Problems of Faith

By S.H. Smith

The material here was originally intended as a third section in Smiths previous offering, The Problem of God, but took on a life of its own to become a separate work. The Problem of Faith is thus a sequel to the former work and deals with those questions with which all thinking believers wrestle: the nature of religious language, evil and the God of love, the concept of miracles and of prayer, the relationship between faith and reason, life after death, and the problem of hell. The aim is to encourage the reader to engage afresh with these essential issues.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Jul 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499087123

S.H. Smith

Stephen Smith holds an MA in Religion and Philosophy from Heythrop College, London, and for many years taught philosophy of religion at Bennett Memorial Diocesan School in Tunbridge Wells. His previous publications include A Lion With Wings: A Narrative-Critical Approach to Mark’s Gospel (Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), and Unlocking the Bible: A Layperson’s Guide (Xlibris, 2013). He now lives in retirement in Sheffield.

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CONTENTS

Chapter 1     Introduction

Chapter 2     God-talk

Chapter 3     Evil and the God of Love

Chapter 4     Miracles

Chapter 5     Prayer

Chapter 6     Faith and Reason—I: Some Needed Clarifications

Chapter 7     Faith and Reason—II: A Brief Survey of Views

Chapter 8     Life after Death

Chapter 9     Hell

Chapter 10   Conclusion

Bibliography

CHAPTER 1

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INTRODUCTION

A LOCAL PREACHER with whom I have a slight acquaintance is in the habit of saying, ‘God is good… God is always good.’ It has become something of a slogan, such that the congregation of the church she serves in is able to anticipate what is coming the moment she begins her address. This slogan is delivered irrespective of circumstances. For example, God’s goodness was proclaimed in the usual manner in the very wake of the typhoon which struck the Philippines in November 2013, in which thousands of people lost their lives and many thousands more their homes and property. At such times, affirmations of God’s goodness ring hollow, especially when, as in the present instance, no attempt is made to justify them. In times of catastrophe, God’s goodness, for many, means nothing. The problem here is that the above-mentioned slogan takes no account of our true experience of the world—a world which, for most of us, can best be described in terms of little islets of delight in a dark sea of tragedy. That is how the world really is for billions in the developing world, while even the most privileged among us can hardly say that life is unremittingly serene.

If, despite the tragedy of life, God is still to be acclaimed ‘good’, some justification, surely, is required. Yet here, too, none is generally forthcoming from the evangelical believer who appears to have a rose-tinted view of the world. To go on calling God good despite our experience of the world’s suffering and evil, and without the slightest attempt to justify such belief, in the end renders the statement vacuous or meaningless.

In one of his sermons, the vicar of this same evangelical church developed a detailed and complex picture—we might even call it a myth—of what is supposed to happen after death. Referring to a wide selection of Bible passages, he claimed that all of us, believer and non-believer alike, are held at death in a kind of holding pen—a sort of GWR: God’s Waiting Room—until the Second Coming. As our bodies have been committed to the earth, it must be the soul that does the waiting. During this period, there is apparently an opportunity for the unredeemed to repent of their wickedness and infidelity and so earn a last-minute reprieve. At the Second Coming or Parousia, however, the time for repentance expires, and the unredeemed are utterly destroyed. There is apparently no everlasting torment (which our vicar declares unbiblical), simply oblivion. The redeemed, however, are reunited with their bodies—new resurrection bodies rather than the old earthly ones—and will live forever with God, not however in heaven, but on a new earth created for the purpose (Rev. 21). The blessed will naturally spend a good deal of time singing praises to God, but apparently there will be time for other activities too (although our vicar did not specify what these might be).

Here we have a highly imaginative picture whose realisation is exceedingly improbable. The confusion clearly evident in this presentation is due largely to two erroneous assumptions. The first is that if the Bible is the Word of God, it can hardly matter how one dips into it. All texts referring to the afterlife are equally inspired, regardless of whether they are to be found in Job, the Gospels, 1 and 2 Corinthians, 1 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Peter, Revelation, or elsewhere. All are to be treated on an equal footing. But this is to ignore the striking literary diversity one finds in the Bible. Compare, for instance, Job and Revelation, both of which are supposed to make some contribution to our knowledge of the afterlife.¹ The former is a largely poetic work written in Hebrew for an Israelite community, possibly around 750 BC², while Revelation is an apocalypse written in Greek for a Christian community in Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey) at the end of the first century AD. Here, then, we have two books of the Bible written in different languages for two very different religious communities living hundreds of miles and possibly some 850 years apart. The community addressed in Job was undoubtedly as foreign to the community addressed in Revelation as it is to us. Today, we can compare the poetry of Chaucer with that of, say, Philip Larkin, both writing in English, though some 600 years apart, and recognise the obvious differences between them, both linguistically and culturally. Yet the differences between Job and Revelation are vastly in excess of those between Chaucer and Larkin. It is a mistake to assume that the views on any subject expressed in the various books of the Bible can be reconciled simply because they are thought to be equally inspired by God. The Bible writers were children of their own times no less than Chaucer and Philip Larkin.

