Religious Beliefs as Pictures

American Academy of Religion

Religious Beliefs as PicturesAuthor(s): Herbert BurhennSource: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 42, No. 2 (Jun., 1974), pp. 326-335Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1460695 .

Accessed: 17/06/2014 19:38

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Oxford University Press and American Academy of Religion are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserveand extend access to Journal of the American Academy of Religion.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.49 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 19:38:02 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=oup

http://www.jstor.org/stable/1460695?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Religious Beliefs as Pictures

HERBERT BURHENN

IN HIS "Lectures on Religious Belief" Ludwig Wittgenstein suggests several times that certain religious beliefs, especially belief in a Last Judgment, can be thought of as pictures - that they function in ways similar to pictures.1

Recently the Welsh philosopher D. Z. Phillips has used this same analogy, with

explicit reference to Wittgenstein, in the course of his own efforts to explicate the nature of religious belief.2 I should like to examine here the analogy between religious beliefs and pictures, as developed by these two philosophers.

My primary concern will be with Phillips, since his writings on religious matters are far more voluminous and since his position is still very much in the

process of developing. But Phillips' acknowledged dependence on Wittgenstein and his frequent references to him will require that I look also at the latter's work. For the purposes of this paper, however, I shall limit myself to the "Lec- tures on Religious Belief" since this is the only place in his writings where

Wittgenstein develops the analogy of religious beliefs to pictures. It may be helpful, by way of introduction, to ask what general purpose

Phillips has in pursuing the comparison of religious beliefs to pictures." In virtually all of his published writings on religion, he is concerned to steer between a philosophical Scylla and Charybdis: regarding religious beliefs as empirical

x These lectures appear in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversation on Aes- thetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966), pp. 53-72. This volume will henceforth be referred to as L&C.

'Three works of Phillips are relevant here - his two monographs, The Concept of Prayer (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965) and Death and Immortality (London: Macmillan, 1970), and a collection of essays entitled Faith and Philosophical Enquiry (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970) (henceforth CP, DI, and FPE, respectively).

"I see no reasonable possibility of answering this question about Wittgenstein's "Lec- tures on Religious Belief." This document was constructed from students' notes and is at best fragmentary. To even the casual observer it is obvious that Wittgenstein was proceed- ing in these lectures in a highly tentative and piecemeal way (even more so than in those works which he left in written form). Certainly no "theory" of religious belief or even

program for studying it emerges from these lectures.

HERBERT BURHENN (Ph.D., Yale) is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religion at the Chattanooga campus of the University of Tennessee. His recent publications include

"Pannenberg's Argument for the Historicity of the Resurrection," JAAR 40 (September 1972) and "Narrative Explanation and Redescription," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 3 (March 1974).

326



RELIGIOUS BELIEFS AS PICTURES 327

hypotheses4 and regarding them as expressions of human attitudes or as absolute

value-judgments (FPE, p. 111). He finds the analogy to pictures useful in dis-

tinguishing his own view of religious belief from both these extremes. This essay falls into two parts. In the first, I examine four features of reli-

gious beliefs which I believe Phillips and Wittgenstein attempt to bring out

through the comparison to pictures. In the second, I look at a test case - belief in a Last Judgment - and ask whether the comparison to a picture is plausible.

I

(1) The first feature of religious belief which both Wittgenstein and Phillips explicate through the comparison to pictures is the intimate relation between a

religious belief and the style of a person's life. This relation must be taken into account in judging whether a person accepts a particular belief. Wittgenstein says:

Suppose somebody made this guidance for this life: believing in the Last Judg- ment. Whenever he does anything, this is before his mind. In a way, how are we to know whether to say he believes this will happen or not?

Asking him is not enough. He will probably say he has proof. But he has what you might call an unshakeable belief. It will show, not by reasoning or by appeal to ordinary grounds for belief, but rather by regulating for in all his life.

