the epistemic status of beliefs that presuppose that existence? And if Christianity is based,
at least partly, on certain beliefs about the life, ministry, teaching, actions, death, and
resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, how could historical research into this be irrelevant to
the status of those religious commitments, even though it cannot settle the questions
decisively? Consider the price Phillips is willing to pay for this freedom from
vulnerability to “outside” considerations. He holds that there are different concepts of
truth, existence, and reality for different language games. In believing that it is true that
Jesus was raised from the dead on the third day, we are not using the same concept of
truth we use when wondering whether it is true that in 1200 bc the inhabitants of Crete
spoke a form of Greek. And in believing that God really exists, we are not using the same
notions of reality and existence that we use in asserting that King Arthur really existed
and denying that there really are any unicorns.
This is a high price indeed for being able to insulate religious discourse from contact with
its surroundings. It certainly doesn't feel as if we mean something different by “true,”
“real,” and “exist” in religious and nonreligious contexts. As for “true,” Phillips's position
could be defended by an epistemic conception of truth according to which the truth of a
belief amounts to some sort of favorable epistemic status for the belief, together with the
claim that epistemic criteria for religious beliefs are different from criteria for other
beliefs. But to restrict ourselves to the first of these claims, it comes into direct conflict
with the obvious point that it is a necessary and sufficient condition of its being true that
Jesus arose from the dead that Jesus did arise from the dead; our epistemic situation with
respect to the belief has nothing to do with the matter.
Although Phillips often shies away from the suggestion, it may be that what is most
fundamentally behind the above views is a certain nonstatemental way of understanding
the content of religious beliefs. He more than once talks as if he thinks that in affirming
such beliefs we do not mean to be asserting anything about a reality that transcends the
natural world, but rather expressing attitudes toward the world of nature and human life.
Believing in God is variously said to be seeing a meaning in one's life (Phillips 1970, 8),
seeing the possibility of eternal love (21, 29), looking on one's life and regulating it in a
certain way (157). Again, “The religious pictures give one a language in which it is
possible to think about human life in a certain wayWhen these thoughts are found in
worship, the praising and the glorifying does not refer to some object called Godwe see
that the religious expressions of praise, glory, etc. are not referring expressions. These
activities are expressive in character, and what they express is called the worship of God”
(Phillips 1976, 149–50).
To be sure, believing in God could essentially involve all that and also be a belief about a
transcendent (and immanent) ultimate reality. But the above passages clearly show that
Phillips thinks the aspects specified are all there is to it.
4. Meaning and Religious Practice
Another possible reason for Phillips's Wittgensteinian position on the sui generis
character of religious belief, thought, and discourse is a conviction that its constituent
terms and concepts are intelligible only from within religious practice. To fully