In this article I wish to revisit one of the most important controversies at last year’s Conference: whether there can be a ‘sliver of reality’ beyond our God language. Bishop Spong argued that there could, and that this ‘sliver of reality’ lay behind our belief in God, our experience of God and our talk of God. Don Cupitt argued that the notion of a ‘sliver of reality’ beyond our God language is meaningless.
I think most peoples’ hearts were with Jack, but their minds probably sided with Don. on argued with his usual flair, but I do have a difficulty with his position which I would like to explore. He put the following post-modernist arguments.
Language structures our experience of the world, and we can never as it were peer behind the world-as-weexperience-it-through-language, to see if it really is like that. Since we can never get at reality except through language, an independent reality would be forever an unknown ‘X’ about which we could say nothing. This idea has no content to give it meaning. As Don puts it in one of his books, ‘outside language there is chaos’. I accept there is a complex interplay between our language and conceptual schemes, and how we experience the world. I have trouble accepting the further claim that it is senseless to speak of a world independent of language.
I would like to use a thought experiment to explain my difficulty. Einstein used these, so I am in good company.
Let's survey in our mind's eye the history of the universe.
We start with the Big Bang, then the evolution of galaxies, the formation of the earth. At some point life emerges.
Species after species, of increasing complexity, develop until we get to the precursor of womankind. l:et’s stop at this point, before the emergence of people and their language.
Up to this point in history there has been no language. Yet despite this there must have been developing physical structures in the universe. Without definite structures, there could have been no evolution of world or life. It makes no sense to suggest that somehow these structures were applied retrospectively to chaos, after people had evolved and developed views on the origins of the universe. There must have been more than chaos out there, for the world and people to have evolved in the first place! ‘Up to this point the world must have existed and had definite characteristics, independently of language.
By contrast, if post-modernism is right, we would have to say that before people developed language, no structure in the universe was possible. If not even a sliver of reality can exist independently of language, post-modernists can hardly accept a whole cosmos independent of language! with help from Chris Gaal Post-modernism seems refuted by our thought experiment.
Indeed it conflicts with our whole scientific outlook.
Human beings did not create themselves and the universe ex nihilo when they uttered the first sentence!
Admittedly this account of the world’s history is expressed in words and uses current scientific concepts. But my point does not depend on the infallibility of our latest scientific views. WHATEVER HAPPENED, definite processes must have occurred for aeons BEFORE humans developed language, if we are to account for our very existence on this planet. Even Genesis allows the world to exist for several days before human language! As the world has existed in the past independently of language, why not now? If the physical world can exist independently of language, why not God? (Though we may doubt Her existence on other grounds. ) At this point I can imagine the following counter-argument from an indignant post-modernist. ‘When we say there is no such thing as a reality independent of language, we are not saying that reality is HISTORICALLY or PHYSICALLY dependent on language. We are not saying that language had to come first before anything else could happen. We are not saying that our words create the physical world. : ‘What we mean is that the world is LOGICALLY dependent on language. As Wittgenstein said “the world is the totality of facts, not things”. Facts are true statements. The world is everything we can truly say about it. We can only state facts and make judgements about the way things are from within a language. Try and describe the world outside ANY language, and you will end up just making an inarticulate > noise!’ Is this appeal to ‘logical dependence’ enough to save postmodernism? What does it involve in practice? | The Sliver Strikes Back . . . ] The Puzzling Case of the Logically Dependent Elephants Imagine a post-modernist zoologist claiming that ‘there can be no such thing as an elephant independent of language.’ Elephants are after all a part of reality, so the arguments should work just the same, and be easier to follow in a more concrete case.
This claim seems initially surprising, but she goes on to explain: ‘I don't mean that elephants couldn't have existed before humans. They did. Nor do I mean that elephants are in any way CAUSALLY influenced in their biology or lifestyle by human language. If the human race died out tomorrow this would if anything improve the life chances of elephants.’ | —— “So what DO you mean?’ we cry, ‘and whatever you mean, why do you express it so misleadingly? Everything you have said so far clearly proves that elephants ARE independent of language!’ “But they are LOGICALLY dependent on language. We cannot describe elephants or state facts about them, without using words. We can’t even call them “animals” without appeal to our zoological classifications. Outside language we can say or think nothing about them. Outside language they are forever an unknown “X” about which we can say nothing. But this idea is meaningless. So it is their LOGICAL dependence which makes a language-independent elephant a meaningless impossibility. ’ ‘But hold on,’ we reply. “You have already admitted that elephants have in the past and do now PHYSICALLY exist independently of language. So whatever your logical dependence involves, it can’t sensibly deny THAT. If your logic STILL leads you to conclude that a languageindependent elephant is impossible you have contradicted yourself. They can’t be a meaningless impossibility AND be placidly roaming the African plains, as their ancestors did before them, long before humans developed language.
