appears that, at best, we will arrive at some form of pluralism or relativism—and this,
whatever its intrinsic merits, is far removed from the intentions of many of the actual
participants in religious language-games. Internally, within the religious language-game
and form of life, universal claims and pronouncements can still be made. But the
philosopher, for whom justification terminates on the form of life, cannot allow the
validity of such claims and pronouncements outside of the language-game in which they
originate.
This can be connected with yet another feature of Wittgenstein's philosophy. In general,
Wittgenstein's later philosophy (unlike the Tractatus) abandons the search for the truth-
conditions of propositions in favor of assertibility-conditions. He asks, not “What would
make this true?” but rather, “Under what circumstances would it be appropriate to say
this?” But whereas truth-conditions—for instance, for assertions about a transcendent
God—can be as remote from experience as one pleases, assertibility-conditions have to
be accessible to the users of language. Because of this, metaphysics is ruled out just as
much as it was for the positivists. And religious assertions, while ostensibly about a
transcendent being beyond the world, must be judged correct or incorrect solely in terms
of the conditions of life, and attitudes toward life, of the believers themselves. The
upshot, arguably, is that Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion does not, in the end,
allow religious language to mean what its ordinary users take it to mean. It is
understandable, then, that a separation has grown up between the Wittgensteinians and
mainstream analytic philosophy of religion, which has increasingly taken a metaphysical
realist turn.
In surveying the overall contours of this debate, several conclusions emerge. First of all,
the claim that language referring to God is meaningless has become virtually a dead
issue. No criterion of meaning that has been proposed to support this conclusion has
withstood criticism, and the objection has simply lost its power
end p.426
to intimidate. This does not mean, however, that the use of language to speak about God
is unproblematic. Given the transcendence and infinity of God as traditionally
understood, it is evident that many attributes cannot possibly be ascribed to God in
precisely the same sense as they are to human beings and other creatures. Some form of
the doctrine of analogical predication seems inevitable. (A particularly careful
development of such a doctrine is due to James Ross [1969].) On the other hand, it is
plausible that there must be some univocal core of meaning, some respect in which we
are saying the same things about God and about other beings; otherwise, our speech
about God threatens to collapse into sheer equivocation. One philosopher who has argued
for some degree of literalism in our language concerning God is William Alston (1989).
Alston's literalism, however, is far from naïve; for instance, he employs a functionalist
analysis of psychological terms to arrive at a limited univocal meaning for these terms as
applied both to human persons and to God.