Final paper - Philosophy of Religion

8/6/2019 Final paper - Philosophy of Religion

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Jane Sorensen119447640

Intro Philosophy of ReligionDr. Kanaris

December 12, 2007

Final: Faith and Reason, Comprehensive, Language

1) Flews position is that knowledge rests on objectively sufficient data. Ruling

on the truth and falsity of claims is essential to (and to Flew, required of) meaning, and

we arrive at the truth by eliminating falsehoods. If its not open to this process, if we

cannot falsify, if its not robust, it is mere emotive utterance and invalid as an assertion.

Religious statements (specifically God has a plan God created the world God loves

us) are not effective or orthodox assertions and yet are intended to be so. When a

contradiction is demonstrated, religious people start qualifying them and as

qualifications persisting in the face of all evidence contrary to them, they are weak

arguments. Faith cannot qualify as knowledge.

Hare proposes another way to look at the claim of faith statements to meaning. He

provides the term blikfor the beliefs we hold or the framework by which we interpret and

act.Bliks ground observation. Religions belief is like a blik, it touches on matters that

concern and orient people. A sceptic such as Flew might have a blikabout the verification

of observations as the connection of meaning to empirical matters, seeking to weed out

all the illusions we have about reality, like the kinds ofbliks of believers. Hare is not

setting his argument up to corroborate an opposing blikto Flews. He is demonstrating

that we decide by bliks what a supportable explanation is.1

He also validly notes that the

explorers in Flews parable of the garden have some detachment, which is antithetical to

1

He notes that Humetaught us that our whole commerce with the world depends on ourblikabout the

world, and that differences between bliks cannot be settles by observation of what happens in the

worldNo proof could be given to make us adopt one blikrather than another. (Stewart 215)


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people of faith. I mind very much about what goes on in the garden in which I find

myself

Mitchells argument is different than Flews and Hares. He agrees that vacuous

statements are a danger oft befallen by religious people, but it need not be so. The

partisan in his parable admits many things count against his trust in The Stranger, but he

has reason to commit himself in spite of these contradictions. In particular, Mitchell is

objecting to the glossing over of theologys struggle with the problem of evil as a

response to evidence that God does not love us.

Flew consequently rejects the blikas an affirmative basis for analyzing Christian

statements, as opposed to cosmological assertion. If they were not intended as assertions,

then religious acts would become fraudulent or silly. Flew believes they are intended and

interpreted to presuppose assertions.

Flew distinguishes between the expedient of qualifying an assertion versus

looking for an explanation, during which search God receives the benefit of the doubt. He

thinks that in the end, the person searching for an explanation will have to resort to the

avoiding action of qualification. (Stewart 219)

Having just said An assertion, to be an assertion at all, must claim that things

stand thus and thus; and not otherwise. Similarly an explanation, to be an explanation at

all, must explain why this particular thing occurs; and not something else. Those last

clauses are crucial (Stewart 218) Flew seems to omit why the and not otherwise is so

crucial, an dit is not obvious to me. He comes across as uncharitably pedantic when he

accuses doublethink of people who retain their faith in a loving God in the face of a

heartless and indifferent world. He should be looking at influencing the actions of


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people rather than box in the philosophical means of seeking meaning. If Flew wants to

address indifference and heartlessness; he will never be granted access to spheres of

influence if he also reviles belief in God, because he will be working in absentia of the

greatest influence of all: heart. The heart has its reason whereof reason knows nothing,

said Pascal, who considered it excessive to exclude reason or to admit nothing but reason.

Other philosophers have also dealt with the framework of looking at religious

assertions. Polanyi does not dispel with them because they are explicitly doubtful. Tacit

doubt appropriately applies to religious statements: I am certain of (insert faith claim

here), but logically it is less than certain. Wittgenstein also places them central in

importance, but we will look at that in the next topic.

2) Malcolms case on the grounds of justification of belief begins with

Wittgenstein (who will oft be cited here) noting that the child believes before he doubts.2

Malcolm starts with describing a culture with a blik(my use of the term) unlink

ours; people who believe that things vanish. Because this is possible for them, they tend

to shrug more than we do when things go missing. Greater cultural characteristics could

be that they have fewer fixations with permanency, and few conserving, saving, and

building tendencies, as all can disappear quite suddenly. Thus, they may be more

tentative in their decisions. But since, as with our culture, a satisfying explanation for lost

objects occurs often enough, they cant be terribly different than us. It is not impossible

to imagine this for others, but our foundation of thinking g precludes us from behaving in

this manner. [M]aterial things do not cease to exist without physical cause is an

2 This is not my personal case, because I remember protesting as a child of three that there was any God I

could not see, and my mother laughing at my precocious doubt.


