Knowing Persons and Knowing God

Abstract

KNOWING PERSONS AND KNOWING GOD I AM GOING TO propose an account of affirming God's existence which runs counter to a prominent trend in recent philosophy of religion, a trend which defends the meaningfulness of theism by either giving up the concept of God's existence as a category mistake or defining it in terms of the practical value the idea has for religious life. Such defenses are reductionist. They reduce the meaning of ' God exists ' to its functions within what they variously call ' religious language,' the ' religious language game,' or the ' religious form of life.' 1 I, too, want to defend theistic thought and life, but I do not believe that the reductionist defenses work.2 In another paper,3 1 I have in mind especially the following: R. B. Braithwaite, "An Empiricist's View of the Nature of Religious Belief," The Philosophy of Religion, ed. Basil Mitchell (Oxford, 1971), 72-91. Paul Holmer, "Language and Theology: Some Critical Notes," Harvard Theological Review, LVIII, S (July, 1965), 242-261; "The Nature of Religious Propositions," Religious Language and the Problem of Religious Knowledge, ed. Ronald E. Santoni (Bloomington, 1968); " Wittgenstein and Theology," Refiection, Vol. 65, 4 (1968). Gordon Kaufman, God the Problem (Cambridge, Mass., 1972). See especially chapter 5. D. Z. Phillips, The Concept of Prayer (London, 1965); Faith and Philosophical Enquiry (New York, 1971). P. F. Schmidt, Religious Knowledge (New York, 1961). Elmer Sprague, Metaphysical Thinking (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). Paul van Buren, The Edges of Language: An Essay in the Logic of Religion (New York, 1972); "Anselm's Formula and the Logic of God," Religious Studies, vol. 9 (1973), 279-288. 2 Many have said as much, but few have argued the case. Kai Nielsen is a notable exception. See his "Wittgensteinian Fideism," Philosophy, Vol. 42 (1967). More frequently one encounters an off-handed rejection of reductionism, as in Patrick Sherry's Religion, Truth, and Language Games (London, 1977) where he notes that "... it often seems as if Phillips is reducing God to a concept or to some 394 KNOWING PERSONS AND KNOWING GOD 395 I argued that while claiming to leave the practice of theistic religion as it is, reductionist views would, when integrated into believers' lives, lead to so fundamental a change in religious life that instead of defending they would undermine or, as Ninian Smart put it, cause a " colossal revolution " in faith.4 Be that as it may, I also believe that the reductionist defenses of the uses and meaning of religious language do not take their analytic and phenomenological task sufficiently seriously when it comes to the meaning of affirming God's existence. They attend to other functions of religious language without examining the sense affirming God's existence actually has in the practice of theistic faith. They view religions as complex forms of life organized by peculiar language systems, conceptual schemes, or models which perform practical functions for believers. We have learned much from the concern with the uses of religious language, but the question about God's existence persists. In this paper I shall argue that affirming God's existence is a necessary part of theistic religion and that the affirmation follows the logic of the most certain affirmation of existence we make, viz. affirmations of the existence of human individuals or persons. That being so, if it is rational to affirm the existence of persons, it is rational to affirm the existence of God. In order thus to support the rationality of affirming God's existence, I will develop four main theses: (1) that practicing theistic religion presupposes the idea of God as a personal or suprapersonal individual; (2) that the actual practice of theism involves affirming the existence of God in a sense of existence appropriate to such finite individuals as human persons; (3) that affirming the existence of human persons takes place through an act which attributes intentions and values to something encountered in action; (4) that affirming God's existence follows the same logic as affirming the existence of persons. aspect of the world. . . ." (p. 53) . See also Ninian Smart in The Cncept of Worship (New York, 197!'l). 3 "Theistic Reductionism and the...