No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Closing Arguments for the Defence
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Abstract
Howard Robinson believes, and would have the rest of us believe, that Gareth Moore was the equivalent of an atheist. To which I say, once again: there is not a single good reason to believe that Gareth was any such thing. I begin with a reminder about our duty to think of Gareth as innocent until proven guilty. I then argue that Gareth's insistence that there is no such thing as an invisible person named ‘God’ did not commit him to atheism. I show that people such as Herbert McCabe, whose orthodoxy is unimpeachable, say the same sort of thing. I then demonstrate that Gareth said nothing that would imply that, on his view, ‘God’ is not a referring expression. I end by explaining that Gareth embraced a theory of truth fully consistent with moderate expressivism.
- Type
- Original Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © 2020 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 My unclarity is brought on, in part, by Robinson's use/mention mistake in the sentence I just excerpted from his page 6.
2 I conjecture that Gareth had at least one additional motive for denying that God is a person. He sought to light a candle against the metaphysical gloom occasioned by clouds of Swinburnism louring over the Oxford of his day.
3 McCabe, Herbert God Matters (London, Geoffrey Chapman, 1987) p. 6.Google Scholar
4 I simply bracket the question of why anyone who came to believe 11 would have any reason to go on practicing Christianity, as opposed, say, to getting permanently stoned or taking up granny grinding.
5 Robinson says that expressivists think of these sentences as ‘normative’, but I think ‘prescriptive’ or ‘imperative’ would be better.
6 This is my attempt to capture what Robinson means when he says that, according to Wittgenstein, “Sensation reports do not refer to some phenomenon that lies behind the criteria that prompts our use of the terms, but capture the syndrome of causes and effects that grounds our use.” (“Reply”, p. 8)
7 Wittgenstein, Ludwig Philosophical Investigations, second edition (Oxford, Blackwell, 1963), p. 102.Google Scholar
8 In addition to what I argue in the next few paragraphs, it bears mentioning that it would be “repugnant to the plain words of Scripture” to deny that ‘God’ refers. In the verse of Exodus immediately following “I am who I am”, God instructs Moses to tell the Israelites that he has been sent by “the Lord, the God of your forbears, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” I take Exodus to be teaching that ‘God’ is shorthand for those definite descriptions, thereby securing its non-negotiably referential character, since the God of Abraham = the creator of all that is.
9 Believing in God: A Philosophical Essay (Edinburgh, T&T Clark, 1988), p. 35.Google Scholar
10 It's rather regrettable that Robinson focuses on Gareth's ‘poltergeist’-‘God’ analogy, without ever mentioning Gareth's equator-God analogy. None of us, I assume, believes in poltergeists, but all of us believe in God as well as in the equator. So all of us, including Gareth, take it that, while there are no poltergeists, there is a God, just as there is an equator.
11 For unequivocal evidence that Wittgenstein held this view, see the Investigations § 136, p. 52.
12 That Wittgenstein considered, only to reject, (something like) the Strawson view of truth is shown by this excerpt from the Investigations: “‘So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and false?’—It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use.” (§ 241, p. 88) He meant: truth is emphatically not constituted by human agreement. Rather ‘true’ and ‘false’ are predicates used by human beings to say what is true – as in ‘What Gareth believed about God was true.’