There must be a flaw in your reasoning somewhere.’ The appeal to logical dependence shows that OUR ability to say things in words is logically dependent on language, not that ELEPHANTS can’t exist independently of language.
Similarly for ‘reality’. We cannot make statements or judgements about the world except through language. In this sense, our detailed understanding of what the world is like at any given time is logically dependent on our language at that time. Pre- Einstein and Niels Bohr, it was not possible to describe the quantum nature of the world.
The relevant concepts, vocabulary and mathematics were simply lacking.
However, it does not follow that reality itself cannot stand independent of our understanding of it, that there is some dependency between THE WORLD and our language.
Modern science is built around asking: ‘Are our current concepts RIGHT?’ This would be an unintelligible question if the nature of the world was itself somehow DETERMINED by our language. Science constantly reformulates and expands our language to respond to new discovery. Reality is bigger than our language. ‘Facts’ do not just exist as statements in language. ‘Facts’ are also STATES OF AFFAIRS in the world — as Wittgenstein acknowledged. There can be more states of affairs in the world than are yet dreamed of in our language.
The World Is The Totality Of Facts, Not Things Our post-modernist still has some important things to say. ‘You admit we cannot state facts or judgements about the world independently of language. This concedes more than you think. The early Wittgenstein thought that when we state facts, we draw little pictures in words, of what the real world looks like. But he grew out of it. He realised that when human beings describe the world, they don’t first look, in a language neutral way; then decide which of our words best fits what we see.
‘Your examples of the elephants and world history, sound more plausible than they are, because we all SHARE the Same contemporary language. Language is like the air we breath — because its there all the time, we forget it is!
Because we look at the world THROUGH our concepts all the time, we forget we are doing this. ‘But go back five hundred years, and your description of Big Bangs and galaxies would have seemed not an obvious neutral description, but a fantastical invention in LANGUAGE! Just as Genesis does to most of us today. Go to Africa with a different set of zoological classifications, and you won't find elephants. ‘The “things” of the world do not tell us what they are and what to say about them. What it is right to say, what “the facts are” is given by the concepts, definitions and rules of evidence embedded in our language. ‘T concede that “reality” in some sense must exist outside language. But whatever the hidden substratum of reality is, we can have no access to it. For all practical purposes, our life is lived within the world created by our language.
For all practical purposes, we still create truth.’ a The Sliver Strikes back. . . _] Let us look at these two claims that: 1. an independent reality would be ‘practically irrelevant’ to us; 2. our language determines what is to count as fact.
I. The Strange Case of the Darkened Room and the Multiplying Elephant Our elephants proved helpful last time. Let’s use them again. Imagine an elephant in a darkened room, symbolising our independent reality. Into the room we shine a torch which stands for our language-mediated perception of the world.
When we shine our torch into the room, we see (not surprisingly) an elephant. But WHICH elephant?! When our post-modernist above said that BECAUSE our experience of the world was always through language, ‘objective’ reality was forever inaccessible and irrelevant to us, he was arguing like someone who would say about our example: ‘When we shine a torch into the room, we don’t see the real elephant. That is forever hidden and irrelevant to human knowledge, because we can never see it as it is in itself. As we surely do see an elephant, it must be ANOTHER, immanent elephant that we see.’ Now clearly, we don’t create a second elephant when we switch our torch on. We see the REAL one, although it will look different in red torchlight to white. It is mistaken to treat the real elephant as a questionable ‘forever unknown’ which can make no contribution to what we see (and can therefore be denied altogether) — to treat OUR TORCH as the instrument that creates the immanent elephant that we see.
