MONOTHEISM AND RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 225Question 8: isn’t the sort of criticism just made merely
literary, superficial, intellectual cleverness without
substance, and so worthless?
No. If one claims that nothing said in English can be true, what one says
cannot be true. If one says that all sentences of more than four words are
gibberish, if what one said were true, one would have said nothing. If one
claims that the state of Washington is a prime number, one asserts that a
concrete object is identical to an abstract object, that something spatially
located is identical with something that cannot be spatially located, that
something that might never have existed is identical to something which (if
it exists at all) has logically necessary existence. All of these claims are
discernibly intellectually disreputable in the light of what they entail. The
same goes for the claim that something is ineffable.
The claim that something is ineffable, while it is (like all claims) made
by the use of language, is not about language – it is about God, or religious
experience, or whatever is said to be ineffable. Any claim that God,
religious experience, or anything else is ineffable, as it turns out, is
necessarily false. If one claims instead that God cannot be described in
physical terms or that we cannot completely describe God,^5 these claims are
true. But they have nothing to do with ineffability.
Question 9: can’t we always “explain away” any religious
experience without any reference to God?^6
Consider some person Tom and some experience E that Tom has. To give a
social science explanation of Tom’s having E is to refer to some science
phenomenon SSP – some institution, practice, community membership,
phobia, desire, economic status, political role or perspective, social
standing, unconscious motivations, or whatever – and to claim that Tom’s
having SSP is the cause of Tom’s experience E. Suppose some such
explanation is true. Does it disqualify E from being reliable? Suppose E is a
conceptual experience – Tom’s belief that social science is not simply a
superstition that unscrupulous academics have developed in order to bilk
money from students and government agencies. Is that conceptual
experience of Tom’s rendered unreliable, or at least somehow evidentially
neutralized, by its being social science explicable? Suppose instead Tom’s
experience is that of appreciating the love of his family, respecting the
environment, hoping studying hard will enable him to pass his social