This is a very much stronger fact - foregoing pleasures, always appealing to this picture. This in one sense must be called the firmest of all beliefs, because the man risks things on account of it which he would not do on things which are by far better established for him .... (L&C, pp. 53-54)

Acceptance of a religious belief is comparable to using a picture as a guide for one's life. Rejecting the belief would be like not using the picture. Acceptance or rejection of the belief is unlike a purely intellectual or theoretical assent or

rejection, which may have no consequences for a person's mode of life. Not only the acceptance, however, but also the meaning of a religious belief

must be judged by reference to the believer's mode of life and his use of the belief in his life. In order to understand the meaning of a picture, we must understand the technique for using it. Wittgenstein takes up the example of Michelangelo's "The Creation of Adam." Only if we understand the technique of using this painting can we "call the man in that queer blanket 'God.' " We must understand the relationship between the picture and what it purports to represent. We must see, for example, that this picture of God creating Adam has a very different role from pictures of Biblical subjects (L&C, p. 63). Wittgenstein introduces the example of Michelangelo's painting in the context of discussing the belief

'At no point in his published writings does Phillips explain what he means by denying that religious beliefs are empirical hypotheses. He sometimes uses slightly different ter- minology to make what seems to be the same point: religious beliefs are not "empirical propositions" (FPE, p. 111); belief in the Last Judgment is not a "testable hypothesis" (FPE, p. 90); there is no "theoretical understanding" of the reality of God (FPE, p. 26).



328 HERBERT BURHENN

that "God created man." The implication is clear: the meaning of this belief also depends on a technique for using it. And that technique differs as much from the technique for using stories of patriarchs and prophets as the technique for using "The Creation of Adam" differs from that for using pictures of patriarchs and prophets.

(2) A recurrent theme in Wittgenstein's "Lectures" is that religious beliefs are radically different from empirical claims, especially the empirical claims of science. He suggests that such concepts as "opinion," "hypothesis," "probability," and "knowing" are inappropriate to religious matters (L&C, p. 57). He notes that "believe" functions very differently in religious discourse than it does ordinarily, for we should not reply to the religious believer, "You only believe --oh well.. ." (L&C, pp. 59-60). Phillips connects this emphasis of Wittgenstein's with the comparison of religious beliefs to pictures:

... the difference between a man who does and a man who does not believe in God is like the difference between a man who does and a man who does not believe in a picture. But what does believing in a picture amount to? Is it like believing in a hypothesis? Certainly not. As Wittgenstein says, "The whole weight may be in the picture." ... "recognition of a belief" . . . does not in- volve the weighing of evidence or reasoning to a conclusion. What it does in- volve is seeing how the belief regulates a person's life. (FPE, p. 89)

This insistence that recognition of a belief involves processes different from test- ing or establishing an empirical claim fits into Phillips' broader project of showing "the diversity of criteria of rationality," a task he considers an essential prolegomenon to the philosophy of religion (FPE, p. 17). The analogy between religious beliefs and pictures is but one of many ways in which he tries to carry out this task.

(3) A third feature of religious belief, closely related to the preceding one, is found in Wittgenstein's claim that our usual criteria for contradiction, for op- position, and for similarity are not applicable in the case of at least certain religious beliefs. Very near the beginning of the "Lectures on Religious Belief," Wittgenstein offers the following observation:

Suppose that someone believed in the Last Judgment, and I don't, does this mean that I believe the opposite to him, just that there won't be such a thing? I would say: "not at all, or not always." (L&C, p. 53)

He later remarks on the same issue: "I can't contradict that person. . ... My normal technique of language leaves me" (L&C, p. 55). Likewise he is puzzled about the criteria for "meaning the same" when one talks about belief or disbelief in a Judgment Day (L&C, p. 58).