Similarly with the world. Our language and concepts MAKE A DIFFERENCE to how we see the world, but do not create the world we see. Our galaxies and elephants are derived
from our observation of the 'real' world. They are not an immanent phantasm created by our language. The world outside language is relevant to the truth and falsity of our concepts and the statements we make. Because it is, we can investigate things further and revise our views.
Galaxies may seem strange at first, but we can build telescopes which prove (or disprove) them. One cannot investigate further an immanent phantasm — its appearance is all there is. But if ‘the surface is all there is’ we don’t get nearer truth — we destroy the distinction between truth and illusion. Things must be as they seem.
What of the claim that our language determines what is to count as fact? This brings in Wittgenstein’s later view of language. 2. Wittgenstein and The Holiness of Ordinary Language Wittgenstein argued that words have meaning by playing a part in patterns of human life or ‘language games’. In these games, words are given meaning by a series of rules governing their use, just as in games like cricket there are rules which determine both what the players will do, and what such key words as ‘leg-before-wicket (Ibw)’ mean. In such games, the linguistic and procedural rules of the game determine ‘the facts.’ By definition ‘lbw’ exists in cricket.
The rules define what is to count as ‘lbw’ and when it occurs. It would be a misunderstanding to deny that ‘lbw’ exists because one had searched the cricket pitch for it in vain. Similarly in the religious game, ‘God exists’, and it would be a misunderstanding of the game to search for some “Super Object’ in the Heavens.
Words only have meaning WITHIN a language game (if they are in more than one, they have more than one meaning.) If we try and use words OUTSIDE the game, we start talking nonsense — outside the game there are no rules for the correct use of the word.
We cannot question the VALIDITY of a language game or ’ the key concepts within it. It is meaningless to ask, about the religious game: ‘Yes, I know this GAME exists, but does GOD exist?’ (Yes I know the game of cricket exists, but does “Ibw’ exist ?). We may get TIRED of a game (I don’t want to play the religious game anymore) but we cannot PROVE OR DISPROVE a game. ‘Proof’ can only occur within the game, according to the relevant rules. By applying the rules of cricket, one can prove that a player has been ‘caught lbw’, but it makes no sense to speak of either proving or disproving the game of cricket.
This analysis of language as games has captivated many thinkers. The history of philosophy is seen as littered with the bones of thinkers who have fatally fallen into potholes of meaninglessness by using their words outside the right games. (The game ‘philosophy’ is not allowed.) The true philosopher becomes a kind of intellectual sheep dog, rounding up straying thinkers and pushing them back into the safe confining pens of ordinary speech, by reminding them of how they should use their words. Language CANNOT BE WRONG, and the only ‘solution’ to the great philosophical problems about God, mind and matter, free will etc. is to convince philosophers and theologians of the holiness of ordinary language, and cure them of the impossible urge to transcend its limitations. Fortunately the ancient Greeks never read Wittgenstein, otherwise we might still be trapped in the thought world of the ancients, ‘refuting’ every attempt at innovative thought by pointing out how it conflicts with established Babylonian linguistic usage.
Was Wittgenstein right? His views contain many paradoxes and difficulties. As a sample of the paradoxes: It is ABOUT language games, but does not itself seem to BELONG to a language game. If Wittgenstein is right that words only function meaningfully within a game, his own writings about them must be nonsense. Conversely, if we understand him, he must be wrong!
Wittgenstein chose the metaphor of a ‘game’ to stress the sheer variety in human language, and the importance of seeing language as not just something ‘in the head’ but an integral part of human social and active life. He says much that is important, but this metaphor of ‘games’ is dangerously misleading. We see this once we attempt to define the boundaries between language games. Since ‘the Tules’ only apply within the game, we need to know where ‘the boundaries are. Here the comparison with games starts to break down. Cricket has clearly defined boundaries. But what are the boundaries in more general cultural categories like science and religion?
When Ptolemy said the planets revolve around the earth, and Copernicus said they didn’t, were they disagreeing within the SAME game? Or was Ptolemy playing his own game of ‘Hunt the Epicycles’? Is religion as such a language game. Or is each major religion a different one?
And if so, does every sect inhabit its own language game as well? This is a Tower of Babel scenario in which everyone inhabits their own self-justifying world. Transubstantiation is a fact within Catholicism; instant creation within Fundamentalism; etc.
