The Concept of Prayer (Routledge Revivals)

D. Z. Phillips

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780415734561
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317821298
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Many contemporary philosophers assume that, before one can discuss prayer, the question of whether there is a God or not must be settled. In this title, first published in 1965, D. Z. Phillips argues that to understand prayer is to understand what is meant by the reality of God. Beginning by placing the problem of prayer within a philosophical context, Phillips goes on to discuss such topics as prayer and the concept of talking, prayer and dependence, superstition and the concept of community. This is a fascinating reissue that will be of particular value to students with an interest in the philosophy of religion, prayer and religious studies more generally.

1

A Philosophical Context for the Problem of Prayer

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TO WORK in the field of philosophy of religion is like working on the Tower of Babel: one cannot take for granted that one's colleagues understand what one is saying. The position, if anything, is worse for the philosophers, since the builders at least were engaged on a common task, they were trying to do the same thing. No such agreement exists among philosophers of religion: the nature and purpose of their subject is itself a philosophical controversy. It becomes essential, therefore, to try to give some indication of what I think philosophy can say about religion.

Wittgenstein had this to say about the nature of a philosophical problem:

A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don't know my way about.’

Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it.

For it cannot give it any foundation either.

It leaves everything as it is.

(Philosophical Investigations', I: 123–4)

Wittgenstein's idea of ‘leaving everything as it is’ is open to misunderstanding. In saying that this is what philosophy does, Wittgenstein is not asking the layman to do the philosopher's job for him. He is not advocating a gallup poll on people's views about religion. What he is saying is that if the philosopher wants to give an account of religion, he must pay attention to what religious believers do and say. Wittgenstein is not equating a philosophical account of religion with the account a believer might give of his beliefs. The difference between them can be illustrated by the following situation. A believer is asked to give an account of prayer. I do not mean that he is asked for a descriptive account, to recite the creeds, or to repeat the prayers he uses. What he is asked to do is to give a conceptual account of the kind of activity prayer is. Often, in face of such a request, the believer is lost. It is not enough for him to say that praying is talking to God, adoring Him, confessing to Him, thanking Him, and making requests to Him, since what the enquirer wants to know is what it means to do any of these things. While praying, the believer knows what he is doing, his prayer means a great deal to him. But when he is asked to give an account of prayer, to say what his prayer means to him, he no longer knows his way about. One is asking him for a non-religious account of a religious activity, a conceptual or philosophical account which would give some indication of the meaning of prayer to someone for whom prayer meant little, and often, he fails to provide an adequate one.

The failure to give a conceptual account of an activity with which one is familiar is not peculiar to religious believers. The scientist knows what he is doing when he is doing science, but he may make a hopeless mess of giving an account of the logic of scientific statements. The novelist may know what he is doing while writing a novel, but it does not follow that he will have anything valuable to say about the idea of literature. Many philosophical puzzles arise when we try to give an account of concepts with which we are perfectly familiar. Consider the famous example from Augustine's Confessions:

‘For what is time? Who can readily and briefly explain this? Who can even in thought comprehend it, so as to utter a word about it ? But what in discourse do we mention more familiarly and knowingly than time? And, we understand, when we speak of it; we understand also, when we hear it spoken of by another. What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not’ (Bk. xi:xiv).

One could construct a parody of the above quotation to illustrate the important distinction between a religious activity such as praying, and the ability to give a philosophical account of the activity. One could imagine a religious believer asking, What is prayer? Who can readily and briefly explain this? Who can even in thought comprehend it, so as to utter a word about it? But what do I utter in discourse more familiarly and knowingly than prayer? And, I understand when I pray; I understand also when I hear another praying. What then is prayer? If no one asks me I know; if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not.’

On the other hand, what of religious believers who accept the challenge, and attempt to give conceptual accounts of prayer? Must the philosopher accept what they say as true? Obviously, he cannot, since if he did, he would find himself struggling with a mass of contradictory accounts. How, then, is one to distinguish the good accounts from the bad ones? Here, the ultimate appeal is to actual usage itself, that is, to the activity of praying. Wittgenstein's point implies that the meaning of ‘prayer’ is in the activity of praying. The philosopher's trouble comes from the fact that he finds it difficult to give a conceptual account of a familiar religious activity; to make philosophically explicit what is already known in a non-philosophical, that is, in this case, religious, way. The conceptual accounts of the believers must be judged on the grounds of whether they accommodate the various features which ‘the life of prayer’ exhibits. The same is true of any philosophical account of prayer. Philosophy does not provide a foundation for prayer, it leaves everything as it is, and tries to give an account of it.

