Sorensen 1 Jane Sorensen 119447640 Intro Philosophy of Religion Dr.

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 blik for 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 blik about 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 of bliks of believers. Hare is not setting his argument up to corroborate an opposing blik to 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 our blik about 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 blik rather than another. (Stewart 215)

Sorensen 2 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 blik as 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

Sorensen 3 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

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.

Sorensen 4 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 the pathology 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

Sorensen 5 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

Religion is a form of life; it is language embedded in action what Wittgenstein calls a languagegame. Science is another. Neither stands in need of justification. p. 291

Sorensen 6 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.

Sorensen 7 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.