Introduction
Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Austrian philosopher, made a great contribution to the study of logic, philosophy of mind, and language. He supposes that the subject of knowing how to go on is somewhat of a labyrinth. There are aspects of it that Wittgenstein handles more darkly than others, but because various strands of the subject are woven together in his discourse, it can be difficult to disentangle even the aspects that are in themselves clear (Penalver, 1997). The idea of an independent standard is a picturesque expression of the care and precision that is demanded of us in the training. People are taught to proceed diligently as if God’s eye were upon us; but if that were true, the eye would be that of someone who has learned our mathematics, gets his answers by calculation and gets them right if he does as we do; but perhaps is not so prone to the blunders we sometimes inattentively commit. Taking into account his philosophical conceptions and ideas, it is possible to assume that Wittgenstein would believe that “it is irrational to believe in God”.
Main body
It is irrational to believe in God because we cannot perceive it and see it. According to Wittgenstein while we might, if we thought the only way of explaining the gesture is by pointing, reckon that it is unteachable, and there must be some happy genetic adaptation that makes people construe it in the way we wish, it is not so clear that in fact, we would have either to abandon anyone who lacked this happy adaptation or in any case not correct his mistake in any way that we could call ‘teaching’ or ‘showing’. It would not have to be done, even if it could, with drugs, radiation, or psycho-analysis: there are dozens of things we could try, none of which is sure to work, but any of which might succeed (Dienstag, 1998).
The account requires people to say that ‘God created Adam’ means something, it is just mysterious, and probably impossible for us to say, what it means; and all the indications so far have been that Wittgenstein would not accept this. In the case of each of these interpretations, there is something against attributing it to Wittgenstein, but nothing very conclusive; and nothing much that counts in favor. Perhaps he had no particular ‘service’ in mind, and his aim was to set us to thinking about what service, in any sense, the words and pictures performed, or whether indeed they performed any; because it is at least clear that any service they perform will be of a peculiar nature (Read & Crary 2000).
If it is sometimes true that a person has an agile mind, then (we think) there must be minds, and there is a question what they are; and if wanting to know what is going on in his head is wanting to know what he is thinking, then (we think) thinking must be something that goes on in the head (Read & Crary 2000). Since these expressions have settled into the language, and seem to be among the primary, plain ways we have of expressing ourselves, we may use them without any awareness of their figurative character, and good-heartedly become puzzled for example about what minds are, or about what it is that goes on in his head that leads him to say he was thinking of such and such. In this way pictures, figures of speech may force themselves (Dienstag, 1998). It would be a rare picture of a person who ‘has no soul’ that showed he had none; but if a film of his behavior in a number of cases showed it, here again, it would be aspects of the picture of a body that showed the want of a soul. In this figure of speech, we make as if we inferred the absence of something from the behavior, but people could no more depict what we pretend is lacking than we could depict the mind, in the back of which someone had the intention to write a letter (Read & Crary 2000). The soul here is conceived as the agency, having which a person will have a certain sensibility; but if we depict the sensibility, for example showing a person registering delight over a desert landscape, we will not thereby have depicted the agency figuratively responsible for his delighting in such things (Sharkey, 2007). Hence if pictures of the human body may illustrate secular uses of the word ‘soul’, it is still not true that the picture of a body is a picture of a soul.
Sometimes our troubles in philosophy arise from supposing that there is an object we are talking about in using this or that word, when in fact there is none. Given anyway that there are words of this kind, it is not clear whether the mistaken fancy that there is an object they are used to talk about is a case of an idea of a private object, and could be got rid of in the way Wittgenstein prescribes (Sharkey, 2007). There are behaviouristic analyses of these words, which do not involve a concept of privacy, and mentalistic analyses do not, just as such, require us to suppose that the object is private either, at least in the sense of being inherently indescribable. Thinking then is a special kind of mental zapping we do, that has such effects as helping us decide, putting us in a better position to discuss, enabling us to devise useful suggestions, and so on; and whatever someone has done, if it does not have the distinctive quality this zapping has, he has not been thinking (Hacker, 2001). Suppose the attitude included expecting that he might be hurt by unkind remarks, intrigued by subtle points, touched by sad stories. It is part of a picture of a soul that we have, that it is through having one of them that a person may be affected in these ways. This comes out in our descriptions of people as soulful, and soulless (Fann, 1969).
