In the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks of November 2015, an atheist propaganda video1 made in 2014 has experienced fresh rounds of shares and likes on social media. The video begins with a conversation between an ‘atheist’ and a ‘theist’. The atheist says that God has not Himself revealed to him, and even if he did, how would we know that ‘it wasn’t just some kind of delusion’? The theist reassures the atheist: ‘Oh, trust me, you’d know. God revealed himself to me.’ She is joined by a dozen or so ‘theists’ (this epithet appears written out above each of them) who all exclaim the same, namely that they all know God and that he speaks to them. They join the first theist in trying to convince the atheist that, since they all agree on this, he should believe in God as well.
But then the ‘theists’ start arguing between themselves. The Muslim expresses a disagreement with a Christian who claims that God reveals himself through Jesus Christ. The Methodist and the Catholic disagree about whether one can be saved by faith alone or by faith and works. The Baptist and the Universalist disagree whether hell exists or not, and so on. When the cacophony of disagreeing voices becomes so noisy that one can hardly understand anything, the Jew and the Muslim in the group who disagree over whether the Holy Land has been given to the Jews by God or not, start pointing guns at each other. Eventually, the Jew raises a fighter jet to end this particular disagreement. At that point, the atheist—clearly representing ‘the voice of reason’ in the video—says:
OK everyone, calm down! Put the fighter jet down! If God is speaking to all of you, and he appears to be telling all of you very different, contradictory things—perhaps this rather glaring discrepancy can be explained if we examine the fact that your relationship with God seems to be precisely shaped by the culture in which you were raised, and the predominant version of God you were taught to believe in. … Typically, religion obeys borders, while truth does not. In America, God is Jahve, and in India, God is Vishnu. Truth does not behave in this way. In America 2 + 2 = 4, and in India, 2 + 2 = 4 also. If God’s message to us was so dire, so vitally important, then why wouldn’t he give it to us in such a clear and precise way so that we would all be in agreement, as evident as a simple math problem in which there is universal agreement, rather than trusting his precious message to be spread by fallible, corruptible human beings? (‘Do You Know God?’)
After his short speech, which the atheist has hoped would enlighten the religious listeners, the ‘theists’ simply resume their disagreements and the cacophony continues undisturbed. Presented as the only reasonable person who also has relevant knowledge, but a person who believers unfortunately do not listen to, the atheist then turns his back to the group of disagreeing believers and walks away, upright, not losing his time with them anymore.
This video presents a well-known piece from the arsenal of atheist apologetics, called The Problem of Religious Diversity (Harrison 2013, 478–483). In this book, I do not attempt an elaborate response to this atheist/agnostic argument. Others have done and will continue doing so.2 I have summarized the video because it includes widespread assumptions about interreligious disagreement, popular, at least, in the more secularized societies. One such assumption is that religious disagreements, either interreligious or interdenominational, are obviously and sheerly irrational. The only rational resolution to them is to explain away all the conflicting religious beliefs as delusions. Another popular assumption reflected in the video is that religious disagreements lead inevitably to conflicts, and hence they ultimately lead to war. In response, it assumes that the atheist’s message is the most peaceful and the peacemaking one (‘OK, everyone, calm down! Put the fighter jet away!’). The only problem is that this message is unheeded, so the evil caused by religions continues.
This is not an unusual picture of religious disagreements. Although these assumptions are problematic, simplistic, or simply false, there is some truth in them. After the world had seemed, in the mid-twentieth century, to be heading inevitably towards secularization, and religion had seemed bound to lose influence (how grand and miscalculated generalizations these now seem!), interreligious and interdenominational disagreements appear to have returned as important factors in politics and international relations. Indeed, despite the continuing secularization in Europe, they are seen as an increasingly worrying sign of our post-secular times. Our unease with such disagreements has to do with a revived perception that they lay behind several terrible conflicts and humanitarian disasters of the modern world, and that they very often seem unresolvable. We do not normally expect interreligious disagreements to be resolved doctrinally, at least, let alone ‘once and for all’, on the basis of evidential procedures and rational arguments. In other words, we do not expect different religions to resolve their differences in matters of belief and wait that most of the world ends up sharing one religion (or, as atheists would wish, having no religion at all)!