The second presumption our vicar makes is that most texts in the Bible should be taken at face value. He ignores the fact, for example, that Revelation adopts apocalyptic as a literary genre which is—and always was³—meant to be taken symbolically. Again, Jesus’s parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16: 19-31) is a colourful story which describes a post-mortem scenario in which Lazarus is vindicated by resting with Abraham in heaven, while the rich man is punished for his refusal to help the poor man at his gate by being sent to Hades, a place of fiery torment. This sounds very much like our traditional conception of heaven and hell; but we must remember that Jesus was here telling a parable, the point of which is to remind us of our responsibility to others. It tells us nothing of Jesus’s personal views regarding life after death. It is a matter of interest that the vicar rejects the fiery torment view of hell expressed here, yet takes a literal view of bodily resurrection in what seems to be a quite arbitrary manner. The reason for this inconsistency of thought, if it may be so described, is all too human: Life in a blissful heavenly abode is a pleasant prospect, whereas torment in hell, or even extinction, is not. We hope for what we desire and shun what we fear or eschew, which tends to distort our reasoning towards reality.

But quite apart from these basic erroneous presuppositions which lead directly to the vicar’s misinterpretation of the biblical texts and to his faulty exegesis, it must be said that a scenario such as the one he presents is intrinsically improbable. It simply fails to match up with our experience of death and thus leads to all manner of intractable problems regarding the human personality and how it could possibly be retained in a resurrection world.

The purpose of the above illustrations is to show how belief so often ignores the demands of reason. People who will readily use their reasoning powers in all worldly matters will just as readily leave their brain at the church door. Why it is that faith so frequently sits cheek by jowl with irrationality? Part of the answer must be wishful thinking. The religious believer believes whatever he desires to and will make any excuse, against all the odds, to justify his position. It is for this reason, no doubt, that the adherents of the different faiths declare their ‘correct’ views to be incompatible with all the other ‘false’ ones and why one denomination claims to have ‘the truth’ in opposition to other equally earnest denominations. It is naturally overlooked that any one of these positions—whether Protestant or Catholic, Sunni or Shia, Mahayana or Theravada, and so forth—can only be held by a relatively small minority of believers and that the implication of this must be that although God is supposed to love all his children, it is only the minority with the ‘correct’ viewpoint as revealed directly to them who will be saved. As John Hick wrote some years ago, a good deal of progress could be made if only there were a Copernican Revolution in belief as there was in regard to the universe some 500 years ago. Instead of seeing Christianity (or Protestantism or Catholicism)—or Islam or Hinduism and so forth—as the centre of the universe of faiths, why cannot it be God at the centre and the various faiths that constitute the planetary satellites?⁴ The chances of a revolution such as Hick envisages, however, are remote in the extreme, because it would require a process of reasoning on the part of all believers, which is simply not forthcoming. It would necessitate believers of all persuasions asking challenging questions: If God loves his creatures, would he not want salvation for all and not simply for a privileged (and, according to some, a preordained) few? How can the Christian know he has the truth, when the Muslim (or Hindu or Buddhist) believer is just as adamant that he has it? What hard evidence exists for the view that there is really an objective God ‘out there’ to believe in? And is not the nature of our beliefs an accident of birth? It is a fair bet that an evangelical Christian born to parents living in Tunbridge Wells and educated at the local Church of England school would have been just as much a dyed-in-the-wool Muslim had he been born to strict Muslim parents living in Oman or a Hindu had he been born in a village in southern India. All such matters are ignored by the believer who supposes that he and those of his faith alone have the divine truth.

The purpose of this book is to show that neither Christianity (our main focus) nor any other religion can lay claim to ‘the truth’, complacently or arrogantly rejecting the claims of other faiths, while it refuses to engage with the theological and philosophical issues facing all religions. We deal with the fundamental problems raised by these issues in each of the succeeding chapters. The next chapter deals with the use of religious language and considers just what it means to talk about God and his attributes. It will become evident that God-talk means different things to different people. Following a brief preliminary discussion about whether religious language can mean anything at all, we explore the philosophical debate about whether or not religious language can claim ‘diplomatic immunity’, as it were, from verification and falsification. How can a language be genuinely meaningful if we are prohibited from demonstrating its truth or falsity? We then examine the work of Wittgenstein for whom, at least in his latter phase, the meaning of language was a matter of its use rather than its correspondence to objective truths. It is in Wittgenstein’s work that we find the seeds of modern anti-realism, such as is espoused in the work of D. Z. Phillips.

Our section on myth and symbol, as represented by Bultmann and Tillich, respectively, show that a good deal of religious language, including that in the Bible, can be taken in this sense to refer to deep but not necessarily objective theological truths. Even the story of the resurrection of Jesus, although generally presupposed to be understood in a historical sense, has been shown to have some mythical characteristics. We shall see that the use of symbol, metaphor, and analogy can serve to deepen our understanding of religious concepts. It is even possible, according to the medieval Jewish commentator Maimonides, to mean more by saying what God is not (the via negativa) than what he is, since positive propositions about the divine are well nigh impossible.