We can try to ease the difficulties by allowing our ‘games’ to be more fluid and interconnected than our initial comparison with cricket suggested. Wittgenstein sometimes speaks along these lines. But the further we get from the original game paradigm, the more empty and unhelpful talk of ‘games’ and ‘following rules’ in the game becomes.
To borrow a criticism from Wittgenstein, we simply DO NOT HAVE rules to decide these boundary issues. There is no obviously right way to carve up our culture into ‘games’. Wittgenstein himself only gave fragmentary examples. But if there are no rules for applying the concept of a language game, then by his own account, this concept is meaningless.
A related problem arises over his view that issues of proof only arise WITHIN the game. It is one thing to say that a game like cricket needs no justification — no-one expects cricket to be RIGHT about the world. (This is one reason we call such activities GAMES.) Yet many of our most significant human activities involve attempts to understand the world, and depend for their meaning and success on ‘getting it right’. Medieval medicine failed to stop the Black Death. Can we really maintain that the question whether the medieval medicine game was right or wrong, is meaningless? Tell that to the victims! Try also telling a religious person losing their faith, that the important thing is ‘playing the game’ for its own sake! ca Wittgenstein’s self-enclosed games are elementary rituals not at all like the creative dynamic between people actively engaged with the world and their wider culture. The metaphor fails him.
These difficulties show that we cannot split off one aspect of human life and thought from others and make it selfcontained and self-justifying. No one area of language can determine its own reality. There is no such thing as a ‘religious game” snugly enclosed in its own set of rules and practices. By removing the earth from the centre of the universe, Copernicus revolutionised religion as well as science, as did Darwin later. Our concepts have multiple interconnections with our wider culture. Any area of thought is vulnerable to issues raised from outside.
Fundamentalists, and any other fantasists, are sick just because they refuse to open up their beliefs to critical assessment in the light of our wider cultural knowledge.
Nor can even the whole of our language determine its own reality. Post-modernists speak as if language determined everything about us. But language is only one aspect of our humanity. We have a biology, and as Freud and Jung showed, a psychology as well, which seems to link into states of consciousness beyond everyday experience and language. We are influenced but not determined by our culture, as the repeated failures of ideologies like communism to mould people in their own image shows.
The human body is as much a carrier of reality for us as language. We see in three dimensions because of the structure of our eyes and brains, not because we have spatial concepts. Our language has multiple connections to our non linguistic outer and inner worlds. These wider connections make it possible for a whole conceptual scheme to prove ‘wrong’.
The Sliver Strikes Back . . . | Berkeley’s Ghost Haunts The Post-modern World It’s time to pull threads together. Let’s do so through this eighteenth century Bishop, whose views strikingly anticipated post-modernism. His fate was sad. His Ghost haunts the victory celebrations of post-modernism much as Banquo’s Ghost haunted Macbeth’s — as an ominous sign — that not all is well.
For Berkeley, our only way of knowing reality is through experience. He did not consider the role of language in our experience, but spoke instead of our sense-impressions.
Look at a tree, and you have a visual sense-impression in your mind. Touch the tree, and you have a tactile senseimpression. Etc. We can convert Berkeley into postmodernism by substituting at appropriate points such terms as ‘language’, or ‘concepts’ for his ‘sense-impressions.’ Berkeley rejected the idea of a sliver of reality independent of our sense-impressions, since we can never, as it were, get behind our sense impressions, to check if they correspond with the ‘real’ world. An independent reality behind our experience would be forever ‘an unknown ‘X’ about which we could say nothing. Such an idea has no content to give it meaning.
Truth is not correspondence between our sense-impressions and reality, but coherence within the pattern of our sense- impressions. I confirm the existence of a tree, not by comparing my visual image with the real tree to see if they both look the same. I touch the tree to see if my visual sense-impression is followed by tactile sense impressions.
When I find a sufficiently coherent bundle of senseimpressions all together, I say there is a tree there. Since truth is coherence within our sense-impressions, and there can be nothing else behind them, the physical world ITSELF is NOTHING BUT bundles of sense-impressions in the mind.
Now if the world is simply bundles of sense-impressions in the mind, then every time someone turns their ‘head’, that part of the world they alone are observing ceases to exist.
Walk out of the kitchen and the washing up vanishes into oblivion (clearly a theory with some practical advantages!) As each person knows only THEIR sense impressions, we must all live in separate isolated universes within our own minds. As Berkeley knows only HIS impressions, the world is all in HIS mind.
