end p.421
The Early Years: Religious Language
During the early decades of the twentieth century, the place of the philosophy of religion
in analytic philosophy was less than marginal. G. E. Moore, after a fervently evangelical
childhood, was content, in “A Defense of Common Sense,” to remark that he differed
from philosophers “who have held that there is good reason to suppose that there is a
God[or] that we, human beings, shall continue to exist and to be conscious after the death
of our bodies” (1925, 127). Bertrand Russell's fulminations against religion were
considerably more demonstrative but were remote from his serious philosophical work.
And Ludwig Wittgenstein's invocation of the Mystical in the concluding section of the
Tractatus, striking and provocative though it was, fell far short of any systematic
articulation of the philosophical issues concerning religion. During these years religious
thought ran in other channels, and insofar as it was philosophically engaged the
philosophy of choice was often some variety of post-Hegelian idealism.
What changed all this was the advent of logical positivism, especially its introduction to
the English-speaking world by means of A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic (1936).
Ayer's work was not particularly original in comparison with that of the continental
positivists, but it had the effect of challenging the foundations of religious thought in a
way that was hard to ignore. Not merely the truth of theological assertions was in
question, but even their very meaningfulness: what was denied was that these utterances
possessed cognitive significance sufficient to allow them to be evaluated as either true or
false. Furthermore, the varieties of philosophy that in the past had been used to articulate
religious belief were themselves equally under challenge, and thus offered no effective
defense.
The 1940s saw the beginnings of efforts by religious thinkers to come to terms with this
new challenge. The controversy came to a head in the “theology and falsification” debate
that took place in 1950–51 in the pages of University and was reprinted in part in the
1955 volume, New Essays in Philosophical Theology (Flew and MacIntyre, eds.). The
stage was set for the debate by Antony Flew, who adapted a parable originally composed
by John Wisdom:
Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. In the clearing were
growing many flowers and many weeds. One explorer says, “Some gardener must tend
this plot.” The other disagrees, “There is no gardener.” So they pitch their tents and set a
watch. No gardener is ever seen. “But perhaps he is an invisible gardener.” So they set up
a barbed-wire fence. They electrify it. They patrol it with bloodhoundsBut no shrieks
ever suggest that some intruder has received a shock. No movements of the wire ever
betray an invisible climber. The bloodhounds never give cry. Yet still the Believer is not
convinced. “But there is a gardener, invisible, intangible, insensible
end p.422