Many believers talk interminably about God without giving much consideration as to what it may or may not mean. Much of it may be empty jargon. When we arrive at the problem of evil and suffering, however, the believer is as much aware of the problem as everyone else: If God is all-loving and all-powerful, why does he allow suffering to exist, especially among the innocent, regardless of whether this is caused by human or natural evil? Usually, the problem is dismissed with a flippant comment to the effect that we are too limited in our understanding to appreciate the full picture and that everything will turn out for the best in the long run. In the wake of the terrible suffering caused by an earthquake or a tsunami, however, this hardly seems a satisfactory answer. Surely, if God has the power to eliminate such suffering, its existence cannot be justified, even if things will eventually turn out for the best. This, certainly, is Ivan’s view in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

Chapter 3 is devoted to this intractable problem. After a brief consideration of key terms (‘evil’, ‘omnipotence’, ‘omnibenevolence’), we proceed to a selective survey of proposed solutions to the so-called ‘inconsistent triad’, beginning with the question of whether it holds together at all: Perhaps God is either not omnipotent or not all-loving. The question of God’s omnipotence, certainly, should be taken more seriously than it normally is, and it is discussed at greater length in my The Problem of God.⁵ The view that God is not all-loving seems self-contradictory unless it is applied to a deistic view of God. In traditional theism, omnibenevolence is part of what it means to be God. More arresting are the genuine theodicies which hold that God remains omnipotent and all-loving despite the proliferation of evil in the world. Most theodicies fall under the influence of either Augustine, for whom the influence of genuine human freedom is a significant factor, or Irenaeus, who regards suffering as a means of our growing from God’s image into God’s likeness. The world is thus a ‘vale of soul-making’, to use John Hick’s expression. Hick himself is very much into the Irenaean tradition, while Richard Swinburne, although making a characteristically distinctive contribution, also borrows from the classic sources. The final section of the chapter deals with the lively discussion about whether God has created the best of all possible worlds and, if he could have created better, why he did not do so. Does ‘best’ mean best for him or best for us?

The question of miracles (Chapter 4) depends very much on what we mean by the term. If we mean no more than an unusual event for which there is currently no natural explanation, there is little to discuss, as what is inexplicable now could be scientifically explained at some time in the future and would then evidently be understood to have a natural origin. Much more interesting is the question of whether miracles as traditionally conceived—that is, as supernatural occurrences—are possible. Among classical philosophers, both Spinoza and Hume denied, though for different reasons, that miracles of this kind could take place. We devote a sizeable portion of this chapter to their deliberations. In particular, what would a sceptic like Hume have to say if he could have witnessed one of the more remarkable cases of healing claimed to have occurred in comparatively recent times at Lourdes—the John Traynor case in 1923, for example? We also take account of Swinburne’s claim that a miracle is ‘a non-repeatable counter-instance of a law of nature’ and of the objections raised by Alistair McKinnon and others.

Another important matter discussed, again by Swinburne and also W. L. Craig, is the problem of how we could know that any miracle has taken place in history—even if it has. We are told that Jesus walked on water (Matt. 14: 22-33; Mark 6: 45-52; John 6: 16-21), but there are some significant differences in the telling. It would, of course, be feasible in principle to demonstrate that such an event occurred, if it was susceptible to empirical observation, just as we accept the evidence that Julius Caesar was assassinated although we could not witness the event for ourselves, but it would hardly be possible to prove, even in principle, that Jesus’s walking on the water was a divine act, since acts of God could never be subject to historical investigation.

Keith Ward’s somewhat eclectic approach suggests that miracles are essentially paranormal events which can occur in various religious traditions and not solely in the Christian one, although in the course of what is a rather confusing account, he finally lurches towards the view that the religious significance of the miraculous can be found supremely in the Judeo-Christian tradition as represented in the Bible.

Finally, we have the anti-realist approach of the Dominican monk, Gareth Moore, which suggests, essentially, that miracles are in the eye of the beholder. An unusually striking event can be interpreted by the believer as a miracle of the supernatural kind, but by a non-believer as an event with no current explanation. For one person God does it, while for another nothing (or ‘no-thing’) does it. The reality, therefore, lies in the interpretation rather than in the objective act.

Chapter 5 concerns some of the issues associated with the concept of prayer. Most grass roots believers regard prayer as the lifeblood of their relationship with God. The believer petitions God for some favour or other, and God responds by acting on the request. If he fails to do so, the believer usually has a ready reply. The prayer was not made in true faith, or the request was not in accordance with God’s will, or God answered the prayer in his own way rather than ours. There are always sufficient excuses to satisfy the believer that there is still a loving God ‘out there’ who is able to answer prayer, even when he does not seem to do so.

Our discussion on the phenomenology of prayer, however, suggests that this rather simplistic view is out of place. All sorts of issues arise. In what sense can God ‘hear’ prayer and what are the mechanics underlying his response? In other words, how can a spiritual being cause a physical effect in the world? Are there ways in which prayer can work at a purely psychological level, perhaps as a means of self-therapy or as a kind of placebo? Again, there is the question of whether God can be induced to change his mind in response to human petition. If as the Thomist tradition suggests, God is utterly immutable, how can he alter course in order to take account of a specific request made by one of his creatures? By way of addressing some of these problems, we shall review a range of approaches by some of the leading philosophers and theologians past and present, including Aquinas, Maurice Wiles, Keith Ward, and D. Z. Phillips. These approaches vary widely. Ward is of the opinion that petitionary prayer can persuade God to do what he would not otherwise have done, while at the other extreme Aquinas insists that petitionary prayer cannot change God in any way, but may serve to have an effect on us. Wiles argues that God’s only act was to create the world and that he does not intervene to answer specific requests. Phillips’s anti-realist assessment is that God is in the language of the prayer itself and can only affect the believer in that sense.