In at least some cases of people disagreeing about a religious belief, Wittgen- stein argues, the disagreement is best construed not as direct contradiction but as the result of using different pictures. Contrasting himself with someone who thinks of sickness as punishment, he observes: "I think differently, in a different




way. I say different things to myself. I have different pictures" (L&C, p. 55). Likewise, our usual notions of agreement and near agreement are skewed in the case of religious belief:

Suppose someone were a believer and said: "I believe in a Last Judgment," and I said: "Well, I'm not so sure. Possibly." You would say that there is an enor- mous gulf between us. If he said "There is a German aeroplane overhead," and I said "Possibly. I'm not so sure," you'd say we were fairly near. (L&C, p. 53)

In the case of an empirical claim, a person may hold one of three positions: p ("There is a German aeroplane overhead"), possibly p, and -p. But in the case of belief in a Last Judgment the corresponding positions would have to be distinguished as follows: using picture X, using picture Y, and using picture Z. Criteria of contradiction and agreement are not readily apparent in the latter case. This, I take it, is what Wittgenstein means by his subsequent reference to being on different planes (L&C, p. 53).

Phillips introduces the Wittgensteinian concepts "language-game" and "form of life" to account for the lack of contradiction between what appear to be opposing religious positions. The opposing parties are not playing the same language-game or participating in the same form of life (FPE, pp. 114-15). Only within the same language-game or form of life can one have contradiction or can one "mean the same." Consequently, contradiction or meaning the same are notions which are inapplicable, for example, to the disagreement between believer and non-believer.

Phillips' strategy of describing religious beliefs as distinctive language-games has been criticized by several philosophers for its apparent suggestion that religious beliefs are esoteric and are isolated from other kinds of human behavior.5 In his most recent writings Phillips has repeatedly insisted that this criticism stems from a misunderstanding of his position. He recognizes a relationship of partial dependence between religious beliefs and non-religious facts (FPE, p. 101), and he denies that the fact that a belief is religious permits it to "violate the facts or distort our apprehension of situations. . ." (FPE, pp. 98-99). But these strictures, he maintains, do not interfere with regarding religious beliefs as distinctive language-games so long as one does not "assume that the relation between religious beliefs and the non-religious facts is that between what is justified and its justification or that between a conclusion and its grounds" (FPE, p. 101). But Phillips still faces the task of delineating the precise nature of this relationship - a problem to which I shall return below.

(4) I noted earlier Phillips' desire to steer between what he regards as two unsatisfactory views of religious beliefs - treating them as empirical hypotheses and treating them as assertions of human attitudes. The first three features of

"See, for example, John Hick, "Sceptics and Believers," in Hick, ed., Faith and the Philosophers (London: Macmillan, 1966), pp. 235-50, and Kai Nielsen, "Wittgensteinian Fideism," Philosophy 42 (1967), pp. 191-209.



330 HERBERT BURHENN

religious beliefs that have been brought out by the analogy to pictures have clearly had to do with avoiding the former view. In fact, the distinction between reli-

gious beliefs and empirical hypotheses is virtually the dominant theme in Phillips' published writings on religion. His efforts to avoid treating religious beliefs as

expressions of human attitudes are far less prominent; indeed, his writings often

give the impression that he is espousing such treatment or perhaps looking on

religious beliefs as some kind of absolute value-judgments. The fourth feature of religious belief which Phillips attempts to elucidate by the comparison to

pictures is what I shall call the irreplaceability of religious beliefs. For him this feature is crucial, for it will help him to show that religious beliefs cannot simply be replaced by value-judgments or expressions of human attitudes.

Wittgenstein remarks on this fourth feature of religious belief near the end of the "Lectures":

Suppose someone, before going to China, when he might never see me again, said to me: "We might see one another after death" - would I necessarily say that I don't understand him? I might say [want to say] simply, "Yes. I understand him entirely."

Lewy: "In this case you might only mean that he expressed a certain attitude."

I would say "No, it isn't the same as saying 'I'm very fond of you' "- and it may not be the same as saying anything else. It says what it says. Why should you be able to substitute anything else? (L&C, pp. 70-71)

At least one of Wittgenstein's concerns in introducing this theme of irreplaceability, it appears, is to avoid the equation of religious beliefs with expressions of human attitudes:

"He could just as well have said so and so" - this [remark] is foreshadowed by the word "attitude." He couldn't just as well have said something else. (L&C, p. 71).

Wittgenstein then proceeds to connect irreplaceability with pictures. For some

pictures we can readily substitute others, with no important change in meaning. But for others no such substitution is possible. This, I believe, is the import of his remark: "The whole weight may be in the picture" (L&C, p. 72).

