On Thu, 30 Dec 2004, Jon Johanning wrote:
> On Dec 30, 2004, at 11:42 AM, Chris Doss wrote:
>> I think Wittgenstein is not on your side in this, BTW.
>> (He certainly took religion very seriously.)
>
> He did, and so do I, in a fashion. But do you known any of his writings in
> which he took the proofs for the existence of God seriously, or stated that
> the monotheistic God exists? If you do, I'd certainly like to be pointed to
> them.
>
I'm a big Ludwig fan, so I'll jump in on Chris here: if you asked LW the question above, he'd say it's a silly philosopher's question. What interested him here was how people treat statements as truths in a given language game. A statement is not a truth or certainty because it corresponds to reality (that's back to the Tractatus, which LW considered a colossal mistake). Rather, when we say something is certain or true, it's our way of saying we can't imagine otherwise, given the language game we're playing. In On Certainty, he uses the metaphor of the hinge: true/certain statements are hinges upon which our doubts and questions turn. (If everything is doubted, then we can't engage in any language games at all!)
Now, are these "hinges" of certain statements--e.g., "There is a God", "I have two hands"--true in the sense that Jon wants to posit? That question is irrelevant to LW. To understand the use of these hinges, we need to analyze the language games, and the question of whether or not the language games refer to reality does not help us to understand why people treat certain ideas as hinges of certainty about which their doubts turn. (Instead, we need to look to socialization, culture, group interaction-- what he called "forms of life"--that make possible and are reinforced by the everyday use of language.)
So what interests LW is how claims like "God exists" become certain statements in specific forms of life. In contrast, creating or refuting philosophical arguments about the existence of God was in LW's view a ridiculous waste of time.
Miles