On mucking around about God: Some methodological animadversions

Abstract

There is confusion and perhaps even incoherence not only in the philosophical and theological accounts of religion, but in certain central strands of first-order religious discourse itself. Not only the talk about God but first-order God-talk itself, it is at least plausible to argue, is in certain fundamental respects incoherent. While there is a strong temptation in thinking about religion to think this, could it really be the case that religious talk generally or religion or, at the very least, Judaism or Christianity, actually is incoherent? If we take Wittgenstein seriously this could not be possible. For him what is given are the forms of life and the forms of language are the forms of life. He reminds us that ordinary language is all right as it is; it does not need any philosophical subliming. Our task as philosophers, Wittgenstein would have it, is to give a perspicuous representation of that language. We must come, if we would dispel philosophical perplexity, to command a clear view of the language in question where it is actually at work. Our philosophical accounts of a particular domain of discourse may be confused, but it makes no sense to say that a whole domain of discourse is itself confused. In certain moods and when we speculate in certain ways we slip into perplexities about a whole domain of discourse, though when we are in such perplexities we usually do not see these perplexities as being about a domain of discourse. We do not see them as confusions about the workings of our language, though that is in reality what they are. But once we see them as such confusions and command a sufficiently clear view of our language in that domain for our philosophical perplexities to wither away, the philosopher's task is completed. The only proper task for a philosopher, Wittgenstein argues, is clearly to display the structure of the language area that perplexes us philosophically or at least to characterize it with sufficient clarity such that our philosophical obsessions are dispelled. But this is all that can be done. There can be no question of criticizing the perplexing area of discourse itself. What we need to recognize is that the forms of language, which are also the forms of life, are the philosopher's given. It makes no sense, Wittgensteinians claim, to say that they are incoherent or to claim that they are irrational