Phillips argues that what distinguishes religious beliefs from expressions of human attitudes is the fact that beliefs, as pictures, have a life of their own. They cannot simply be invented - by theologians, for example --because such inven- tion would constitute "a curious reversal of the emphasis needed in religion": believers want to say not that they judge the pictures, but that the pictures meas- ure them (FPE, p. 117). Correspondingly, when a picture loses its force and ceases to sustain people religiously, "something dies with it, and there can be no substitute for that which dies with the picture" (FPE, p. 119). Sometimes, when the original force of a picture is lost, it acquires a new force, that of a literal picture, which Phillips regards simply as a matter of superstition (PPE, p. 116). This in fact is what he believes to be happening to our picture of immortality




(DI, p. 78). To understand what is lost when a picture dies, we must realize that we do not have a conception of the religious meaning of the picture which is separable from the picture. We do not, for example, have a notion of divinity apart from our "image of God" against which that image can be evaluated (FPE, p. 119). This is also Wittgenstein's point when, discussing how one learns the word "God" from pictures, he observes: "I wasn't shown [that which the picture pictured]" (L&C, p. 59).

II

I should like now to examine as a test case belief in a Last Judgment and to comment on the accuracy of the four preceding features as descriptions of that belief. This particular case is chosen, of course, because of Wittgenstein's references to it and because Phillips has recently published a monograph on escha- tology.

(1) It seems to me difficult to deny the close relationship between belief in a Last Judgment and the role of that belief in the believer's life, with regard to judging both whether the belief has been accepted and what it means. I find it helpful in this context to contrast belief in a Last Judgment with scientific or quasi-scientific speculation about the end of life on Earth or the end of the planet Earth itself. Certainly the nature of the end of human history envisioned by scientific speculation is very different from that usually associated with a Last Judgment. Likewise a Last Judgment is generally thought of as part of an overall divine plan that also covers the beginning and subsequent course of human life. Scientific speculation about the end need not include any reference to the beginning of human life or any assumptions about its ultimate purpose. The contrast between these two views of the end, however, also extends to how they might function respectively in a person's life. Scientific speculation could be associated with various kinds of attitudes toward life - with despair, with nihil- ism, perhaps with some form of stoicism. It is possible and indeed likely, however, that for many people such speculation is primarily a matter of curiosity (unless they expect the end within their own lifetime, of course). The acceptance of one or another conception of the end may have no influence on how they live on a day-to-day basis. It may play no role in determining the values they pursue. In contrast, religious belief in a Last Judgment could hardly be a matter of curiosity in this sense. To believe in a Last Judgment is to be deeply concerned about the quality of one's life - a theme often reiterated by Phillips -

for a Last Judgment has to do with giving an account of one's life. It is inter- esting to note in this connection the great amount of space devoted in the NT literature to how one should live iA light of the expectation of a Judgment and the relative paucity of speculation about the exact nature of that coming event.

If the meaning of belief in a Last Judgment is closely tied to the role of this belief in the believer's life, does this imply that the meaning of the belief is in some sense exhausted by reference to its role - that once we have understood the role, we have understood the belief? Phillips would probably be unhappy with



332 HERBERT BURHENN

this question: it suggests too simplistic an equation of meaning with use. But

Phillips' repeated insistence that at least some religious beliefs have no hypothet- ical or theoretical content would seem to point towards an affirmative answer to the question. We shall see this issue emerge again below.

