Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion and Wittgenstein’s “honest religious thinker”

In this paper I want to discuss a specific idea about religion that finds expression in Wittgensteinian publications such as Culture and Value (CV) and Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief (LA). This is the idea that it is misguided to think that religious belief statements entail cognitive commitments as they are typically entailed by belief statements. This view can be termed non-cognitivism about religious belief statements and seems to characterize not only Wittgenstein’s own comments about religion but much of Wittgenstein inspired philosophy of religion.

In my paper I want to develop and defend the following three claims:

a)    There are two kinds of non-cognitivism about religious belief statements in Wittgenstein: While the Tractatus (TLP), the Lecture on Ethics (LE), Part I of the Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough (RF) as also other writings up to 1931 defend strong non-cognitivism, Wittgenstein later opposes strong non-cognitivism, but still gives at many places expression to a moderate type of non-cognitivism about religious belief statements.

b)    Both types of non-cognitivism about religious belief statements are, as general statements, highly questionable analyses of the grammar of religious belief statements. Wittgenstein’s 1948 comparison of the “honest religious thinker” to a tightrope-walker gives expression to this insight and manifests a change in his thinking from non-cognitivism to a less non-cognitivism bound analysis of the grammar of religious belief statements. 

c)    For a Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion, one should look at the mature expression of his later philosophy, the Philosophical Investigations (PI), rather than CV and LA. Turning to the PI will bring one to utilize notions such as “language game” (PI §7) and “family resemblances” (PI §67) for this endeavor – notions that hardly come into play in the relevant texts from CV and LA.