It would follow from my argument that only a religion which fears being shown for what it is, need fear philosophical enquiry. Many Christian philosophers have thought otherwise: that the attempt to give a philosophical account of religious activities threatens the autonomy of religion, and is an attempt to rationalize what is essentially mysterious. These misgivings are particularly strong when philosophy is thought of as conceptual analysis. These misgivings, as I hope to show, are caused by a very different view of the relation of philosophy to religion from the one I have outlined; a view which, nevertheless, with few exceptions, characterizes contemporary philosophy of religion in the English-speaking world. Michael Foster in his book, Mystery and Philosophy, voices some of the fears I referred to. ‘The goal towards which both scientist and philosopher are working is a state in which there will be no more mystery. The pursuit of this goal seems to be one of the deepest impulses of the new philosophy’ (p. 20).

He quotes from Reichenbach's Rise of Scientific Philosophy:

Philosophy is no longer the story of men who attempted in vain ‘to say the unsayable’ in pictures or verbose constructions of pseudological form. Philosophy is logical analysis of all forms of human thought; what it has to say can be stated in comprehensible terms, and there is nothing ‘unsayable’ to which it has to capitulate. If it still includes unsolved problems subject to controversy, there is good hope that they will be solved by the same methods as those which, for other problems, have led to solutions commonly accepted today (ibid. 20; Reichenbach, p. 308).

It is not surprising, given Reichenbach's conception of philosophy, that Foster should have misgivings about a philosophical analysis of religious concepts. Neither is he reassured when he hears Schlick say, ‘No meaningful problem is insoluble in principle’. ‘There is no unfathomable mystery in the world’ (ibid., p. 21). On the other hand, one should not assume that later philosophical views give more ground for hope.

It is common among philosophers today to speak of the liberation of epistemology from the narrow criteria of logical positivism. ‘The meaning of a word is to be found in the way it is used’ has become a well-known slogan. Yet, religion has benefited little from the so-called concessions. Philosophers stress that by ‘use’ they do not mean any kind of use. This is undeniably an important point to make, for it is of the essence of language that it must make a difference whether one says one thing rather than another. Many of the things religious believers say, according to some philosophers, must be rejected as a misuse of language. Apparently, the mistake is due to the fact that the way in which religious people use certain concepts breaks the rules which govern their use. These rules are determined by the way in which we ordinarily use words. It has never been clear to me who the ‘we’ are, or what ‘ordinary’ refers to. One thing seems clear, ‘we’ excludes religious believers, and ‘ordinary language’ excludes much of what they say. In the judgement on the meaning of religion, there is said to be a strain between it and ordinary meaning. The strain need not be obvious at first, and the rules need not be broken in a dramatic way. This, we are told, is why religious people fail to see their mistake; their lapse into nonsense is gradual. This so-called lapse is well illustrated by the ways in which two contemporary philosophers have chosen to describe it.

Professor Hepburn states that the meaning of certain con-cepts is ‘stretched to breaking point’ in their religious counterparts. He gives the following example:

… compare these sentences—‘Outside my room a sparrow is chirping’, ‘Outside the city the speed limit ends’, ‘Outside the earth's atmosphere meteors do not burn out’ and finally ‘God is outside the universe, outside space and time’. What of this last statement? The word ‘outside’ gets its central meaning from relating item to item within the universe. It… is being stretched to breaking-point in being applied to the whole universe as related to some being that is not-the-universe: its sense is being extended to the point where we may easily come to speak nonsense without noticing it… (Christianity and Paradox, p. 5).¹

Professor Flew had made the same point earlier when he said that since the meaning of religious statements, concerning the existence or love of God, for example, are said by believers to be so different from the meaning of ‘existence’ and ‘love’ in non-religious contexts, they can ‘thus be killed by inches, the death by a thousand qualifications’ (‘Theology and Falsification’ in New Essays in Philosophical Theology, p. 96). Flew suggests that the believer's statements can be so eroded by qualification that they are no longer statements at all (ibid., p. 98).

We have, then, the idea of ordinary meaning being stretched to the point of nonsense, or of its being eroded by the believer's thousand qualifications. The task of philosophy is then thought to be that of pointing out, and, if possible, correcting these linguistic mistakes which religious believers make. In the spirit of such a task, C. B. Martin writes in the preface to his book, Religious Belief: ‘My method will usually be two-sided. I shall try to set out as clearly as possible what I believe to be some of the most important difficulties and confusions in religious forms of argument and assertion; then I shall give accounts of what such forms of argument and assertion might mean that would be safe from philosophical censure’ (p.v.).