(2) I find no reason for quibbling with Wittgenstein's observation that such

concepts as "hypothesis," "opinion," and "probability" are inappropriate to a discussion of belief in a Last Judgment. But when he mentions the inappropri- ateness of evidence for this belief, I begin to balk. Wittgenstein notes the

absurdity of appealing to a dream as evidence for a Last Judgment:

If you compare it with anything in Science which we call evidence, you can't credit that anyone could soberly argue: "Well, I had this dream . . . therefore ... Last Judgment." (L&C, p. 61)

Phillips goes further and maintains that not only "the weighing of evidence" but also "reasoning to a conclusion" are irrelevant to "recognition of a belief" (FPE, p. 89). He even describes belief in a Last Judgment as an absolute:

Beliefs, such as belief in the Last Judgment, are not testable hypotheses, but absolutes for believers in so far as they predominate in and determine much of their thinking. The absolute beliefs are the criteria, not the object of assessment. (FPE, p. 90)

Now it is certainly true that there is a difference between the kinds of considerations which bear on a scientific question and the kinds which bear on belief in a Last Judgment. But I find it very misleading to say that evidence has no

bearing on this belief." If one asked a Christian why he believed in a Last

Judgment, he would surely refer to considerations of an evidential nature. He would no doubt appeal to the Scriptures, to the teachings of the Church, or to the

message of Jesus himself and then defend his confidence in these, perhaps with reference to his own experience. His chain of argument would certainly be more

complex than Wittgenstein's example of appealing to a dream suggests. I am likewise puzzled by Phillips' claim that belief in the Last Judgment is an absolute and therefore not an object of assessment, in light of the amount of debate about this belief in the history of the Jewish and Christian traditions. Unfortunately, he does not explain in any detail what he means by "absolute" in this context.7

6 Phillips concedes that evidence is relevant to some beliefs, but belief in a Last Judg-

ment is apparently not among them (FPE, pp. 87-88). 'In one of his essays Phillips borrows an example from Wittgenstein's "A Lecture on

Ethics" to illustrate the contrast between absolute and relative judgments: Supposing that I could play tennis and one of you saw me playing and said, "Well, you play pretty badly," and suppose I answered, "I know I'm playing badly, but I don't want to play any better," all the other man could say would be: "Ah, then that's all right." But suppose I had told one of you a preposterous lie and he came up to me and said, "You're behaving like a beast," and then I were to say, "I know I behave badly, but then I don't want to behave any better,"




There is a further aspect of belief in a Last Judgment which complicates this issue. One would not ordinarily believe (or disbelieve) in a Last Judgment by itself. In the Jewish and Christian traditions this belief is part of a larger pattern of belief that includes the creation and the redemption, as well as the consumma- tion, of the world. Most considerations that would be relevant to belief in a Last Judgment would bear on belief in this larger pattern as well. If one is

looking for "absolutes," I should find it more credible to call belief in this entire

picture of the history and purpose of the world an absolute than to ascribe such status to belief in a Last Judgment alone.

(3) The claim that one cannot contradict belief in a Last Judgment seems to me the most puzzling of the features of religious belief under discussion here. What Wittgenstein says about non-contradiction is at least prima facie very odd and implausible. Most people would not feel the same difficulty in contradicting the believer in a Last Judgment.

Wittgenstein's point depends on a very close relationship between belief in a Last Judgment and the believer's behavior or mode of life. We do not ordinarily speak of the relationship of contradiction between two modes of life. The

analogy to pictures is helpful here also, for we should not usually speak of con-

tradicting a picture. What must be resisted from Wittgenstein's standpoint, of course, is the propositional explication of the belief or picture. For as soon as we can treat the belief as equivalent to a proposition or group of propositions, then we can easily derive the contradictory.

But this way of putting the matter is probably unfair. What Wittgenstein (and, of course, Phillips) is resisting is propositional explication in a very specific sense - explication which implies not only that propositions can be derived from

religious beliefs, but also that these propositions express the beliefs adequately and independently of reference to the believer's behavior. Religious beliefs, unlike scientific claims, have the logical peculiarity that such separation of proposition and mode of life cannot be accomplished. This peculiarity, it would seem, is what Phillips believes to be distinctive about religious language-games. It is what he refers to when he talks of theology's having a special personal element

could he then say, "Ah, then that's all right?" Certainly not; he would say, "Well, you ought to want to behave better." Here you have an absolute judgment of value, whereas the first instance was one of a relative judgment (quoted in FPE, p. 80).