Following Wittgenstein’s theory of language, it is possible to say that “our use of language does in fact evolve unpredictably over time. The indeterminacy of this evolutionary process can be seen in the divergent evolution of word use between isolated members of the same linguistic group faced with similar environmental factors” (Penalver 1997, p. 791). More sophisticated accounts of the ‘service’ of the words and pictures might be contrived. For example, it is not absolutely implausible to say that religious pictures and doctrines give us something, the contemplation of which or the repetition of which is a specifically religious act, an act deriving a peculiar pathos from the fact that we know we do not understand the words, or know that God is not as depicted in the paintings (Hacker, 2001). In #350 Wittgenstein writes:
“But if I suppose that someone is in pain, then I am simply supposing that he has just the same as I have so often had.” — That gets us no further. It is as if I were to say: “You surely know what ‘It is 5 o’clock here’ means; so you also know what ‘It’s 5 o’clock on the sun’ means. It means simply that it is just the same there as it is here when it is 5 o’clock.” — The explanation by means of identity does not work here”
Religious wonder can focus on the painting, make it do duty for God, just because we feel the absurdity of believing that this is all that human beings can do by way of depicting the divinity. It is a striking fact that a painting like Michelangelo’s of God creating Adam, although ridiculous and known by believers and unbelievers alike to be ridiculous, should, surrounded as it is by disclaimers of its verisimilitude, nevertheless have a place of honor on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (Fann, 1969).
It is from the first of senses of ‘circumstances’ that we might derive the awful argument that some tribes demonstrably have a chief, chiefs undoubtedly have consciousness, so consciousness exists; but not only is this argument too dismal to consider: even if it were being contemplated, it would hardly be necessary to remind us that there are some things that would show that a tribe has a chief. No one would be so contentious as to question that part of the argument (Guttenplan et al 2003). If we, therefore, move on to the second sense of ‘circumstances’, it seems equally unnecessary to remind us that there are occasions on which we might mention that a tribe has a chief, or what those occasions are, before saying that a chief surely has consciousness. In the case in which there is a problem, on the other hand, it seems absurd to suppose that activity either is or is not a game and that whether it is can be ascertained by a review of its similarities to games — as if God knew, but we had to figure it out. Metaphorical and analogical uses of words are indeed often ways of talking; but not standard in the sense in which it is standard to call chess a game. The predicate ‘is just a game’ is standard in the sense that it is one we have all heard many times applied to various things philosophy, politics, the writing of examinations. It is not new or puzzling to us, and we know what to make of it. Although he had certain scruples, both about saying that he does not believe and that he does not understand religious teaching, he is clearly altogether unwilling to say that he does believe or does understand it except presumably in the foregoing sense (Hacker, 2001). He seemed to mean by this that the Last Judgment, the soul’s survival of death, and so on, are no part of his thinking: they are not even excluded from it. He thinks in an entirely different way. Wittgenstein “helps us to see the frictionlessness of the standards for linguistic success assumed by Borges’s commentators: they are based on the confused expectation that language not merely represent the world but that it reproduce it; language is asked to be a medium that does not mediate” (Sharkey 2007, p. 249).
Following Williams (1999) the suggestion then is that Wittgenstein was saying that while the imaginings and pictures by common consent do not explain the meaning, nothing else does. This might have been the point of the far from the transparent remark, crudely reported one supposes: ‘The word “God” is amongst the earliest learned — pictures and catechisms, etc. But not the same consequences as with pictures of aunts: whereas with pictures of aunts, there is here the aunt and there the picture, with religious pictures there is never anything corresponding to the aunt (Hacker, 2001). If that is the point intended, the analogy is not well crafted, because it suggests too strongly that not believing that God created Adam is not believing that an event occurred quite like what the picture by that name depicts, while people who believe that God created Adam do not believe that an event occurred of which the picture is a fair likeness.
