only that the confusion must be exposed in the form it has in this context. This means however that there will never be a general rejection of certain expressions, as it is always possible that a good use for and meaning of them can be found—and perhaps it is precisely in looking for such a real (or deeper) meaning that letting them be the focus of meditation consists in?
One reason for me to bring up divine command theory is that Wittgenstein himself might seem to have been a supporter. He is recorded as having said (
Wittgenstein 1979, p. 115):
Schlick says that in theological ethics there used to be two conceptions of the essence of the good: according to the shallower interpretation, the good is good because it is what God wants; according to the profounder interpretation God wants the good because it is good. I think that the first interpretation is the profounder one: what God commands, that is good. For it cuts off the way to any explanation ‘why’ it is good, while the second interpretation is the shallow, rationalistic one, which proceeds ‘as if’ you could give reasons for what is good. The first conception says clearly that the essence of the good has nothing to do with facts and hence cannot be explained by any proposition. If there is any proposition expressing precisely what I think, it is the proposition ‘What God commands, that is good.’
On closer inspection, however, Wittgenstein’s point here is a very different one than divine command theory. Instead of explaining why the good is good in any way, including by reference to the fact that it is commanded by God, the proposition “What God commands, that is good” cuts off the way to all explanation. “What God commands, that is good” and something like the claim that the good is sui generis are thus identical in meaning. Of course, this can still be criticised in the light of some of the things I have mentioned above, since “God” is here still introduced as some kind of philosophical principle, as the name for the fact that there is no explanation. A generous reading would be that Wittgenstein’s point here is no more than a negative point against Schlick, using the same terminology and setup as Schlick but turning it on its head, in this way cutting off the way Schlick wants to take.
However that may be, this short discussion of divine command theory shows that one source of the metaphysical problem is the preconception that meaning ultimately must have a command-like form, the preconception that not until God has issued a command is anything good or bad, important or unimportant, meaningful or meaningless, not even the relation to God. One way of getting out of the clutches of this problem is therefore to realise that for the believer the relation to God is meaningful as such. This is another reason why the distinction between a metaphysical, apparent use, and a real one is at the end of the day drawn in the first person: the relation between the believer and God does not exist independently of the believer.
3. Understanding Belief
One important achievement of Phillips’s philosophy of religion, indeed Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion more or less generally, has been to point out that describing religion as metaphysical speculation is to misdescribe it, however common such descriptions are in philosophy, in everyday speech, and by religious believers themselves. The point, in other words, is that it would be a mistake to see a close connection of religion and metaphysics, in one sense of this ambiguous word. I will not repeat these discussions. Instead, I will try to make a similar point but in a slightly different way, which will ultimately make it possible for us to approach this topic from a new direction.
Let us imagine that a religious believer, after divine service, devotions, or the like,
6 or after a good conversation with friends, says, “Today I really felt God’s presence.” A curious non-believer, who also took part, might ask, “Do you mean that there was a nice atmosphere and do you hypothesise that God was the cause of it?” Now it is not impossible that the believer would answer this question in the affirmative, in that way giving a meaning to the original saying that turns it into metaphysical explanation. The difference between the believer and the non-believer would then primarily lie in how they would explain the “nice atmosphere”, which they thus might have experienced in the same way. But if so, the believer’s answer to the non-believer’s question would amount to the denial of another, and to my mind more likely, take on the first saying: that the believer says that God was indeed present (that is, not merely as a distant, ultimate cause) and that the non-believer misses something if she did not notice this presence. But what does this mean?
Our imagined non-believer, who really tries to understand what the believer is saying, then poses another question: “In fact, I also found the atmosphere to be quite nice. Is that what you mean, did I experience the presence of God too?” The believer, enthusiastically, might then reply, “yes exactly!”, only to be taken aback when the non-believer replies, “So ‘God’ is only a metaphor for this atmosphere?” Of course there is something more to God than that, the believer thinks to himself, but he cannot come up with a reply that really satisfies him, and therefore only says, “Well, there are situations of different kinds where you can feel the presence of God.”
Our imagined non-believer, however, finds this answer enlightening and now takes herself to have learnt how the concept of God is used: “God” is the word for the sum total of this and similar situations. She is not yet confident that she can use the word correctly, for exactly what “similar” means in all contexts is not something she takes herself to have mastered, but in principle there is no difficulty to come to learn this language perfectly, she tells herself.
This only gives rise to another question for our non-believer, however: what really is the difference between her and her friend who in contrast to her obviously is a believer? Although she now takes herself to be able to use the word “God” correctly in many situations, and perhaps will come to master the use of this word perfectly in the future, this does not mean that she believes in God, she tells herself.
7 So what does this mean, “believing in God”? She realises—perhaps inspired by
Wittgenstein’s (
1969, § 402) “In the beginning was the deed”—that one obvious difference between her and her friend is that he does not only use this word, for example to describe things, but also does things she does not do, such as praying, both by himself and together with others. But this poses no insurmountable difficulty, she realises, for she could easily do the same things, in the style of a researcher using participant observation of an active kind as her research method. But such participation would not make her a believer, she tells herself on second thoughts. Or if it would, that would not be on account of just what she is doing but of what she is doing doing something to her. What? There is something the believer takes himself to be having—but is “having” even the right word?—that she does not have, she concludes. But what?