But this does not necessarily mean that religious disagreements are simply irrational, as the atheist video presents them. Rather, it is to say that most of us are aware on some level that interreligious disagreements are, normally, of a deep and difficult kind. It is common among philosophers and theologians nowadays to observe that people of different religious traditions who disagree over matters of faith operate with disparate semantic systems. Grammatically different concepts and claims frame the very thinking of the believers of different faiths and orientate their lives. Disagreements across religions often involve misunderstandings, or a lack of clarification or definition, which makes any meaningful communication, let alone intelligible discussion, difficult. But the challenges are not always due to misunderstandings. Indeed, even when this is not so, the disagreement normally persists. And yet, it need not be seen as irrational. Religious disagreements can be seen as ‘speech situations in which reason is at work’, but which happen ‘within a specific structure of disagreement that has neither to do with a misconstruction that would call for additional knowledge nor with a misunderstanding that would call for words to be refined’ (Ranciere 1999, xi).
Such a perspective has strong affinities with a number of Wittgenstein’s remarks on language, religion, and, indeed, on (inter)religious disagreement. Theology should be thought of ‘…as grammar’ rather than ‘science’ (PI §535, LC 57–59), Wittgenstein affirms, and the concept of God is more like the concept ‘object’ (a basic and central concept of grammar which enables us to talk about reality at all), rather than a term for any particular object or a class of objects in the world (CV 97). In Chap. 2, I will argue that this conception of religion—I will call it ‘grammaticalist’—is not the only conception of religion in Wittgenstein. But it is an important one, reflected also in Wittgenstein’s remark (as recorded by G.E. Moore) that ‘different religions treat something as making sense, which others treat as nonsense: they don’t merely one deny a proposition which other affirms’ (MWL 8:78)—a remark to which we shall return a few times in this book. According to the Wittgensteinian grammaticalist conception, then, interreligious disagreements can lack a common framework or criteria for its resolution, such that can more easily be found for disagreements over empirical or ‘non-religious’ historical propositions.
The atheist propaganda video mentioned above does not pay attention to this. It presents all confessional and interreligious disagreements as grammatically non-problematic, propositional disagreements. It presupposes that a deceptively simple idea of ‘mathematical truth’ of simple rules of arithmetic like 2 + 2 = 4, which, in philosophy, are customarily considered as necessarily true, should apply to all beliefs of all religions. But, if Wittgenstein’s remark is even partly on the mark, sometimes the differences between beliefs of different religions are less like the disagreement between 2 + 2 = 4 and 2 + 2 = 5, and a bit more like the difference between asserting 2 + 2 = 4 in a decimal system and asserting 2 + 2 = 4 in a binary system; in the former, this is clearly or ‘necessarily’ true, while in the latter it is nonsensical. Another message of the video is that, since the disagreeing parties are not willing or able to consider scientific evidence which appears to defeat their beliefs (cultural contingency of their beliefs, psychological factors, and so on), the disagreements are bound to deteriorate either into a shouting competition (in the video, the Pentecostal who is speaking ‘in tongues’ seems to be winning that particular competition) or even an armed conflict. However, according to the grammaticalist Wittgensteinian picture above, the solution to (inter)religious disagreements—if a ‘solution’ is a sensible concept here at all—will most likely not be reached through scientifically modelled evidence game, at least not primarily. Given the life-guiding and depth-grammatical nature of most central religious concepts and beliefs, and given that different religious cultures give rise also to somewhat different criteria for what is rational to believe, at least in the domain of religion, there are good reasons to think that seeking resolutions through scientific evidential reasoning is not the most promising way to resolve such disagreements.
This book aims, with the help of Wittgenstein, to avoid simplifications of interreligious disagreements, such as that portrayed in the video mentioned at the beginning. It tries to understand them in their considerable complexity and propose a way of seeing and dealing with them which will, hopefully, help us (inter)religiously disagree in better ways.
Scholarly Contexts, and Contents of the Chapters
This book is envisioned as a contribution to the following scholarly contexts: Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion, Wittgenstein and theology, and theology of interreligious relations. But I also need to say a few words about a scholarly context which I am not addressing directly, the analytic epistemology of religious disagreement and the reasons why I am not doing so.
In the analytic philosophy, at least in the English-speaking world, the topic of religious disagreement (interreligious or/and interconfessional) has recently achieved considerable attention, within a currently flourishing subfield of epistemology, the epistemology of (peer) disagreement. Essays such as that of Inwagen (2010), Oppy (2010), Audi (2011), and Vainio (2014) all address the question of rationality of holding (on to) one’s religious beliefs in the face of extensive (inter)religious disagreement. In other words, the question they seek to address is whether a person who persists in her particular religious beliefs which appear to contradict those o...