I. M. Crombie (1955), in commenting on the falsification debate, elaborates views that
are generally consistent with Mitchell's. In accounting for religious language he develops,
in effect, a doctrine of analogy, though one less burdened with metaphysical baggage
than traditional Thomism. Like Mitchell, he admits that unfavorable evidence counts
against faith, but (being a believer himself) he does not allow that the evidence counts
decisively against faith, because that faith is in fact true. But what would it take to
decisively refute Christian faith? According to Crombie, the Christian
has his prepared positions on to which he retreats; and he knows that if these positions are
taken, then he must surrenderThere are three main fortresses behind which he goes. For,
first, he looks for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come; he
believes, that is, that we do not see all of the picture, and that the parts which we do not
see are precisely the parts which determine the design of the whole Second, he claims that
he sees in Christ the verification, and to some extent also the specification, of the divine
love Third, he claims that in the religious life, of others, if not as yet in his own, the
divine love may be encountered, that the promise “I will not fail thee nor forsake thee” is,
if rightly understood, confirmed there. (129)
Crombie's reference to “the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come,” is
taken up and elaborated by John Hick (1957) in his doctrine of “eschatological
verification.” The idea here is that Christian faith is after all verifiable (though perhaps
not falsifiable): all we have to do is die! Naturally, Hick was faced with various
challenges to this proposal. Some have questioned whether the doctrine of life after death
is itself meaningful. Another question is whether whatever it is after death that decisively
confirms the truth of Christianity could not in principle confirm it in this life. And of
course, the notion of eschatological verification does not, by itself, cast light on the way
language can be used to describe a transcendent reality such as God. Nevertheless, Hick's
proposal does underscore the fact that, in certain respects, religious believers entertain
quite concrete expectations that are different from the expectations of nonbelievers. This
is a far cry from Hare's blik and Flew's “picture preference.”
Any discussion of the problem of religious language that did not mention the later
philosophy of Wittgenstein would be seriously incomplete. The most striking thing about
Wittgenstein's philosophy, when the Philosophical Investigations first appeared, was its
proposal to take the various forms of discourse—the different “language-games”—on
their own terms. Rather than having to fit into what many perceived as the straitjacket of
verificationism, religious language (among other forms) was to be understood as it is
actually used by religious persons. Furthermore, believers are not asked to justify their
use of such language; rather, the demand for justification “bottoms out” in the “form of
life” of which it is a part. Within the language-game and within the form of life, there are
demands for justification and standards for what counts as justification. But if the
language-game and the form of life are questioned from the outside, the only possible
response is, “This language-game is played.”
This approach to language, then, promised to liberate religious language from the
oppressive requirements of verificationism and to permit it to be studied in a way that is
more congenial to the actual intentions of the language users. This liberation, however,
comes at a price. “This language-game is played”—true enough, but so are other,
competing religious language-games, and so are secular language-games that altogether
reject talk about God. So if the project of justification bottoms out at the form of life, it
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