Religious Beliefs as Pictures

Abstract

IN HIS Lectures on Religious Belief Ludwig Wittgenstein suggests several times that certain religious beliefs, especially belief in a Last Judgment, can be thought of as pictures that they function in ways similar to pictures.1 Recently the Welsh philosopher D. Z. Phillips has used this same analogy, with explicit reference to Wittgenstein, in the course of his own efforts to explicate the nature of religious belief.2 I should like to examine here the analogy between religious beliefs and pictures, as developed by these two philosophers. My primary concern will be with Phillips, since his writings on religious matters are far more voluminous and since his position is still very much in the process of developing. But Phillips' acknowledged dependence on Wittgenstein and his frequent references to him will require that I look also at the latter's work. For the purposes of this paper, however, I shall limit myself to the Lectures on Religious Belief since this is the only place in his writings where Wittgenstein develops the analogy of religious beliefs to It may be helpful, by way of introduction, to ask what general purpose Phillips has in pursuing the comparison of religious beliefs to pictures. In virtually all of his published writings on religion, he is concerned to steer between a philosophical Scylla and Charybdis: regarding religious beliefs as empirical