Chapters 6 and 7 deal with the relationship between faith and reason and the extent to which God can be known through either of these or through a combination of the two. The first of these chapters is concerned with some terminological clarifications and relationships, including those between knowledge and belief, faith and belief, faith and knowledge, and faith and reason. There is also a brief outline of alternative understandings of the nature of revelation.

The following chapter provides a brief survey of views about the role of faith and reason in our understanding of God. Both Emil Brunner and Alvin Plantinga, in their different ways, argue that God is to be known through revelation alone. For Brunner, God reveals himself through his Word as recorded in the Bible, while Plantinga, a leading representative of the reformed epistemology movement, argues that knowledge of God, in the Christian understanding, is ‘properly basic’ to anyone who is blessed with the correct ‘noetic structure’ and that no rational justification is required.

At the opposite end of the spectrum stand W. K. Clifford and Richard Dawkins, whose only God is reason itself and which, ironically enough, suggests to them the absence of God. Reason is the only means we have of making intellectual headway in the world, and we must follow wherever it leads. Both Clifford and Dawkins suggest that mankind has an ethical duty to believe only on the basis of sufficient evidence. Failure to do so leads to irrationalism and superstition which in the more extreme cases can lead to dire consequences for society as a whole, particularly, at the present time, in the form of international terrorism.

Some thinkers, including Aquinas and W. L. Craig, take a broadly compatibilist view, arguing that although revelation may provide us with knowledge of God which could not otherwise be evident to us, it can never be contrary to reason. According to Aquinas, reason is best suited to the field of natural theology in which some attempt is made to rationally demonstrate truths that can also be evident through faith. Craig, on the other hand, relegates reason to serve as an apologetic tool. All that is required for the believer is possession of the Holy Spirit which is a self-authenticating witness to the truth of the Christian revelation. Reason, however, may be of some use in dealing with the usual raft of practical and philosophical questions the ‘seeker’ may have prior to his committing himself to the faith.

Finally, there are those such as Pascal and Kierkegaard who, while not denying that reason can have its uses, deem that faith goes beyond it. After his conversion, the former declared that God was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and not of the philosophers, while Kierkegaard speaks of the ‘leap of faith’. It is only by taking this step that one can move from intellectual doubt to comparative certainly.

The chapter on life after death (Chapter 8) considers first the nature of the human personality, since it is this issue which lies at the heart of the discussion. When the believer hopes for post-mortem survival, he generally envisages the survival of his own personality and not simply his survival in the memory of those who outlive him. What it is that constitutes personal identity, therefore, is instrumental to any discussion of life after death. If, for example, the brain criterion, or any other criterion largely dependent on the brain, is paramount, it is difficult to see how the person can survive the dissolution of the brain. On the other hand, mind-body dualism, which may suggest that the real ‘I’ is the soul, would, were it to prove true, facilitate the possibility of some form of post-mortem existence, including disembodied survival.

The rest of the chapter is devoted to a consideration of the various possible forms of life after death: bodily resurrection, disembodied survival, and reincarnation. Each of these alternatives is found to be beset with serious difficulties. In the case of bodily resurrection, which involves a hiatus of ‘nothingness’ between the death of the earthly body and the advent of the resurrection body, we are left with the problem of how we could ever know the resurrected person to be identical to the deceased earthly one. And if memory is wholly dependent on the physical brain, how would a resurrected being be able to recall his earthly life? Moreover, if he was unable to remember his life on earth so that it seemed to him that his post-mortem existence was his only one, what point would be served by a resurrection life at all?

In the case of disembodied survival, the prevailing question is what a bodiless person could be like. A person without any physical features would have none of the characteristics we normally associate with personal identity. Even if one could survive in such a state—perhaps, as H. H. Price suggests, in a kind of dream world—there would still be the problem of how one could live in community and not simply in a solipsistic bubble. How would one be able to identify other persons or to distinguish one from another or communicate with them in a purely ‘spirit’ world?

Reincarnation is the means of post-mortem survival commonly espoused by the major belief systems of the East and also has some vogue in the popular imagination. Déjà-vu experiences or experiences induced under hypnosis suggest to some that they have lived in different guises at various times in the past. Of course, these claims may be the result of wishful thinking, cryptomnesia, or even conscious fraud. More interesting, perhaps, are the studies of reputable scholars such as Dr Ian Stevenson who studied and documented hundreds of cases of the ‘reincarnation type’ from all over the world, especially among children, and found many of them to be ‘suggestive’. However, as we shall see, serious studies of this kind are very much dependent on a watertight methodology, and it is far from certain that Stevenson achieved this.

The next section is devoted to possible empirical evidence for survival of death—spiritualism, out-of-the-body experiences, apparitions, and other paranormal phenomena. Once again, however, we shall see that such ‘phenomena’ afford ample opportunity for wishful thinking and both conscious and unconscious fraud. The most interesting cases here are those which defy easy explanation, such as the phenomena which are experienced by two or more reputable witnesses simultaneously.⁶ There can be little doubt about the reality of some so-called paranormal experiences, but this does not necessarily imply a paranormal explanation.

