The Possibility of Discussion

Relativism, Truth and Criticism of Religious Beliefs

Hugo Strandberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754655435
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317019718
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Answering the question 'How is fruitful discussion possible?', this book addresses the central philosophical issue of how reason shall be understood and how it is limited. This study argues that the understanding of discussion according to which it necessarily starts from putative universal norms and rules for argumentation is problematic, among other reasons since such rules are unfruitful in contexts where there are vast disagreements such as religion. Inspired by Wittgensteinian ideas, Strandberg develops instead a new way of understanding discussion, truth and rationality which escapes these problems, and shows how this solution can be used to answer the accusation against Wittgensteinian philosophy for being conservative and resulting in fideism.

Chapter 1The Unfruitfulness of Rationalistic Discussion of Religious Beliefs

DOI: 10.4324/9781315554136-2

I hope it is now clear what I mean when I ask ‘How is fruitful discussion of religious beliefs possible?’, and why I ask this question. It is now time to start answering it.

One simple answer to my question would be to say that there is not much of a problem – now and then it is, of course, difficult to reason in the right way, especially when it comes to religious matters, so it is not so strange that people come to different conclusions. But if everybody is only careful enough in investigations and argumentations, everybody will arrive at the truth, and disagreements will disappear. Hence, what is suggested here is that we should start from certain putative universal norms and rules for argumentation, and show from these that certain religious beliefs are rational (that is, they are legitimately held) or irrational (that is, they are illegitimately held). This form of discussion I will, in the following, call rationalistic discussion. What I am going to do in this chapter is to give one example of how unfruitful this form of discussion is when it comes to reconciling religious disagreements.

The example I will discuss is the disagreements concerning the existence of God. Traditionally, the question about the existence of God has been the central question in the philosophy of religion, and it has mainly been discussed in a rationalistic way. If this way of discussing is unfruitful when it comes to this question, claimed to be crucial, which I will try to show, this indicates that the rationalistic way of discussing is an unfruitful way of reconciling disagreements. If we think that reconciling disagreements is sometimes valuable, in this situation we must search for alternatives to rationalistic discussions of religious belief. The question we then must consider is the one I asked in the introduction: How is fruitful discussion of religious beliefs possible?

Rationalistic Arguments for the Belief that God Exists

When the existence of God has been discussed in a rationalistic way, the discussion has been about arguments for the belief that God exists, for example about the teleological and the cosmological arguments. All these arguments have been criticized in different ways, and I am not going to go into that type of criticism. Let us, on the contrary, assume that they are valid.¹ What does this result in?

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1 Cf. Steven M. Cahn, ‘The Irrelevance to Religion of Philosophic Proofs for the Existence of God’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 6 (1969): 170, who adopts the same strategy and comes to the same conclusion, but argues in a different way.

Let us assume that the teleological argument is valid. The best way to explain the existence of the world, as it actually is, is then to posit something outside the world which is somehow the cause of the world and which the world is dependent on. However, the teleological argument, rationalistically understood, shows, if it is valid, nothing more than precisely that there exists something outside the world which somehow is the cause of the world and which the world is dependent on – it does not say anything about the properties of this ‘something’. On the contrary, many different hypotheses are compatible with the result of this argument, and which of these is correct or more justified, the argument cannot determine. The argument consequently justifies not the belief in a creator (since a creator is a personal being), nor that the cause of the world is an infinite being, nor that this is a being whom we can get in contact with and who is worthy of reverence, or the like.² The teleological argument hence does not manage to establish anything of religious importance. The argument, even when it is supposed to be valid, does not result in such beliefs which are central to religious believers.³

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2 See, for example, David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (London, 1991), pp. 129 and 131; Alfred Jules Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (London, 1946), p. 115; Rush Rhees, Rush Rhees on Religion and Philosophy, ed. D.Z. Phillips (Cambridge, 1997), p. 5.

3 Cf. Stefan Eriksson, Ett mönster i livets väv: Tro och religion i ljuset av Wittgensteins filosofi (Nora, 1998), p. 16.