The soul is said to leave the body. Then, in order to exclude any similarity to the body, any sort of idea that some gaseous thing is meant, the soul is said to be incorporeal, non-spatial; but with the word ‘leave’ one has already said it all.
A figurative expression might be said to ‘do a service’: it conveys something different from what it appears to say, and it would be fair enough to call what one is conveying by using the figure ‘the service’. However, as we have seen, religious teachings are not figurative, either in the sense that they say something quite ordinary, such as that we will be remembered after we die, or that they say something less ordinary, that could be explained in some other way. There is no well-understood point the words or pictures make that is different from the representations they appear to make, even if both with figurative expressions and religious teachings, the apparent representation will be denied (Guttenplan et al 2003). Hacker ( 2001) gives the following example: we say ‘I understood in my heart, but deny that we mean that something called ‘understanding’ occurred in the organ that pumps blood; people say both that the soul leaves the body and that it is incorporeal, non-spatial, and hence should deny that it goes anywhere; but whereas we can explain what we meant by ‘I understood in my heart, we cannot make the idea of the soul’s departure from the body any clearer. In this sense of ‘service’, there is, therefore, no service performed by the words or the pictures. They might still, however, perform the same service: none.
Being told about the soul’s survival, the last judgment, the mansions of heaven, or the torments of hell will serve to comfort the bereaved, threaten the sinner, or reassure the virtuous. However, threatening sinners in this way is not like threatening rapists with imprisonment, and comforting the bereaved in this way is not like assuring someone that her son is still alive, unless we can say what is threatened and what will suffer it, or what still lives when someone has died. In the absence of explanations of what it means to say for example that the soul exists when the body has disintegrated, we are therefore faced with a choice (Hacker 2001). if we treat the ‘service’ of the words and pictures as that of comforting and threatening, between saying that a hoax is being perpetrated, which relies on simple people’s supposing that the teachings have a meaning like ordinary threats and assurances, when in fact they do not mean anything — and saying that the teachings just are soothing and disturbing, the way music can be, not because of what they say, but perhaps because they have been intoned repeatedly in ways that condition us to shudder or relax on hearing them. According to Kelly (1995).
“religious interpretation of these experiences makes it clear that what he is talking about here is what might be called a mode of experience in which things are seen from a particular perspective. Thus in discussing what is involved in seeing a fact in the world as a miracle, he rejects the idea that science has proven that there are no miracles and says, “The truth is that the scientific way of looking at a fact is not the way to look at it as a miracle” (567).
When anyone says he does not believe that God sits on a throne or has a face, or that heaven is above and hell below, devotees say they do not believe these things either. Defenders of religion must at every turn disavow crude interpretations, but while we can make a very long catalog of these things, we never seem to come to what is true (Dienstag 1998). One can say that ‘sitting on the right hand of God’, ‘descending into hell’, and so on are metaphors, but they are unlike an average metaphor in that it proves impossible to say what they are metaphorical for. Even more rarely are they such that, if they were believed, it would any longer make sense to continue the eternal round of prayer and praise?
“However, the experience of feeling safe in the hands of God or being under God’s judgment also includes the notion of the world as a totality; for it involves seeing ourselves as creatures standing in some sort of relationship to our creator, who is distinct from his creation” (Kelly 1995, p. 567 ).
While sophisticated theories of religious meaning are sometimes contrived, their intelligibility tends to be no improvement on what they purport to interpret, and they can rarely be said to represent what the man in the pew, or in the pulpit either, believes.
Conclusion
In sum, Wittgenstein would believe that “it is irrational to believe in God because we cannot touch, perceive or see it. One cannot tell a person what he means, and certainly not insist on it in the face of his denial; but it is possible to suppose that something like the following was what Wittgenstein had in mind: one of the cases in which we can say we understand is when we have seen through something, and there is a way of seeing through some religious teachings that starts, as Wittgenstein does, with what we imagine in connection with them, and the paintings we may be shown.
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