Finally, we examine the anti-realist and reductionist approaches to life after death. Here it may be more appropriate to speak of eternal life rather than immortality, for the former implies not more life beyond this life, but this life lived sub specie aeternitatis. As Wittgenstein puts it, eternal life is the present life lived without limits in much the way that one’s visual field can be said to have no limits. Or as Stewart Sutherland intimates, eternal life is life lived in such a manner that it can never be trivialised.

Our final chapter deals with the concept of hell—a topic which, until some twenty or thirty years ago, had gone into remission in official Church teaching and in the believer’s imagination to the extent that it would hardly have been worth commenting as a significant problem for Christian belief. Now, thanks largely to the evangelical wing of the Church, hell is back on the agenda, not only as a conceptual symbol but also in all its fiery physical reality. It is this reinvention of the wheel, as it were, that demands our attention.

Although the concept of hell may have some symbolic significance which could readily be acknowledged by the anti-realist, it is the literalism of the fundamentalist which provides us with the main bone of contention. This view of a physical place of everlasting torment, it is often claimed, is justified in biblical teaching, but this claim requires serious reappraisal in the light of measured and even-handed exegesis. Does the Bible really teach what fundamentalists assert?

A further issue is whether a God of love would send anyone to hell, at least to a place of everlasting torment, or even whether he could do so if he felt it to be necessary. We present an argument to show that it would be logically impossible for God to keep anyone in torment forever. The prospect of his doing so is an incoherent one. A God of love would, in any case, surely will that all should be saved and that should even one be lost his will would have been violated—a problem which the exclusivist is bound to take seriously. Once again, many of these seemingly intractable problems can be avoided by taking an anti-realist approach.

This concludes the outline of our programme. Let us now proceed to a detailed examination of the relevant issues.

Notes

¹   Much of Revelation takes the form of an apocalyptic vision. Job 19: 25-26 is thought by evangelical scholars to signify some form of bodily resurrection, but the Hebrew here is difficult and the passage can be otherwise interpreted. See my Unlocking the Bible: A Layperson’s Guide (Dartford and Bloomington: Xlibris, 2013) pp. 321-23.

²   There is very little indication of when, precisely, Job was written. Suggestions have ranged from the time of Moses (c. 1400 BC) to that of Ezra (c. 450 BC). For a brief outline of the issues, see F. I. Andersen, Job (TOTC; Leicester: IVP, 1976).

³   The author himself describes his experience as a revelation (apocalypse) delivered to him while he was ‘in the Spirit’ (Rev. 1: 10). At various points in the book, the author tells his readers that the various images he is describing are representative or symbolic of reality. Thus, the seven stars are (i.e. stand for) the angels (or messengers) of the seven churches, while the seven lamp stands are the seven churches themselves (Rev. 1: 20); the golden bowls full of incense are the prayers of the saints (Rev. 5: 8) and so on.

⁴   J. Hick, God and the Universe of Faiths (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1973), esp. pp. 120-47.

⁵   S. H. Smith, The Problem of God (Dartford and Bloomington: Xlibris, 2014), pp.

⁶   We have chosen to omit from this work consideration of poltergeist activity, but it is some of these cases that have proved to be among the most compelling for paranormal interpretation. Brief case studies and discussion can be found in D. R. Griffin, Parapsychology, Philosophy and Spirituality: A Postmodern Exploration (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997) pp. 71-77; and H. J. Irwin, An Introduction to Parapsychology (3rd. edn.; Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland and Co., 1999) pp. 183-98. Full-length studies include A. Gauld and A. Cornell, Poltergeists (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979).

CHAPTER 2

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GOD-TALK

WHAT DOES IT mean to talk about God? When the believer claims to ‘know God’, is he referring to an objective Being ‘out there’ or is ‘God’ really a cipher for a kind of self-knowledge? And is it legitimate for revisionists who do not believe in an objective Being to go on talking in terms of God? Does that not simply confuse the issue? But even if we do believe in such a Being, what can we really say about him (her? it?)? When the Psalmist referred to God as a rock and fortress, he was obviously not speaking literally. So how do we speak of God? Metaphorically? Symbolically? Analogically? Can we verify what we say? And if not, does it make sense to go on speaking in religious terms? These are the issues we need to address in this chapter.

1.   Sense and Nonsense

The purpose of language is to communicate and to articulate facts and concepts about the world in which we live. Paul van Buren writes:

We might picture language as a platform on which we can move around. The planks of this platform are rules for the use of words, and they can stick out so far. They can be extended, but only by mutual agreement, and if we venture too far, we risk falling off into the ‘void of meaninglessness’. Everyday life can be lived safely in the centre of the platform, but religious belief keeps us exploring the edges. How can we keep a footing here?¹

Nonsense can come in different guises. The sentence ‘around move can we which on platform a as language picture might we’ is nonsense because it is syntactically confused. If we invert it, it forms the first sentence of the quotation above, in which case it makes perfect sense.

Other nonsense language may be syntactically correct, but the juxtaposition of words might not be in their proper context. For example, if I were to say, ‘This tea tastes too unhappy’, no one would be able to understand me because unhappiness simply does not go with tasting tea. Lewis Carrol’s Alice books contain nonsense of this kind, as in the case of the vanishing Cheshire cat whose grin is the last thing to disappear or the dog that could lose its temper and have to find it again. A word of caution is needed here, however, for some so-called nonsense verse is not always of this kind. Take Edward Lear’s The Owl and the Pussycat:

The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea

In a beautiful pea green boat;

They took some honey, and plenty of money,

Wrapped up in a five-pound note…²

The nonsense in this poem, as it develops, turns out to consist of talking animals, cats and owls being married by turkeys, and so on. The language itself is perfectly coherent.

