Religious Belief and Religious Skepticism by Gary Gutting (review)

BOOK Bli:VIEWS 167 Religwus Belief and Religious Skepticism. By GARY GUTTING, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982. Pp. 192. $15.95 (cloth); $9.95 (paper). This small but weighty volume consists of two parts. In the first the author argues that religious beliefs need justification, that the autonomy of religious language-games is not enough to protect them from justificatory demands, and that philosophers have yet to show that religious claims are ' properly basic ' or beyond the reach of evidence. In the second he first considers a cumulative evidential case for theism and then argues that the belief in God can best be grounded in appeals to experience. Both parts contain a number of very fine points, but also, in my opinion, some weaknesses. Gutting begins by noting that the wide disagreement in religious matters creates a prima facie demand for believers to justify their claims, but he pauses to consider the Wittgensteinian point that believers and nonbelievers do not share a common understanding of the claims at issue. He grants this point but refines it, saying that nonbelievers can perfectly well understand the moves in a religious language-game and still lack an understanding of the transitions (a term borrowed from Wilfrid Sellars) into and out of the game. One learns transitions into a religious language-game in connection with religious experiences, so that one cannot have certain concepts without the accompanying experiences. Here it is hard to see how one can lack certain religious concepts and still be said to understand all the moves in a language-game. Yet, this point aside, Gutting argues that nonbelievers can understand enough to question not only the consistency of the ' game' but also the veridicality of the underlying experiences. He then considers the claim-also attributed to Wittgenstein-that religious beliefs cannot be justified because they belong to the framework of basic propositions which we rely on in justifying other claims. He accepts the idea that some propositions must be basic in this sense, and he seems to accept the idea that these basic propositions are rooted in the language user's practice. But he does not accept the conclusion that religious beliefs are basic; for there may well be other more fundamental propositions in terms of which religious claims stand to be justified. For reasons which are unclear, he thinks that a detailed account of religious language is required to settle the question of just how basic religious assertions are. Yet the question of whether they are more basic than other propositions would seem to require a detailed analysis of these other claims as well-all of which makes one wonder what exactly he means by a' detailed' account. 168 BOOK UVIEWS He does give one example of a detailed account-David Burrell's exposition of St. Thomas Aquinas's views (Exercises in Religious Understanding )-but the question of how 'basic' religious claims are gets lost in a welter of other complications. Burrell's discussion of Aquinas is supposed to be supportive of a Wittgensteinian treatment of religious belief because of Aquinas's claim that God cannot be described. Presumably , a God that cannot be described cannot be the object of justification either. Yet God-talk obviously must have some point, and once that point is explained we are back to the question of justification. Are religious claims about God justifiable or are they not f According to Burrell, Aquinas's famous five ways of proving God's existence are not proofs so much as attempts to show the explanatory power of the God hypothesis. Indeed, the God hypothesis is open to the same kind of justification as any metaphysical claim; it stands or falls with its explanatory power, fruitfulness, scope, comprehensiveness, etc. This, however, is plainly incompatible with the claim that religious beliefs are groundless, and so Gutting concludes that religious beliefs require justification, just as Aquinas thought. But the connection between this discussion and Wittgenstein 's treatment of religion is so remi;>te that Gutting's procedure amounts to little more than stating Aquinas's views (or Burrell's account of them) and then announcing that he prefers them. More surprising, Gutting, having discussed Aquinas...