Since what I am focusing on here are disagreements which do make a difference, it is important, when discussing disagreements concerning the existence of God, to understand the belief that God exists, a belief which must be understood in the different ways it shows itself in the lives of religious believers. If the belief that God exists is understood in this way, the attempt to show, in a rationalistic way, that God exists immediately encounters problems, as I have just shown. Even if the arguments were valid, this would not be an argument for the existence of God, if the word ‘God’ is understood to signify what religious believers believe in, but would only be an argument for the existence of something whose existence is religiously insufficient as well as uninteresting.⁴ The traditional arguments for the existence of God are thus dependent on the existence of religious belief in God: if they were presented to a person who had never heard of God or religion, she would not understand the arguments in the sense in which they are intended to be understood – that is, as religiously important arguments. That they have been understood to have religious importance is due to the fact that the word ‘God’ is not just a few letters, but already has a meaning for us.⁵ If the word ‘God’ did not already have a meaning, the conclusions of the traditional arguments, if they were regarded as valid, would be the existence of something with only vague similarities to God as God is actually understood by believers.

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4 Cf. Ingolf U. Dalferth, Die Wirklichkeit des Möglichen: Hermeneutische Religionsphilosophie (Tübingen, 2003), pp. 217–18.

5 When Thomas Aquinas formulates his five ways (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica: Complete English Edition in Five Volumes, Volume One (London, 1981), pp. 13–14), he does not mention God until the end of each of the ways, by formulations such as ‘… and this we call God’. Hence, what I am assuming is that he is basically right, up until the point when he calls the being whose existence he just has shown ‘God’. Calling this being ‘God’ is not innocent – it is to use a word which has already a meaning for us. Of course, this problem is not so devastating for him, since he does not aim to prove that God exists from a position which neither affirms nor denies the existence of God, as the problem is for Swinburne, who does aim to prove that God exists from such a position.

Is there then no way of meeting this problem? One philosopher of religion who has tried to work out an argument for the belief that God exists, where ‘God’ is given a certain content, is Richard Swinburne.⁶ I will therefore turn to Swinburne's project.

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6 In Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God (Oxford, 1991).

Swinburne's Arguments for the Belief that God Exists

What Swinburne is trying to do is to show that the probability of ‘the theistic hypothesis’ exceeds ½. ‘The theistic hypothesis’ is here the hypothesis that ‘… there exists a person without a body (i.e. a spirit) who is eternal, is perfectly free, omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, and the creator of all things’⁷. This hypothesis hence has, from the start, a religious content,⁸ and Swinburne's project then seems to be more promising than the traditional arguments.

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7 Ibid., p. 8.

8 That the theistic hypothesis is a genuine expression of the religious belief in God can be questioned, which I do in the next chapter. In this chapter, however, the hypothesis is understood as an expression of the religious belief in God. Even if it is so understood, it must be noticed, however, that a religious believer wants to say a lot more about God than what Swinburne tries to justify, and that his result could thus be said to be rather meagre.

If Swinburne only relied on the traditional arguments, his project would be a failure since, as I have shown, there are many hypotheses which are compatible with those arguments. The theistic hypothesis is one of them, but there are also others, such as the hypothesis that the cause of the world is not a person, is something we cannot get in contact with, or the hypothesis that the cause of the world is a personal being with limited powers. Swinburne must hence be able to give additional arguments for why one of the many hypotheses is to be preferred. By evaluating the probability of the theistic hypothesis and showing that the probability of the hypothesis exceeds ½, Swinburne thinks that he can show why one of the many hypotheses is to be preferred. In the following, I will contrast Swinburne's theistic hypothesis with a hypothesis according to which the cause of the world is a being with limited powers, to see whether Swinburne's way of reasoning is a fruitful way to discuss religious beliefs in a context of vast disagreements.

When Swinburne evaluates the probability of the theistic hypothesis, he does so by means of Bayes's theorem. Bayes's theorem can be expressed as a function consisting of three factors that determine the probability of a certain hypothesis.⁹ When it comes to a hypothesis like the theistic hypothesis which is meant to explain the existence of everything, these factors can be laid out in the following way. The first factor, which contributes positively to the probability of the hypothesis in question, is a measure of how probable the hypothesis renders the data – that i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The Unfruitfulness of Rationalistic Discussion of Religious Belief
• 2 Religious Belief and the Diverse Ways We Deal with the World around Us
• 3 Problems of Relativism
• 4 The Demand for Universality
• 5 The Objectivity of Truth
• 6 How Is Fruitful Discussion Possible?
• 7 Wittgenstein, Conservatism and Fideism
• 8 Philosophy of Religion and Enlightenment Thinking
• Bibliography
• Index