But before we too hastily dismiss ‘unhappy tea’ as pure nonsense, take a look at the following verse by the American poet E. E. Cummings (1894-1962):

My father moved through dooms of love

Through sames of am through haves of give,

Singing each morning out of each night

My father moved through depths of height.³

And if jumbled sentences make syntactical nonsense, how about the following?

r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r

who

a)s w(e loo)k

upnowgath

PPEGORHRASS

eringt(o-

aThe): l

eA

!p:

S                                                        a

(r

rIvInG                                gRvWaPsPhOs

to

rea(be)rran(com)gi(e)ngly

grasshopper;⁴

The clue to the deconstructed language here can be found in the word ‘grasshopper’; but what made Cummings set out the poem in this fashion? Presumably there is some meaning to it, even if it is not immediately obvious to us. But what makes us suspect that there is, when we are happy to accept the parallel instances given above as nonsense? It is precisely because words are often juxtaposed in highly unusual or original ways that poetry is said to open up new vistas of meaning and possibilities of understanding the world.

Now if someone says, ‘God has laid it upon my heart to pray for X’, are we to take this as nonsense? It is certainly not syntactical nonsense like the jumbled sentence we started with or the ‘grasshopper’ poem (which, presumably, is supposed to have some meaning). If it is nonsense, it must be of the ‘unhappy tea’ type. Tea can be too sweet or too weak, but not too unhappy. Now in a similar way, a person may have a strong desire to pray for X; but can God ‘lay it on her heart’? Is this not simply a more esoteric way of saying the same thing? If it is, this does not in itself make the latter statement meaningless, since it still refers to something—namely, the desire to pray. Most people nowadays, however, would no doubt find it a curious mode of expression. But perhaps some religious language can be emptied of its meaning, particularly if it resists the normal means of verification or falsification. It is to this question we must now turn.

2.   Verification and Falsification

a)   Verification

When we run over our libraries… what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume—of divinity or metaphysics, for instance—let us ask, ‘Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number?’ No. ‘Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence?’ No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.⁵

With these words, David Hume brings his celebrated Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding to a close. It is, in effect, a statement of what later became known as the verification principle. Hume contends that there can be two sources of meaningful knowledge: abstract reasoning and experimental reasoning. By ‘abstract reasoning’ Hume means self-evident truths of the kind found most commonly in the field of mathematics. The sum of 2 + 2 = 4, for instance, is simply a received truth—it simply is the case. Of course, there are other kinds of self-evident truth, although some of them amount to little more than tautologies. However, the language of definition falls into this category. ‘A triangle is a three-sided polygon’ simply defines what a triangle is.

By ‘experimental reasoning’, Hume means matters of fact which are capable of empirical verification. ‘There is a horse in that field’ can be accepted as a matter of fact once it has been empirically checked. Of course, normally we would not bother checking. Mundane propositions of this sort we simply accept at face value unless there is sufficient reason for not doing so. These two roads to valid knowledge have been dubbed as ‘Hume’s fork’.

Now it will be seen that certain kinds of language—aesthetic, ethical, and religious, for example—do not fall into the two categories proposed by Hume. So what happens to these? Presumably, they are to be committed to the flames. Hume himself singles out the language of metaphysics and of divinity as prime candidates. Statements of this kind, he thinks, are really pseudo-statements which are neither analytically true nor refer to any verifiable empirical truths in the world.

This approach was repackaged in the 1920s by the fairly short-lived Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians centred in the University of Vienna. Its intellectual position became known as logical positivism (or logical empiricism) and included Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970) and Moritz Schlick (1882-1936) among its leading lights. Like Hume, these thinkers tended to straightjacket meaningful language into self-evident (or analytic) and empirical (or synthetic) truths. Initially, the young Wittgenstein was thought to be in sympathy with the Circle. His statement at the beginning of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), ‘The world is the totality of facts, not things’, certainly seemed to point in the direction of logical positivism. But his statement at the end, ‘What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence’, alerts us to a significant difference. A genuine logical positivist would surely have said, ‘What we cannot speak about is meaningless.’ But Wittgenstein, even at this early stage in his career, seemed to imply that there might be truth about which one could not speak.

A. J. Ayer’s contribution to the debate, in his significant Language, Truth and Logic (1936), was to suggest that logical positivism in its original form was too restrictive and that a whole range of statements rendered meaningless under those strict conditions could surely be verifiable in principle. These would include historical statements (such as ‘Richard I was once king of England’), generic statements (for example, ‘All arsenic is poisonous’, which could not in fact be verified, since all the world’s arsenic would need to be tested), and statements that could possibly be verified in the future (Ayer’s example was ‘There are no mountains on the farther side of the moon’, which in 1936 could not, of course, be verified in practice). Thus, Ayer’s introduction of a weak verification principle rescued much common sense language which would otherwise have been rendered meaningless; but this was cold comfort for religious language which still fell foul of the principle (although historical statements about religious figures like Jesus came within its purview).

