And so it is that we get the conclusion: it's obligatory on all who hold religious beliefs
that those be rationally grounded in the deliverances of reason and experience. It should
be clear from the preceding that Locke was of the view that it's no more acceptable for
the nonreligious than for the religious person to rest content with such nonreligious
beliefs as are planted in him by tradition or just well up, he knows not how. When it
comes to religion, we are all, religious and nonreligious alike, to believe or disbelieve
“according as reason directs” us.
Positivist Verificationism
For the sake of convenience, let me give the title “evidentialism” to the classic
Enlightenment position concerning religious belief that I have just explicated, namely,
that the intellectuals among us, and perhaps the nonintellectuals as well, are entitled to
their religious beliefs only if those are rationally grounded in the deliverances of reason
or experience. Evidentialism is a term that's come to be commonly used in recent years
for the position in question. Though Enlightenment evidentialism was certainly in the
background of Wittgenstein's remarks on religion, his immediate polemical partner was
the logical positivism of the first half of the twentieth century. Logical positivism is
rightly seen as a child of the
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Enlightenment; the status given by Enlightenment evidentialism to rational grounding in
the deliverances of reason and experience has its counterpart in the positivist thesis that a
condition of a sentence having meaning is that it be either analytic or empirically
verifiable. Nonetheless, the child has its own distinct features.
What animated the thought of the logical positivists was the deep conviction that insofar
as knowledge is concerned, science is the road ahead for humanity. Logical positivism
was thus a species of scientism. For most of us today that gives it a strange musty smell.
Too much has happened between then and now for us to find science a plausible object of
veneration.
Anyone who holds the view that when it comes to knowledge, science is the road ahead
for humanity, and who wants to get beyond the stage of preachment, is immediately
confronted with the question: How is science to be differentiated from the mass of other
ways that people employ in their attempt to gain knowledge? How is it to be demarcated,
to use a term that the positivists themselves used?
It was in its answer to this question that positivism marked a distinctly new development
in Western thought. Let's turn to language, they said, and let's distinguish between
meaningful and meaningless discourse. What demarcates science from all other discourse
is that scientific discourse is meaningful, whereas all other is meaningless. The positivists
took to calling all discourse other than scientific discourse “metaphysics.” It was, need I
say, a pejorative term in their hands. The fatal flaw in metaphysics, said the positivists, is
not, as previous writers had contended, something epistemological; the problem is not
that metaphysics lacks good grounds for the truth claims it makes. The fatal flaw is