The Existence of God and Language Games
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| James Hall |
James Hall's Knowledge, Belief, and Transcendence: Philosophical Problems in Religion (1975) parses arguments for and against traditional theism in excruciating detail, dotting every logical i and crossing every epistemological t with post-positivist precision to draw obvious conclusions. It's a mountainous labor to deliver a mouse, but that's not a bad thing. Somebody needed to consider it all in one place, and the process makes explicit many things that might have otherwise been sketchy intuitions. When I say obvious, I mean obvious to me. Most of Hall's conclusions are ones I have already drawn less rigorously already, and they may be obvious to other thoughtful adults as well, even to religious ones.
For instance, a priori proofs that move from definitions of God to supposed realities prove nothing beyond their own linguistic content. They are circular. On the other hand, a posteriori proofs of God from facts fail to account for all possible explanations. Take the argument from design: If design, then an intelligent designer. Design, therefore an intelligent designer. This would be compelling if its premise were true, but we know that orderly shapes, such as spirals in draining water, occur naturally where nobody imputes a designer, and the historical centerpiece for intelligent design, biological adaptation, has been naturalized by Darwin's natural selection. Besides, even if we allow an intelligent designer, this doesn't establish that he is the orthodox God. He might be the Satanic demiurge of Gnosticism or the indifferent watchmaker of Deism.
Mystical experiences and other feelings of God's presence have no public proof value. However impressive to their subjects, they can't be shared. Attempts to evade the disproofs of God from the problem of evil by claiming transcendence, placing God is beyond human understanding, end up making him irrelevant. Of course, Hall says, a transcendent God can't be disproved, but he has nothing to do with human beings. An entity that can't be detected or comprehended, in effect, doesn't exist.
After 160 fine-print pages minutely summarizing the rules of evidence and parsing theistic arguments, Hall arrives at a "Scottish verdict" with respect to the existence of the Abrahamic God: Not proven. Rational arguments for divine existence are, upon examination, scandalously flimsy, and arguments against divine existence--though stronger--are circumvented by a number of counter-arguments. Belief in God's existence need not be absurd, but the only rational, responsible position to take with respect to knowledge of God's existence is agnosticism.
This skeptical foundation and what James Hall builds on it fascinate me because of our similar backgrounds. We are both retired professors raised in small-town evangelical churches. Born less than a decade apart, we both attended Southern universities and were raised Baptist. Hall describes himself in his The Great Courses series The Philosophy of Religion (2003) as an agnostic Episcopalian (p. 12), which describes me. The difference is that he's a professional philosopher, and I'm an old English teacher who specialized in Tolkien.
In the last part of Knowledge, Belief, and Transcendence, Hall turns his argument to the question of how theological belief might be justified despite the fact that "God exists" is a cognitively empty statement: in other words, it doesn't signify any state of things that, even in principle, can be proven. Because its truth or falsity cannot be reliably shown, belief in God cannot be (to use the traditional epistemological formula) a justified true belief. It cannot be knowledge.
But Hall disagrees with both opponents of theism who dismiss it for this reason and supporters of theism who salvage belief by burning the bridges between secular philosophy and theology.
Hall's position is that those who dismiss theism because it is not cognitively verifiable make a category mistake by reading God exists as a truth-conditioned description. Cognitive statements, descriptive sentences that can be judged true or false, constitute only one of many categories of sentences. A question, for instance, may be relevant or justified (or not), but never true or false. Likewise a command may be warranted (or not) but never true or false. Similarly, a statement of speculation or prediction isn't true or false when stated but may become one of these later. Statements of value such as Christianity is good can never be proven true or false. People in religious arguments may (but rarely do) define criteria objectively enough to allow for truth-tests. They may set up clear game rules for the evaluation of religious systems and declare a winner. Until they do, all we have is projections of feeling in which neither side is true or false.
There are other categories of language such as cries, of pain or joy. There is performative language such as a wedding vow that creates a status change or not, well or badly, but it doesn't state cognitively verifiable fact. Statements of verifiable fact do constitute one language category, but most language is something else. Hall argues that the "existence" of God belongs to another category.
To understand the category to which Hall assigns God exists, we need an introduction to the theory of language games. There is no such thing as a frameless or ontologically absolute discourse. No claim is true or false outside a frame of reference that can be explicitly stated (but often is only implied) and establishes the rules of the cognitive "game" within which the claim is played.