Phillips goes on to suggest that belief in God is an absolute in this sense: it must not be treated as a means to a further end. One should not, for example, believe in God because he happens to be the most powerful being. But it is hardly obvious how this line of reasoning could be transferred to belief in a Last Judgment. The problem, I suspect, is that Phillips treats believing in God as equivalent to being religious. He regards as the most genuine form of atheism "the recognition that religion means nothing to one" (CP, p. 19). Now it is clearly problematic to ask for a justification of religion in general. But believing in a Last Judgment cannot simply be equated with being religious, and one may very well

attempt to justify belief in a Last Judgment by reference to a broader pattern of belief.



334 HERBERT BURHENN

(FPE, p. 9). Neither Phillips nor Wittgenstein, however, has addressed himself in detail to the question of how changes in matters expressed propositionally influence religious beliefs. One could hardly deny, for example, that the develop- ment of historical-critical study of the Bible has affected the beliefs of many per- sons. Yet when Phillips discusses how non-religious facts bear on religious beliefs, he seems scrupulously to avoid what are usually called intellectual obstacles to belief.8 Until he addresses himself to this matter, his frequent complaints about being misunderstood by his critics will remain at the level of carping.

(4) The thesis that religious beliefs are irreplaceable seems to me subject to a difficulty I mentioned above - namely, that it is more plausibly applied to the Jewish or Christian accounts of man's origin and destiny than to belief in a Last Judgment alone. At the end of his monograph Death and Immortality, Phillips acknowledges that pictures of immortality are probably dying today - that fewer and fewer people are making use of them. But if it is the case that they are dying, I should think it very doubtful that they are dying alone. They are most likely dying because other beliefs to which they are related are also dying. The shape of Jewish or Christian belief changes from age to age, of course. But this changing shape would seem to reflect changes in groups of interrelated beliefs rather than in isolated beliefs. More attention to these interrelationships would be a helpful dimension for Phillips to add to his work.

It is irresistibly tempting to suggest that what is irreplaceable about belief in a Last Judgment is the specific expectation about the future which is usually thought to accompany this belief. It is equally tempting to suggest that the mode of life associated with belief in the Last Judgment is a function of this expectation about the future. This would certainly be our usual view of the matter. Yet both Wittgenstein and Phillips seem determined to excise from belief in a Last Judg- ment all reference to the future. For Wittgenstein this determination may be connected with his view that the good life is a life lived wholly in the present, without hope or fear.9 Phillips seems to regard as superstitious belief in any kind of divine activity which does anything other than influence human attitudes.10 In another context he eliminates even the future dimension of hope:

s His most extended discussion of the relation between religious beliefs and non-religious facts is the essay entitled "Religious Beliefs and Language-Games" (FPE, pp. 77-110). He discusses intellectual obstacles to religious belief in other contexts, of course, but never for the purpose of showing how these obstacles alter religious beliefs.

'This view is most clearly stated by Wittgenstein in some of his writings from the Tractarian period. Note, for example, the following remarks from his Notebooks, 1914- 1916 (New York: Harper and Row, 1961):

A man who is happy must have no fear. Not even in face of death. Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy. (8.7.16) What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! (2.9.16)

A useful survey of the relevant references can be found in Eddy Zemach, "Wittgenstein's Philosophy of the Mystical," Review of Metaphysics 18 (1964-65), pp. 38-57.

"0 See especially CP, chap. 6 and FPE, pp. 92-110.




The religious alternative to such despair is hope. But the believer's hope is not

hope for anything, moral improvement, for example, since he has already recog- nized that there is no hope for that. It is simply hope, hope in the sense of the

ability to live with himself. (CP, p. 67)

Here again the propositional explication of religious belief is the crucial issue.

It should be obvious that the analogy between religious beliefs and pictures is developed in a systematic way by neither Wittgenstein nor Phillips. Thus the patchwork character of this essay. Nevertheless, Phillips has placed far more emphasis on this analogy in his recent writings (especially Death and Immor- tality) than in his earlier work, and the analogy has thus become crucial for any general assessment of his position. I hope that my brief treatment of the analogy has indicated both the strengths and weaknesses of his efforts to date.



Documents

Religious Beliefs as Pictures