RECOVERING RELIGIOUS CONCEPTS

RECOVERING RELIGIOUS CONCEPTS

SWANSEA STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY General Editor: D. Z. Phillips, Rush Rhees Research Professor, University College of Wales, Swansea and Danforth Professor of Philosophy of Religion, Claremont Graduate University Philosophy is the struggle for clarity about the contexts of human discourse we engage in. What we need is not theoretical explanation, but clarification and elucidation of what lies before us. Recent returns to theory in many fields of philosophy, involving more and more convoluted attempts to meet inevitable counterexamples to such theories, make this need all the more urgent. This series affords an opportunity for writers who share this conviction, one as relevant to logic, epistemology and the philosophy of mind, as it is to ethics, politics, aesthetics and the philosophy of religion. Authors will be expected to engage with the thought of influential philosophers and contemporary movements, thus making the series a focal point for lively discussion. Titles include: Lilli Alanen, Sara Heinamaa and Thomas Wallgren COMMONALITY AND PARTICULARITY IN ETHICS David Cockburn OTHER HUMAN BEINGS John Edelman AN AUDIENCE FOR MORAL PHILOSOPHY? Raimond Gaita GOOD AND EVIL: An Absolute Conception D. Z. Phillips WITTGENSTEIN AND RELIGION RECOVERING RELIGIOUS CONCEPTS Closing Epistemic Divides Rush Rhees (edited by D. Z. Phillips) MORAL QUESTIONS

Recovering Religious Concepts Closing Epistemic Divides D. Z. Phillips Rush Rhees Research Professor University of Wales, Swansea and Danforth Professor of Philosophy of Religion Claremont Graduate University, California

First published in Great Britain 2000 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmil!s, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-349-41139-9 ISBN 978-0-230-59563-7 ( ebook) DOI 10.1057/9780230595637 First published in the United States of America 2000 by ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Phillips, D. Z. (Dewi Zephaniah) Recovering religious concepts : closing epistemic divides I D.Z. Phillips. p. em. - (Swansea studies in philosophy) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Religion-Philosophy. I. Title. II. Series. BL51.P519 1999 210-dc21 2. Knowledge, Theory of (Religion) 99-30116 CIP D. Z. Phillips 2000 Softcover reprint of the hardcover I st edition 2000 978-0-333-74852-7 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, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P OLP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10987654321 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00

To my Claremont colleague Jack Verheyden on the occasion of his retirement

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Contents Acknowledgemen ts Preface viii x 1 Where We Are: at the Mercy of Method 1 2 Return of the Monstrous Illusion 16 3 Epistemic Practices: the Retreat from Reality 24 4 From World to God? Searching for Mediation 45 5 The Friends of Cleanthes: a Case of Conceptual Poverty 63 6 Revelation and the Loss of Authority 82 7 Turning God into one Devil of a Problem 103 8 Miracles and Open-Door Epistemology 129 9 The Dislocated Soul and Immortality 138 10 The World and T 157 11 The Radiance of a False Eternity 171 12 In the Beginning was the Proposition - In the Beginning was the Choice - In the Beginning was the Dance 191 13 God and Concept-Formation 211 14 Where Are the Gods Now? Time for Judgement 227 15 Anglo-American Philosophical Culture: Religion and the Reception of Wittgenstein 242 Notes 260 Index 21Q vii

Acknowledgements All but two of the essays in this collection were written in the 1990s. The essays have been modified, since their original publication, to emphasise the continuity between them. I am grateful to the editors and publishers indicated below for permission to reprint. 'Where We Are: at the Mercy of Method' was first published as 'At the Mercy of Method' by Claremont Graduate School, where it was my inaugural lecture as Danforth Professor of the Philosophy of Religion. It was reprinted in Philosophy and the Grammar of Religious Belief, edited by Timothy Tessin and Mario von der Ruhr, Macmillan and St. Martin's Press, 1995. 'Return of the Monstrous Illusion' was first published as 'Notes on a Monstrous Illusion', in Philosophy and Theological Discourse, edited by Stephen T. Davis, Macmillan and St. Martin's Press, 1996. 'Epistemic Practices: the Retreat from Reality' was first published as 'Epistemic Practices', in Topoi, December 1995. 'From World to God? Searching for Mediation' was first published as 'From World to God', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supp. Vol. 1967, reprinted in my Faith and Philosophical Enquiry, Routledge, 1970. 'The Friends of Cleanthes: a Case of Conceptual Poverty' is a fusion of two papers, 'The Friends of Cleanthes' and 'The Friends of Cleanthes - a Correction', first published in Modern Theology, 1985 and 1987, respectively. 'Revelation and the Loss of Authority' was first published as 'Authority and Revelation' in the proceedings of the Enrico Castelli Conference in Rome on Philosophy and Revelation, Archivio di Filosofia, 1994. 'Turning God into one Devil of a Problem' was first published as 'Mysticism and Epistemology: One Devil of a Problem', in Faith and Philosophy, 1995. 'Miracles and Open-Door Epistemology' was first published in Scottish Journal of Religious Studies, Vol. 14, No. 1, Spring 1993. 'The Dislocated Soul and Immortality' was first published as 'Dislocating the Soul', Religious Studies, reprinted in Can Religion Vlll