There is one obvious answer to this question, an answer that takes us back to the beginning of this example. What has been missing in this non-believer’s attempt at coming to an understanding of religious belief is—God. Whatever importance the investigations she has carried out has had, or could have had, they have only focused on what the believer is saying and doing. But to him, our imagined believer, what is central is not what he says or does, but, one could say, what is done or said to him, that is, by God. Obviously, this too is something he is saying, but whatever he says (or does) he ultimately understands as a response to what has been said and done to him, that is, by God. From the believer’s point of view, the question, if there is one, rather concerns how it is that the non-believer fails to be open to the presence of God in the situation this example started out from: is this on account of something she is doing or saying?
At this point, someone might claim that if religious belief should be understood primarily in terms of God, at most secondarily in terms of what the believer is doing or saying, this means that metaphysics is the centre of religion after all, that religion is about something that transcends what we say and do, the existence of which first has to be established in order for the life of belief to make sense.
8 Well, this means at most that metaphysics is a failed attempt at approaching the point to which we now have arrived. For we started the discussion in this section with our believer saying, “Today I really felt God’s presence” and we ended with the description of religious belief as a response to what he sees as said and done to him. And this could just as well be understood as pointing to experience and therefore to the empirical as pointing to the metaphysical. That God cannot be experienced fully and thus transcends any possible experience does not invalidate such an interpretation, for the same obviously goes for whatever is experienced, as experience and that which is experienced are not identical. However, both these ways of analysing religious belief, whether in terms of the empirical or in terms of the metaphysical, are examples of the same mistake. For they still take for granted that the best way of understanding religious belief is in terms of something the believer is having, such as knowledge, be it of an empirical or a metaphysical kind, or, toning down the pretentions, belief, assumption, or the like. But to the believer I am imagining here, what is central is not his belief in God but, as it were, God’s belief in him, only as a response to which his own belief in God can be understood.
One way of acquiring a better understanding of what this means is by taking a closer look at something that was mentioned earlier in this example: prayer. Our imagined non-believer prayed, but only in the sense of quoting prayers, but her friend the believer prays in the sense of addressing God. However, this way of describing the difference is not the way she would describe the difference. What she would say is that he believes himself to be addressing God; if she would say that he is addressing God, she would be a believer too. Such a description makes it sound as if he is primarily related to a belief, only secondarily to God (that is, if the belief is correct). But that is not so from his own perspective: he addresses God. From his own perspective, there is thus no intermediate step of beliefs. This, then, creates problems for a philosophical analysis pursued in the third person. As long as we discuss the issue in the third person, all we can do is to give voice to these different positions and take note of the difference between them. But what they actually mean, including the extent to which confusion is involved in them, cannot be grasped in such an abstracted manner—it will only become clear, if ever, when lived.
From the point of view of the believer, praying is addressing God. And only because the believer is addressing God, he can also think about it, talk about it, etc., even though also those kinds of reflections must in the end be understood as a way of addressing God, to the extent God cannot fail to be addressed by anything the believer is saying and doing. Of course, describing him as addressing God sounds as a description of him doing something, but this is only secondarily so. Why? Generally speaking, addressing someone is to try to draw the attention of the one I am addressing to myself, thus establishing or maintaining a relation between us. Except for a situation in which I cry out for anyone to hear me, if I, say, have met with an accident and just need help from whomever, this means that her presence, with all that this involves, has already caught my attention. Addressing her is thus a response to her very being, the relation to which is for me already established. In the case of the believer addressing God, this general analysis of addressing someone as a response to the one addressed will receive an additional emphasis. For the one addressed, God, is, to use traditional expressions, the creator, eternal, omnipresent, and so on—expressions whose existential significance is, among other things, precisely that God has addressed the believer before the believer has addressed God and that the latter address therefore must be understood as a response to the former one.
As a further example, consider love. Although loving someone could be said to be something you do, loving someone could just as well be said to be something that is done to you, in the sense that someone has struck you; your loving does not come from you but from the very being of the other. The bystander might here describe the lover’s relationship to the beloved as consisting of various beliefs held by the lover, about the beloved’s positive qualities, say, or, with a slightly different emphasis, of various things done by the lover to the beloved. But from the point of view of the lover, such descriptions miss the mark because they only point to herself as a lover and fail to see what has given rise to all that which the descriptions are about, the beloved himself.
9The problem with the understanding of religious belief as a form of metaphysical speculation is thus that it takes religious belief to be primarily a form of belief, as paradoxical as this may sound. This was also the problem of our imagined non-believer. She tried to come to an understanding of religious belief by studying her friend the believer, by studying what he was saying and doing. Precisely because of this direction of attention, however, she was unable to see the distinctive religious element. An understanding of religious belief that only sees belief does not see it as religious; in order for it to be religious, God cannot be left out of the picture. In other words, one way of getting out of the difficult constellation of religious belief and metaphysics is to see that the believer we have been discussing relates himself to a person and not to a belief. Love of God is the response to the love of God, he might try to describe the heart of his faith (cf.
Strandberg 2011).