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Religious Belief and Contradiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Colin Radford
Colin Radford
Affiliation:
University of Kent
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Extract

In the Lectures on Religious Belief Wittgenstein is reported as saying that the non-believer cannot contradict the believer. This claim may seem both to run against our experience, particularly if we are apostates, and to offer a protection to the believer from the most direct criticism. Such claims, and others which are less clear but just as surprising, combine to suggest that much of what Wittgenstein has to say about religion and religious belief is obscurantist, and he acknowledges that some say this of him.

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Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 50 , Issue 194 , October 1975, pp. 437 - 444
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1975

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References

1 Lectures and Conversations (Oxford, 1966), pp. 53, 55Google Scholar. All subsequent references are to this work.

2 e.g. ‘… The religious person never believes what I describe’, p. 55.Google Scholar

3 p. 64. Just what exactly the issue is between Lewy, or Moore, and Wittgen stein is quite unclear.

4 Whether one must be true is not clear, and settling this issue regarding 1 and 2 would demand a more detailed description of the mise en scène. To avoid repetition I shall in the rest of the article use ‘contradiction’ and its cognates to include contrariety, unless otherwise stated.

5 Cf. p. 62, ‘In general, if you say: “He is dead” and I say: “He is not dead” no one would say: “Do they mean the same thing by ‘dead’?” In the case where a man has visions I would not off-hand say: “He means something different”. Cf. a person having persecution mania.’

6 Cf. p. 55, ‘… the religious person never believes what I describe’.

7 In both cases, to misquote the Investigations, II, xiv, p. 232Google Scholar, ‘Belief and evidence pass each other by’.

8 As Wittgenstein acknowledges in his own way, p. 57.

9 Even if Father O'Hara was cheating himself. Cf. p. 59.

10 Cf. ‘“Being shown all these things, did you understand what this word [‘God’] meant”? I'd say “Yes and no. I did learn what it did not mean, I made myself understand. I could understand questions when they were put in different ways—and in that sense could be said to understand”’ p. 59).