Peter Munz puts forward very much the same point of view in his book, Problems of Religious Knowledge. In face of the plurality of religious traditions Munz thinks it foolish to identify the truth with any of them. On the other hand, he also objects to saying that religious truth is the sum of religious traditions. One of Munz's aims is ‘… to inquire whether it is not possible to find a criterion of religious truth which would enable us to avoid the identification of religious truth with any one provincial or with the alleged cosmopolitan tradition’ (ibid., p. 9). Munz thinks, like Martin, that such a criterion is determined by philosophy: ‘… the philosophy of religion imposes its own criterion of what is good theological reasoning and what is bad theological reasoning. And in doing this, it ceases to be purely descriptive of religious knowledge and begins to be normative’ (ibid., p. 28).

One can see from this brief look at some trends in contemporary philosophy of religion, how different their view is of the relation of philosophy to religion from that implied by Wittgenstein's remarks. These philosophers claim to detect a norm of meaningfulness which can test the validity of religious statements. The norm is ‘ordinary language’. The view of religious concepts as ‘stretched meaning’ or ‘eroded meaning’ is based on a fundamental assumption, namely, that there is a primary context of ‘ordinary’ use which can self-evidently be taken as paradigmatic for evaluating use in other contexts. In reply to such an assumption, one can only urge that one takes the advice which, according to W. H. Watson, expresses ‘the kernel of Wittgenstein’: ‘… look to see what men do with things, with words and with ideas, and observe their behaviour’ (On Understanding Physics, p. xiv).

‘Yet’, an objector might ask, ‘are we any better off if we do this?’ If one does try to give an account of prayer as a religious practice, one soon realizes that this is a difficult undertaking. To begin with, one is confronted by the diversity of the subject, one discovers that people have very different ideas about prayer. Inevitably, one's own ideas of prayer impose themselves on one's investigation, singling out those prayers towards which one is sympathetic from those with which one feels little sympathy or no sympathy at all. If the reader complains that some prayers are given more attention than others in this essay, it can be said that this fault was admitted at the outset. (Anyway, are all prayers of equal importance?) The examination does not claim to be exhaustive, but deals with some of the philosophical prob-lems connected with prayer. It is dangerous to make sweeping generalizations where prayer is concerned. If one asks why men pray, or what need prayer satisfies, it would be foolish to look for the answer to these questions. Some men pray for money, while others pray for deeper faith. Some men pray for specific favours, while others pray, ‘Thy will be done’. One has only to compare accounts of religious experience to appreciate how diverse they are, and how different are the conceptions of God which underlie them. Compare, for instance, Isaiah's reaction to the divine vision he sees in the temple: ‘Then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, … for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts’ (Isaiah 6: 5), with George Müller's statement that he and God were business partners (see Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 470), or with the description Francis W. Newman heard a lady give of ‘the pleasure it gave her to think that she could always cuddle up to God’ (ibid., p. 81 n.). In face of prayers which do not fit readily into my exposition, all I can do is to note them and leave it at that. I do not say that they are not prayers (who is a philosopher to say that?), but simply that I do not understand what is involved in them.

On the other hand, an acceptance of Wittgenstein's view that ‘philosophy leaves everything as it is’, does not mean that all that religious people say must be accepted at face value. Religious believers can make mistakes and be confused, just like philosophers, scientists, or anyone else one cares to mention. What is important to notice is that whether a mistake or confusion has occurred, is to be recognized by criteria found within religion. But how does one distinguish the criteria from the confusions? Wittgenstein's answer is: by paying attention to the grammar of what is said

In the use of words one might distinguish 'surface grammar’ from ‘depth grammar’. What immediately impresses itself upon us about the use of a word is the way it is used in the construction of the sentence, the part of its use—one might say—that can be taken in by the ear.—And now compare the depth grammar … with what its surface grammar would lead us to suspect. No wonder we find it difficult to know our way about (Philosophical Investigations, I : 664).

Flew and Hepburn have paid too much attention to the surface grammar of religious statements. They have assumed too readily that words such as ‘existence’, ‘love’, ‘will’, are used in the same way of God as they are used of human beings, animate and inanimate objects. Depth grammar is made explicit by asking what can and what cannot be said of the concept in question. To understand the limits of what can be said about a concept, one must take account of the context in which the concept is used. Certainly, it is important to stress that it must make a difference whether we say one thing rather than another; there must be a distinction between what is rational and what is irrational. To abandon such a distinction would, as Peter Winch has pointed out, plunge us ‘straight into an extreme Protagorean relativism, with all the paradoxes that involves’. ¹ But this does not mean that what the distinction betw...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1. A Philosophical Context for the Problem of Prayer
• 2. Prayer and Verification
• 3. Prayer and the Concept of Talking
• 4. Prayer as Talking to Someone One Does Not Understand
• 5. Prayer and Dependence
• 6. Superstition and Petitionary Prayer
• 7. God's Voice and the Concept of Community
• 8. Praying to the True God
• Bibliography
• Index