Belief, Change and Forms of Life PDF
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BELIEF, CHANGE AND FORMS OF LIFE LIBRARY OF PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION General Editor: John Hick Danforth Professor, Claremont Graduate School Claremont, California Already published Masao Abe ZEN AND WESTERN THOUGHT William H. Austin THE RELEVANCE OF NATURAL SCIENCE TO THEOLOGY Paul Badham CHRISTIAN BELIEFS ABOUT LIFE AFTER DEATH Paul and Linda Badham IMMORTALITY OR EXTINCTION? Patrick Burke THE FRAGILE UNIVERSE Margaret Chatterjee GANDHI'S RELIGIOUS THOUGHT William Lane Craig THE KALAM COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT THE COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT FROM PLATO TO LEIBNIZ Stephen T. Davis LOGIC AND THE NATURE OF GOD Lynn A. de Silva THE PROBLEM OF THE SELF IN BUDDHISM AND CHRISTIANITY Padmasiri de Silva AN INTRODUCTION TO BUDDHIST PSYCHOLOGY Ramchandra Gandhi THE AVAILABILITY OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS J. C. A. Gaskin HUME'S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION H. A. Hodges GOD BEYOND KNOWLEDGE J. Kellenberger THE COGNITIVITY OF RELIGION Hywel D. Lewis PERSONS AND LIFE AFTER DEATH Julius J. Lipner THE FACE OF TRUTH Eric Lott VEDANTIC APPROACHES TO GOD Geddes MacGregor REINCARNATION AS A CHRISTIAN HOPE Hugo A. Meynell AN INTRODUCTION TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERNARD LONERGAN F. C. T. Moore THE PSYCHOLOGICAL BASIS OF MORALITY Dennis Nineham THE USE AND ABUSE OF THE BIBLE D. Z. Phillips BELIEF, CHANGE AND FORMS OF LIFE Martin Prozesky RELIGION AND ULTIMATE WELL-BEING Bernard M. G. Reardon HEGEL'S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION John J. Shepherd EXPERIENCE, INFERENCE AND GOD Patrick Sherry RELIGION, TRUTH AND LANGUAGE GAMES SPIRIT, SAINTS AND IMMORTALITY Ninian Smart CONCEPT AND EMPATHY Wilfred Cantwell Smith TOWARDS A WORLD THEOLOGY Shivesh Chandra Thakur RELIGION AND RATIONAL CHOICE Robert Young FREEDOM, RESPONSIBILITY AND GOD Further tides in preparation Series Standing Order If you would like to receive future titles in this series as they are published, you can make use of our standing order facility. To place a standing order please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address and the name of the series. Please state with which title you wish to begin your standing order. (If you live outside the UK we may not have the rights for your area, in which case we will forward your order to the publisher concerned.) Standing Order Service, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG21 2XS, England. BELIEF, CHANGE AND FORMS OF LIFE D. Z. Phillips M MACMILLAN © D. Z. Phillips 1986 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1986 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1986 Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world Typeset by Wessex Typesetters Frome, Somerset British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Phillips, D. Z. Belief, change and forms of life.—(Library of philosophy and religion) 1. Religion—Philosophy I. Title II. Series 200'. 1 BL51 ISBN 978-1-349-07920-9 ISBN 978-1-349-07918-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-07918-6 To Rush Rhees Contents Preface IX Acknowledgements XIV 1 Wittgenstein and Religion: Fashionable Criticisms 1 2 Knowing Where to Stop 17 3 Reminders of What We Know? 42 4 The Challenge of What We Know: The Problem of Evil 52 5 Belief, Change and Forms of Life 79 6 Can There Be a Christian Philosophy? 104 Notes and References 120 Bibliography 131 Index of Names 137 Index of Subjects 139 Preface With the present book, a certain cycle has been completed in my work. In The Concept of Prayer, I first began to urge that, in order to explore the grammar of the Reality of God, we should look to the contexts of prayer and worship. Unsurpris ingly, most of the discussions of this essay since 1965 have concentrated on what they take to be its epistemological presuppositions. Very little attention has been paid to the analyses of the prayers, despite the fact that the whole burden of the book was to show that epistemological considerations cannot be divorced from such contexts. In Death and Immortality, I tried to provide conceptual reminders of contexts in which the notion of the immortality of the soul has its home. I emphasised the essential differ ences between talk of eternity and talk of duration. In providing conceptual reminders, a philosopher must also be aware of the reactions of his critics, and of differing philosophical developments in contemporary philosophy. In the essays in Faith and Philosophical Enquiry and Athronyddu Am Grefydd, I tried to come to terms with such criticisms and developments. Religion Without Explanation marked a change of direc tion. I turned from contemporary philosophy of religion to examine