Acknowledgements IX Be Explained Away? edited by D. Z. Phillips, Macmillan and St. Martin's Press, 1996. 'The World and "I"' was first published in Philosophical Investigations, 1995. 'The Radiance of a False Eternity' was first published as 'William James and the Notion of Two Worlds', in Religion, Reason and the Self: Essays in Honour of Hywel D. Lewis, edited by T. A. Roberts and Stewart Sutherland, University of Wales Press, 1989. Included in this paper is a portion of 'Between Faith and Metaphysics', first published in Christian Faith and Philosophical Theology: Essays in Honour of Vincent Brummer, edited by Gijsbert van den Brink, Luco J. van den Brom and Marcel Sarot, Pharos, The Netherlands, 1992. 'In the Beginning was the Proposition - In the Beginning was the Choice - In the Beginning was the Dance' was first published in Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. 21, 1995/6. 'God and Concept-Formation' was first published as 'God and Concept-Formation in Simone Weil', in Simone Weil's Philosophy of Culture, edited by Richard H. Bell, Cambridge University Press, 1993. 'Where are the Gods Now? Time for Judgement' was first published in Religion and Relativism, edited by C. Lewis, Macmillan, 1995. 'Anglo-American Philosophical Culture: Religion and the Reception of Wittgenstein' was first published as 'Wittgenstein, Religion and Anglo-American Philosophical Culture', in The Proceedings of the 18th International Wittgenstein Symposium. I am grateful to Helen Baldwin, secretary to the Department of Philosophy at Swansea, for preparation of the texts, and to Timothy Tessin for help with the proofreading. DZP Claremont/Swansea

Preface The essays in this collection show how unnecessary epistemic divides can be created between the philosophical epistemologies we create and the spiritual roots of religious concepts. In the first essay, I illustrate how these epistemic divides have been created by various methods which have dominated philosophy of religion since my undergraduate days in the fifties. In the second essay, I show how an unnecessary epistemic divide is created between us and 'God' by a 'monstrous illusion': the assumption that religious practices depend on a metaphysical belief said to be logically prior to them. This assumption is not a healthy respect for realism, but the needless creation of a rootless conception of 'how things are'. The third essay illustrates one of the deepest confusions, not simply in the philosophy of religion, but in epistemology more generally, namely, the assumption that epistemic practices are hypotheses about or descriptions of reality. In fact, epistemic practices are the contexts, the conceptual parameters within which our beliefs, true or false, have their sense. By turning these conceptual parameters into beliefs, we are robbed of the realities in our midst. What we need, as Wittgenstein said, is realism without empiricism. It is highly ironic that empiricists, who think of themselves as realists, deny that we are acquainted with ordinary certainties in our lives. These certainties are turned into probabilities. Even 'seeing a chair' is said to be a matter of having a good reason for saying that it is highly probable that we are seeing a chair. And this is said to be realism! Wittgenstein reminded us that it is part of the grammar of the word 'chair' that 'this is what we call "sitting on a chair"'. Are we to say that 'sitting on a chair' gives us a good reason to say that it is highly probable that we are sitting on a chair? Analyses such as this create epistemic divides which are a retreat from reality. This retreat from reality is illustrated in the fourth essay. The cosmological argument turns the celebration of God's creation into a causal hypothesis about the origin of 'everything'. This notion of 'everything' depends on treating it as though it were x

Preface XI one big thing. Celebration of creation is pressed into a category and a mode of argument too impoverished to accommodate it, or to mediate its sense. The fifth essay provides a further example of this conceptual poverty, the offering of too narrow a range of concepts in which to discuss religious belief. This narrowness is found in an empiricist account of 'experience', from which we attempt to construct authoritative contexts in which we can be said to be certain, to know, or to believe such-and-such. In essays 6, 7 and 8, we see what happens when this attempt is made with religious concepts. For example, with respect to revelations, one is led either to the unintelligible notion of self-authenticating revelations, or to the conclusion that we must be necessarily agnostic about the truth of any revelation. Similarly, we are deprived of any authoritative context in which claims concerning miracles can be discussed. Once again, epistemic divides separate us from the notions of revelations and miracles. Epistemic divides may also separate us from an intelligible notion of the self. In essays 9, 10 and 11, we see how the notion of the soul can become a metaphysical abstraction. The self of solipsism obscures the connection between T and the realisation of a world, my world, which death will end. Instead, immortality is turned into a hypothesis, one pursued, sometimes, by trying to turn a seance into a science. In short, we are offered a language in which to discuss the immortality of the soul which ignores the soul in the words of religion. Epistemic divides can only be closed if we pay attention to concept-formation in religion. In essays 12 and 13 we see how intellectualisation and romanticisation can obscure what conceptformation comes to, not only in religion, but in the very different context of sense perception too. Notice that I have talked of epistemic divides separating us from 'God', not from God. This is because I am concerned in these essays with philosophical analyses which rob us of the sense of religious beliefs. Issues of sense are logically prior to issues of truth and falsity. It is only when we appreciate the sense of religious beliefs that we can see what calling them true or false comes to. In the fourteenth essay, I argue that truth in religion is confessional in character. To fail to appreciate this detracts, not only from religious belief, but from rejection of religion also. Many of my fellow philosophers are engaged in either

Xll Preface establishing the truth, the falsity, or the meaninglessness of religious belief. In the final essay of the collection, I argue that we need a sensibility in the philosophy of religion which transcends the distinction between belief and unbelief. In fact, it is a sensibility which, I hope, is present throughout the collection; a sensibility which can be content with nothing less than the recovery of religious concepts from those epistemic divides which separate us from them.