Plane geometry, for example, proves postulates based on axioms and previously demonstrated postulates, called theorems. For two millennia the system perfected by Euclid was thought to be absolutely true even though it failed to describe spherical surfaces, where the shortest distance between two points is a curved line and parallel lines intersect. Descartes saw absolute certainty in geometry. Even Kant understood Euclidian space to be a universal category despite the fact that mathematicians knew that Euclid's Parallel Postulate had never been proved.
In the 19th century, however, a series of innovators constructed geometries without this postulate that described forms of curved space, and Einstein's General Theory of Relativity demonstrated that actual space was curved, bent by gravity. Euclidian geometry fails to describe large-scale reality. For centuries, philosophers answered the question, "Can we know unconditional truth?" with a yes and gave geometry as proof. Now, we understand geometry--or the various geometries--to be true only within the framework of of their particular axioms.
Subatomic particles likewise exist only as useful assumptions--as terms in the rules of a language game, not as verifiable things. The quarks in the Standard Model are all-but universally accepted because they explain and predict so many observable facts including phosphorescent flashes, electrical current, pulses in particle detectors, and tracks in Wilson cloud chambers. But nobody has ever seen an atom, much less a muon. Atomic particles are considered real, not because they are observable, but because, once they are incorporated in the rules of a mathematical game we call physics, observed facts match legal moves within that game.
Of course, notoriously, particles may not be particles at all, but waves, and seem to blink in and out of existence in a vacuum and have indeterminate, paradoxical quantum characteristics. As the search for a unified field theory continues, so-called particles (and waves) may end up being metaphors for states of vibrating four-dimensional strings. This is not to say that particles are fantasies. In the game of describing and predicting phenomena at a very small scale, subatomic particles are essential to the best rule-set known. They are "real" because they work.
There's no such thing as a true language game, Hall argues, just a better one. All games are invented. We cannot determine if a cognitive statement is true or false before implicitly or explicitly agreeing upon the rules of the game in which it is played--axioms and the laws of deductive logic, for instance, in the case of geometry. Evolution grounds biology, atomic theory grounds physics, and cosmic expansion grounds astronomy. To deny these grounds (this side of a paradigm shift) is not to argue within the science game but to resign from it. The foundation of a science is not what it proves true or false, but what determines truth or falsity in its successful practice. You may disagree with my moves in a chess game, but, if you disagree with the rules of chess, you aren't playing chess, but another game. So what rules ground the practice of religion?
Hall acknowledges that a variety forms of religion are practiced but chooses to narrow his discussion to ethical monotheism, which describes Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. He argues that God exists is not a postulate to be proven within this religious discourse, but an axiom. Traditional theistic discourse makes sense only if an ethical supreme being--admittedly not proven from outside the theology game--is assumed to exist. This is the price of admission. Assuming is not the same as believing but is a first step toward evaluation. Some religion games are toxic nonsense, and Hall asks the reader to discern whether the game-rules of ethical monotheism may facilitate organizing the realities of life in fruitful, consistent, and felicitous ways.
"Instead of nonsense, instead of auto-encouraging hoopla, we have a notion of religious discourse as a working enterprise which at least has some discernible, testable, even useful output" (Hall, p. 226). Even absent a testable reality corresponding to God, a theism game may frame life-benefits unattainable from the science games. It may confer meaning and purpose. In Hall's view, skeptics who shun religion because God can't be known to exist make a category error. The right question is, "not 'Do I know God exists? but 'Does taking the world under the rubric of theism illuminate or darken my perception and understanding? Does seeing events in a network of intention, fulfillment, and frustration achieve anything?'" (Hall, p. 229)
If you aspire to be wafted off to Gloryland when you die or hope for a miraculous cure at Lourdes, Hall's view may be deeply unsatisfactory. As an agnostic Episcopalian (at least in later life), he values ethical monotheism, not for its guarantees, but for its practical spiritual value. As a mythology eliciting a mind-set, it is an antidote to absurdity and anomie. To recite the creed is not to publish an autobiography of credulity, but to participate in a transformative ritual. We seem to be back (with philosophical apparatus) to my father's statement recalled at the beginning of this blog: he was a Christian because his father, the best man he ever knew, was (https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2019/10/baptist-boy.html). Hall values religion more for orthopraxy than orthodoxy, more for its effect on daily life than for its metaphysical truth.
Sources
Hall, James. Knowledge, Belief, and Transcendence: Philosophical Problems in Religion. Houghton Mifflin, 1975.
Hall, James. Philosophy of Religion. Video lectures and course guide. The Great Courses, 2003.
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