Being a Bishop, Berkeley tried to call on God to rescue him from absurdity. Things continue to exist when no one is looking at them, because God is there all the time and God as we all know sees everything. [This was a bit of a cheat, even for a Bishop, for on Berkeley’s own premises, To Be Was To Be Perceived, and he had never perceived God, so He could not exist. (The use of ‘He’ is not sexist here; in Berkeley’s day She WAS a He.)] The post-modernist world is not quite so precarious as Berkeley’s — it does not vanish every time someone blinks. Nevertheless since it only exists as immanence IN language, it cannot exist before people developed language.
World and language leaped into existence simultaneously, in a post-modern Big Bang, like our elephant in the torch beam. :
The post-modern world also changes when human language changes. Since our world view, and that of a primitive tribe are incompatible, and there is no ‘independent reality’ to give meaning to the idea that one of us could be wrong, each society creates ‘the truth’ of their incompatible worlds. This is only possible if we literally inhabit different universes. The patterns of our language create our worlds, just as in Berkeley the pattems in our sense impressions create our worlds.
Such a breathtaking claim for language has not been made since the writing of St John’s Gospel! ls The Sliver Strikes Back. . . _| Human At The Point of Delivery Any theory of human knowledge has to move us from statements about human subjective experience, to statements about the world. All our experience is ‘human at the point of delivery.’ Berkeley and post-modernism both make the mistake of trying to REDUCE the objective to the subjective. Berkeley reduces the world to the subjective sense experience of the individual. Post-modernism reduces the world to the subjectivity of a given language and culture. Both give an account of ‘what exists’ in terms of sensory or linguistic ‘immanence’. The world is what appears to us through the medium of our senses or our language and stories. This account proves incompatible to be ‘really’ about our human stories, religious people with a world existing AT ALL have always ‘really’ been non-realists. This does come : : . over as a bit of a fudge. It also makes it hard to ie a) pe ll = it a rane eon, acknowledge the fact that the crisis in religion today is 3 d a crisis of RELEVANCE. Religion used to be relevant, screen of chaos by language. The ultimate Home Movie. because people believed it said TRUE THINGS about | The Sliver Strikes Back... | this world and the next. Increasingly today people don’t believe this. The view that religion has always ‘really’ Return of the Sliver? been about human practices, actually intensifies the problem: “Why bother to play this game/tell these stories?’ — but post-modernism would have to rule out the question as a meaningless attempt to get behind the surface of the game.
The old beliefs about God are not sustainable in the light of modern scientific knowledge and biblical scholarship.
However, if I am right, the post-modernist claim that ANY talk of an objective God MUST BE nonsense, falls to the ground. Freed from post-modernism, non-realism is free both to acknowledge its break with the past, and to seek relevance for its religion. It can say: ‘Yes, we think people in the past were wrong about God. They misinterpreted their experience, myths and symbols.
Nor can we use the fact that all alleged encounters with God are human at the point of delivery, to deny the possibility of encounter with an objective God. ALL our knowledge is human at the point of delivery. If we use this N : aac i. eer evertheless, they used their belief in an objective be dealy the possibility of Gad, We: mniet -alea deny ‘fhe Tevelation of God to achieve something spiritually and — culturally so worthwhile, that we would be throwing Where does this leave the Sliver, Non-Realism and Sea of the baby out with the bathwater to reject their God Faith? My own view is that all three gain. completely. We need to understand and re-interpret ie : . their alleged encounters with God to make them e The sliver is rescued from the dustbin of history. We relevant to us and compatible with our modern have to take Her more seriously. She may be out there. knowledge; to selectively retain the best of what they She may be listening! Some of human religion may be a thought and did, while retaining our intellectual genuine encounter with aspects of reality which integrity as modern men and women.’ transcend everyday experience. : . . e And Sea of Faith? If our agenda is to EXPLORE rather * Non-realism gains by being able to draw a clearer than DOGMATICALLY MAINTAIN religion as a human distinction between its view of God as a human creation, then we can provide a forum within which creation, and that of the past. P ost-modernism. has this battle between the sliver and non realism is fought muddled this issue. Since for it ALL talk of ‘God’ has out between serious people of good will on both sides.