influential attempts in early anthropology, sociology and psychoanalysis to explain religion away. Their efforts turned out to be misconceived even in terms of the methodologies of their own disciplines. In that book, I also explored Wittgenstein's discussion in On Certainty of Moore's truisms. I suggested that there are close parallels between Wittgenstein's treatment of fundamental proposi tions which are held fast by all that surrounds them, and the way in which the fundamental beliefs of religion should be discussed. lX X Preface Yet, if fundamental beliefs in religion too are held fast by all that surrounds them, what happens when what surrounds them changes? It is evident that the meaningfulness of religion has been challenged in a host of different ways. In Dramau G wenlyn Parry, a discussion of the work of a con temporary Welsh dramatist, and in Through a Darkening Glass, I was concerned, in the main, with the various ways in which religion and other ways of thinking may lose their hold on us. The possibilities of meaning and loss of meaning in religion are also one of my major concerns in the present essay. It is highly probable that many philosophers will approach Belief, Change and Forms of Life armed with certain philosophical assumptions about the mode of argument they expect to find in the essay. This is because there are widespread philosophical theses concerning views which philosophers of religion influenced by Wittgenstein are supposed to hold. Over and over again it is said that these philosophers discuss religion as though it were an esoteric game, logically cut off from other features of human life. This game, according to the critics, is said to be understood only by those who play it, since the players themselves determine what does and what does not make sense in relation to it. According to the critics, it is said that the game cannot be criticised from the outside, and cannot be affected by any possible changes in personal, social or cultural life. No advance can be made to more substantive matters until these theses are refuted, since, surprising though it may seem, little effort has been expended to check whether anyone has ever held such views. That is why it has been necessary to begin the essay by showing that, so far from holding any of the theses which others have so confidently attributed to me, I have actually argued against every one of them! Textual refutations in face of persistent misunderstandings, however, are no more than a preliminary step. The persis tence of the misunderstandings itself needs explaining. It is important to see how Wittgenstein's own terminology con cerning language-games has misled philosophers, tempting Preface XI them to frame the unfounded theses I have referred to. Rightly understood, however, nothing Wittgenstein says rules out the possibilities of dialogue, understanding, criti cism, change or decline where religious beliefs are concerned. Confusion may or may not be present in religious practices. Wittgenstein considers examples piecemeal; he does not indulge in a priori theorising. He rescues us from misleading tendencies of thought by the rearrangement of what we know when not philosophising. So far, we have done enough, but no more than enough, to answer the often repeated criticisms of Wittgenstein's influ ence on the philosophy of religion. But further complexities must be faced. Wittgenstein's philosophical methods are relatively straightforward when what he discusses in rescuing us from our misunderstandings is the language we use when not philosophising. What happens, however, when the discus sion of the language 'we' use is one of a use of language in which we do not participate? Here, Wittgenstein's methods would involve discussion of uses, possibilities of meaning, which, perhaps, we have never recognised, or which perhaps we have distorted by imposing alien criteria of meaningful ness on them. Such discussions are sorely needed in con temporary philosophy of religion. When religious possibilities of meaning are threatened in a culture, some may take it upon themselves to remind the age in which they live of the possibilities it is growing away from. This can only be done when there are resources available to do so. Such resources cannot be taken for granted. Where they are absent, it may not be possible to provide religious reminders in a straightforward way. Nevertheless, in such situations, the task of philosophy remains unchanged: as always, it has to endeavour to understand what lies before it. 'Leaving everything where it is', not adding anything to it, involves giving an account of cultural turbulence as much as it involves giving an account of cultural stability. Charges of anti-intellectualism and conservatism against Wittgenstein in this context are entirely misplaced.
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