Obviously, logical positivism presents a challenge to religious language, but to what extent can the verification principle itself be challenged? A number of objections can be made:

•  One must wonder whether such a rigid linguistic programme can be justified. Who, after all, sets the rules? If they are rigorously applied, entire areas of discourse—religious, ethical, aesthetic, and so on—must be dismissed. Of course, one could always reduce aesthetics and ethics to matters of opinion or emotivism, as Ayer did; but most people would want to assert that they mean much more than this when they are discoursing on these things. Why should the verificationist’s criteria be any more acceptable for arriving at a definition of meaningful language than any alternative criteria?

•  It would seem that the verification principle cannot itself be verified on the basis of its own criteria. The statement, ‘All propositions, other than analytic or synthetic ones, are meaningless’, is neither analytic nor synthetic and so is hoisted on its own petard.

•  Karl Popper (1902-94) showed that not all scientific propositions are conclusively verifiable as the logical positivists believed. For instance, the statement ‘All swans are white’ might have been thought of as being conclusively verifiable, until the discovery of Australia together with its black swans. Scientific knowledge is not established on the basis of sure and certain scientific laws, and better or greater knowledge does not imply our quest for certainty based on what we already know. Popper’s Copernican Revolution was to show that scientific theories are developed on the basis of insight and imagination which are applied to a particular problem. We then submit the initial conjecture to tests which are designed to falsify the theory. Weighing up alternative solutions to a problem is really about deciding which one can be falsified the least. But even the chosen solution must be open to being replaced if a subsequent solution, with even fewer flaws, can be substituted. Popper does not deny the usefulness of metaphysics; metaphysical insights have been useful for facilitating progress in the sciences. However, metaphysical statements in themselves are not seen to be meaningful because they are not open to falsification; and although Popper rejects the verification principle, he insists that language can have no meaningful function unless it is capable of falsification.⁶

b)   Falsification

Some scholars, like Ian Ramsey and John Hick, have responded to the verificationist challenge by taking a cognitive approach to religious language, but before examining this, we need to first look at the reverse side of the verificationist coin—namely, the falsification approach. The falsificationist agrees that religious language is meaningless, not, however, because it cannot be verified as empirically true, but because the believer refuses to subject it to any form of falsification. The statement ‘God is love’, for example, sounds highly dubious in view of our experience of the world, yet the believer could never be induced to admit that the statement might be wrong, But this, so the objection goes, actually empties it of all meaning and sense.

Still the most celebrated presentation of the problem, even after nearly sixty years, is that of Anthony Flew made during the course of a university debate with R. M. Hare and Basil Mitchell.⁷ As is well known, the discussion proceeds on the basis of three parables which, at the risk of over-exposure, we will repeat here. Flew kicks off the debate with a parable taken from John Wisdom’s article, ‘Gods’:⁸

Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in a jungle. In the clearing were growing many flowers and many weeds. One explorer says, ‘Some gardener must tend this plot.’ The other disagrees, ‘There is no gardener.’ So they pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. ‘But perhaps he is an invisible gardener.’ So they set up a barbed-wire fence. They electrify it. They patrol with bloodhounds. (For they remember how H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man could be smelt and touched, though he could not be seen.) But no shrieks ever suggest that someone has received a shock. No movements of the wire ever betray an invisible climber. The bloodhounds never give cry. Yet still the Believer is not convinced. ‘But there is a gardener, invisible, intangible, insensible to electric shocks, a gardener who has no scent and makes no sound, a gardener who comes secretly to look after the garden which he loves.’ At last the Sceptic despairs. ‘But what remains of your original assertion? Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener, or even from no gardener at all?’⁹

Flew is obviously applying his parable to religious assertions (which he does in a different manner from Wisdom himself), his point being that if the believer refuses to allow any objection to count against his assertions, they will eventually become emptied of all meaning. In Flew’s colourful phrase, they will ‘be killed by inches, the death of a thousand qualifications’.¹⁰ This is particularly the case with the problem of evil. The believer may begin with the assertion that God loves us as a father loves his children:

But then we see a child dying of inoperable cancer of the throat. His earthly father is driven frantic in his efforts to help, but his Heavenly Father reveals no obvious sign of concern. Some qualification is made—God’s love is ‘not a merely human love’ or it is ‘an inscrutable love’, perhaps—and we realize that such sufferings are quite compatible with the truth of the assertion that God loves us as a father… We are assured… But then perhaps we ask: what is this assurance of God’s (appropriately qualified) love worth, what is this apparent guarantee really a guarantee against? Just what would have to happen not merely (morally and wrongly) to tempt but also (logically and rightly) to entitle us to say ‘God does not love us’ or even ‘God does not exist’?¹¹

Flew admits from the outset that the empirical evidence for God’s existence is ambiguous (there are both weeds and flowers in the garden), but if one maintains the validity of a statement such as ‘God loves us as a father loves his children’, despite the sparsity of the evidence for this, does not the statement simply become meaningless?

However, as Dan Stiver¹² has pointed out, this rather depends on what is meant by ‘evidence’. Clearly, Flew takes a strongly empirical stance and calls for the kind of evidence demanded by the logical positivists—that which can be tested by sense perception. But does not this simply beg the question? Flew is presupposing that the only admissible evidence is of the empirical kind, and this cannot be accepted without further ado. As Stiver again points out, if the existence of God could be established empirically in this way, we would end up with a mere idol and not the living God of the great faiths, whose nature is ultimately beyond reason. Still, one cannot help feeling that Stiver here is playing the believer’s timeworn ‘mystery’ card and that Flew’s critique of religious language remains a powerful one.

