notions of “fact” and “truth” in Wittgensteinianism refer only to facts and truths about
language?
According to Wittgenstein's critics, “truths about language” come between us and contact
with “reality as such.” How does language give rise to the latter notion? The answer is
that propositions articulating the grammar of concepts are confused with propositions that
describe reality (Hacker 2001). As we have said, when one person says “The tablecloth is
red” and another says “The tablecloth is not red,” the meaning of “red” does not change.
Even when the tablecloth is not red, it might be said, the meaning remains. But where
does it remain? It is tempting to think of “the meaning” as an independent realm, existing
in its own right, a realm that appears to transcend the affirmative and negative judgments
about the color of the tablecloth. Here is the transcendent reality of metaphysics, one that
our concepts are said to describe, or that determines the forms our concepts take. It is in
this metaphysical space that the epistemologists we have considered place “God.” Our
task, with respect to “God,” is the same as with any other word, namely, to bring it back
from its metaphysical to its everyday use.
God as Metaphysical Reality
If “Being” is thought as the inclusive, metaphysical category that includes all things, do
those things include God? It may be said that there are degrees of being, as though being
were a property of things (Rhees 1997d). But if the difference between God and other
beings is one of degree, and one says, for example, that God is more powerful than the
devil, what measure of comparison would one be using (Rhees 1997b)? Such a
comparison leads to the anthropomorphic God of Cleanthes in Hume's Dialogues, a
conception all too common in contemporary philosophy of religion. Advocates of Radical
Orthodoxy argue that the confusion of treating “God” as a being among beings can be
traced to Duns Scotus, who departed from Aquinas's insight that God is not a substance,
not a member of any species or genus (Blond 1998).^11
To avoid the difficulty of talking about God as a being among beings, some have sought
to identity God with the metaphysical notion of “ultimate reality.” Mounce (1999, 105)
argues that in Reid's epistemological naturalism, “the order of the worldpoints to a source
which is transcendent and therefore cannot be comprehended in human categories.”
According to Radical Orthodoxy, “If one wishes to avoid idolatry it must be understood
that God's reality has to be seen as the source of any created object's reality. Which is to
say that insofar as any object or thing has reality it only does so because all reality owes
its origin not to itself but to God” (Blond 1998, 7).
We have already seen how this idea of “the source of all things” can arise from
confusions about language. But in Reid and Radical Orthodoxy, if “God” is meant to
fulfill the same role as the metaphysical “ultimates” of the Presocratics, familiar
difficulties arise. If God is thought of as a quasi-empirical substance, the problem of
measuring the measure reappears. We cannot simply say that God “is,” any more than we
can say this of any other ultimate substance.
In response, it will be said that God is an incorporeal substance. Is it not the sine qua non
of supernaturalism, as opposed to naturalism, the acknowledgment that in addition to all