had discovered some chemical process whereby he could change ordinary bread into
muscle and ordinary wine into blood, that would have to be taken seriously by the
Christian. Characteristic of the Wittgensteinians is their insistence that different language
games each have their own distinct “grammar” for evidence, truth, fact, justification, and
the like. As Phillips remarks, for “religious beliefs, the grammar of belief' andtruth' is
not the same as in the case of empirical propositions or the prediction of future events”
(1976, 143).
But suppose the objector moves up a level. Suppose it be granted that within religious
language games, reasons are offered for and against what is said; and suppose it also be
granted that, since language used religiously is not functioning assertorically, one cannot
ask for evidence for the truth of what was asserted. Still, don't the participants in a
religious form of life have to justify their participation? And don't the practitioners of a
religious language game have to justify their practice?
Fundamental in the thought of the Wittgensteinian philosophers of religion is their
insistence that these questions be answered with a no. As Norman Malcolm puts it:
One of the primary pathologies of philosophy is the feeling that we must justify our
language-games. We want to establish them as well-grounded, but we should consider
here Wittgenstein's remark that a language-game “is not based on grounds. It is there—
like our life.”
Within a language-game there is justification and lack of justification, evidence and
proof, mistakes and groundless opinions, good and bad reasoning, correct measurements
and incorrect ones. One cannot properly apply these terms to a language-game itself. It
may, however, be said to be “groundless,” not in the sense of a groundless opinion, but in
the sense that we accept it, we live it. We can say, “This is what we do. This is how we
are.”
Religion is a form of life; it is language embedded in action—what Wittgenstein calls a
“language-game.” Science is another. Neither stands in need of justification, the one no
more than the other. (1977, 152, 154)
end p.261
It is these claims that constitute the so-called fideism of Wittgensteinian philosophy of
religion. Wittgensteinians are fideists concerning religious language games in exactly the
same way that they are fideists concerning scientific language games and concerning our
material-object language game. In no case, so it is said, is one called on to justify one's
participation in the game. Though Malcolm, like other Wittgensteinians, is not fully
explicit on the matter, one surmises that his reason for thinking one needn't justify one's
participation in one or another of these language games is that one couldn't.
Reformed Epistemology
By the time Reformed epistemology appeared on the scene, in the early 1980s, logical
positivism was dead and buried. What remained very much alive was the evidentialism
that emerged in the Enlightenment: the claim, in Locke's version of it, that for religious