The first response to Flew in the university discussion is by R. M. Hare, who is forced to admit that ‘on the grounds marked out by Flew, he seems to me completely victorious’:

I therefore shift my ground by relating another parable. A certain lunatic is convinced that all dons want to murder him. His friends introduce him to all the mildest and most respectable dons that they can find, and after each of them has retired they say, ‘You see, he doesn’t really want to murder you; he spoke to you in a most cordial manner; surely you are convinced now?’ But the lunatic replies, ‘Yes, but that was only his diabolical cunning; he’s really plotting against me all the time, like the rest of them; I know it I tell you’. However many kindly dons are produced, the reaction is still the same.¹³

Hare’s confession that on Flew’s own ground he seems ‘completely victorious’ is really a way of acknowledging that if the only meaningful language relates to the empirical world as the logical positivists assert, it must be granted that Flew is right in what he says. Hare’s point, however, is that religious language may be meaningful even if it is non-cognitive, that is to say, even if it refers to things which cannot be empirically verified. Religious believers, he argues, do not make factual assertions at all; they simply have what he labels a ‘blik’—a way of looking at the world which cannot be refuted because it is non-cognitive. Nothing at all can count against the believer’s ‘blik’, and so any disagreement between the believer and the non-believer cannot be settled by an appeal to evidence because there is no agreement about what may be held to constitute evidence. The believer, rather like the lunatic, will accept only the evidence that supports his ‘blik’.

The weakness in Hare’s position clearly lies in the question of why we should accept one particular ‘blik’ rather than another. It is a problem which has resurfaced more recently in the movement known as reformed epistemology, in which philosophers like Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff argue that religious language requires no logical demonstration or verification. Just as a statement like ‘this is a hand’ requires no justification, so it is contended that one simply needs the correct ‘noetic structure’ to appreciate the truth of religious statements. They are, in fact, not susceptible to logical demonstration, because human reason is in every case flawed, so they must instead be ‘properly basic’, in the same way as ‘this is a hand’ is properly basic. But what makes the Protestant Christian’s noetic structure right and that of the Catholic, or those of other religious believers or the atheists, wrong? A. C. Grayling is scathingly dismissive of this kind of approach:

The main problem is that calling a belief ‘basic’, so that you do not have to argue for it or provide evidence for it, is gratuitous: you can help yourself to anything you like, and of course anything follows. Choose a convenient belief, give it the most convenient content for what else you wish to believe, and then claim that it is ‘basic’ and therefore in no need of justification. This is too obviously unacceptable to need much comment. As Daniel Dennett said of this view of Plantinga’s, this is ‘Exhibit A of how religious belief can damage or hinder or disable a philosopher’ . . . Plantinga’s approach provides an example of complete intellectual irresponsibility.¹⁴

Granted, this statement applies essentially to religious belief, but it can just as readily be applied to religious language.

A further parabolic response to Flew is made by Basil Mitchell, but unlike Hare, he takes a cognitive stance. The parable he relates is quite long, but must be quoted in full if we are to comment on its intelligibility:

In time of war in an occupied country, a member of the resistance meets one night a stranger who deeply impresses him. They spend that night together in conversation. The Stranger tells the partisan that he himself is on the side of the resistance—indeed that he is in command of it, and urges the partisan to have faith in him no matter what happens. The partisan is utterly convinced at that meeting of the Stranger’s sincerity and constancy and undertakes to trust him.

They never meet in conditions of intimacy again. But sometimes the Stranger is seen helping members of the resistance, and the partisan is grateful and says to his friends, ‘He is on our side’.

Sometimes he is seen in the uniform of the police handing over patriots to the occupying power. On these occasions his friends murmur against him: but the partisan still says: ‘He is on our side’. He still believes that, in spite of appearances, the Stranger did not deceive him. Sometimes he asks the Stranger for help and receives it. He is then thankful. Sometimes he asks and does not receive it. Then he says, ‘The Stranger knows best’. Sometimes his friends, in exasperation, say, ‘Well what would he have to do for you to admit that you were wrong and that he is not on our side?’ But the partisan refuses to answer. He will not consent to put the Stranger to the test. And sometimes his friends complain, ‘Well, if that’s what you mean by being on our side, the sooner he goes over to the other side the better’.¹⁵

In this parable, Mitchell shows, contrary to Hare, that some things do count against religious belief, but not decisively so. The believer must stake everything on faith in God (just as the partisan stakes everything on the stranger, even though his behaviour is ambiguous). The fact that the partisan has a personal encounter with the stranger is important; it is only those who have a personal encounter with God who will maintain that their claims about him are true, despite the ambiguities. Religious language is meaningful in a cognitive sense—that is to say, it is meant to convey knowledge about a state of affairs ‘out there’—even though it cannot be proved to be true.

Here, however, we are reminded of Hare’s admission that if Flew is taken on his own terms, which involves taking religious language to be understood in a cognitive sense, then he is completely victorious. Certainly, Mitchell’s approach gravitates back to Flew’s original charge and could even be said to confirm it, for he recognises that in the face of serious challenges to religious belief—notably the problem of evil—the believer