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unreflective part of the framework of our practical and scientific tradition. (Malcolm

285)

As Flew would heartily agree, we have frameworks by which we ask questions

and make judgments. This framework itself is not tested and rarely questioned. Some

things do come sufficiently pre-tested to be known; otherwise incremental human

development would be pretty hard done by. Malcolm notes that when we come across

people who do not accept the framework, this would mean that he had not learned that

language-game. (p. 286) Language games are things we accept, are passed on to us,

because they aid common understanding. Notably, Wittgenstein said A language game

is only possible if one trusts something. So belief is an integral part of the structure.

Malcolm then gives some descriptions and illustrations of transient experiences

that hearken back to previous or first experiences, forms, thoughts, ideas, something

placed in there a priori and giving a certain result, serving to show that the abstract Idea

has been adequately shared with the subjects of these illustrations so that they act or

describe or do appropriately. For instance, the performance of someone doing quite well

with a series of tasks based on meagre instructions, which can be remarkable and

attributable to their talent the number and variety of language games they learned.

Here is where it gets interesting. Malcolm suggests that these illustrations belong

to thepathology of philosophy, which tries to postulate the mental states of processes

these things are automatically derived from. They explain how we know. And it is

important considering that we have a common language because of this. Wittgenstein

criticized that whatever object is conceived of as giving us the recognition, it could also

indicate a different thing than what we derived from it. I am not entirely sure whether this


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means that two people thinking the same thing arrive at different conclusions. I do think

he is saying that getting this specific is pointlessly derivative: The assumed intermediary

Idea, Structure, or Rule does not and cannot reveal that because of it we went in the only

direction it was reasonable to go.The idea cannot provide the bridge of justification.

(p 288) The pathology of philosophy is that we always have to justify language games,

and establish them as well-grounded (and I would venture that this pathology has trickled

down no, flooded down to the common language to the point where you have to argue

everything in a positivist manner before the intransigent cede way). But bliks cant be

ruled out by criteria we propose; what we propose is also based on bliks.

If that means Have I grounds? to believe in evidence, a cause, or a framework,

the answer is the grounds will soon give out (an argument taken far enough leads to an

illogical or irrational conclusion). So you must act without grounds. We live without

evidence. If the traveler is to continue his journey he will have to do something on his

own, without guidance. (p 288) Religion, the means by which many guide their

journeys, is experiential, and it is groundless so is chemistry, Malcolm claims.3

Each

have controversy, criticism, explanation, justification. The framework has been worked

out and is still working itself out, and this is akin to the Divine in Process Thought, which

is only a subset of religious thought but so akin to the way we think and the world reveals

itself to us that it is aptly named.

I have mentioned that, prior to the identification of positivism as such (and that

there are philosophic grounds for its rejection), the demand for argument is much higher

than the willingness to accept argument. Intellectually, our over-stimulated society is

3 Religion is a form of life; it is language embedded in action what Wittgenstein calls a language-

game. Science is another. Neither stands in need of justification. p. 291


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staying at a dogmatic stage that philosophic religion left long ago when it turned its focus

to the several personal ways we approach the Divine. The philosophy of religion isnt

about rationalizing or apologizing for faith, but in identifying truths and forms in it and

perhaps creating language games that manifest an ability to communicate about it. In

stripping away fancy, we find a harder, more durable creativity that identifies common

elements to humanity and creation that lead one, as it did the Deists, to think there must

be a God having a hand in the design of our world. Theologians and philosophers worry

about meaninglessness we looked at delimiting how the term ineffable can be used.

Wittgenstein, in spite of, or even with, his earlier positivist-slanted work (as his career

progressed, he could limn the unspeakable better and better, and it became clear that

religion had a central place in his semantics), stated None the less, the attempt to speak

of such things is not ludicrous: such an attempt will result, strictly speaking, in

nonsensical utterance, but this is important nonsense, indicating something significant in

human life. (Clack 112) We also worry about meaning in our lives, through ethics, and

the problem of evil in the world through our actions and the apparent absence of God.

For sure, the desire to provide a rational foundation for religion is prominent

such as proofs of the existence of God, and since there are none, for some theres no

rational justification for religion but to bring this back to Malcolms argument, the

misunderstanding is that in order for religious belief to be respective it has to be

justified. It is like the idea that we are not justified in relying on memory until memory

has been proved reliable.


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Works Cited

Malcolm, Norman. The Groundlessness of Belief. In Exploring the Philosophy of

Religion. Ed. David Stewart, 2007, 6th

edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Clack, Beverley, and Brian R. Clack. 1998. The Philosophy of Religion: A

Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Final paper - Philosophy of Religion

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