II. Robinson's charge: two kinds of reasons

Near the start of his article, Robinson, who had been a friend of Gareth's since their undergraduate days together at Corpus, informs us of a fundamental question he never quite had it in him to raise with Gareth while he was still alive:

Robinson speaks of Gareth's “commitment … to a full-blooded religious life” (pp. 354–355) and represents Gareth as “someone whose faith seems inwardly very robust” (p. 355). Nevertheless, it's hard not to see the charge of holding a view that's “equivalent to atheism” as an attack on Gareth's own integrity: how could anyone honestly live and die as a faithful Dominican and yet be an atheist at heart?

Before proceeding further, it's worth stopping for a moment over the wording of Robinson's charge. It's not entirely clear what he means by characterising Gareth's position as being “equivalent to atheism”. I understand his claim to be that Gareth's views are tantamount to atheism, or are doctrinally on a par with atheism, without being explicitly or avowedly atheistic. Notice too that in framing his unasked question, and throughout the piece, Robinson presents himself as a spokesman for some kind of “normal orthodox” Christianity (at one point, he describes himself as a “rather conservative anglo-catholic” p. 354). As one such “normal orthodox” Christian, what so unnerved Robinson was that, at least as he saw it, Gareth's philosophical position was tantamount to atheism.

Rather surprisingly, Robinson's article considers only four passages from Believing in God. Given the seriousness of the charge (and the fact that Gareth himself goes to great lengths to deny that he is saying there is no God), we might be rather taken aback at how little textual support Robinson presents in defence of his judgment.

That said, as near as I can tell, Robinson adduces two kinds of grounds in support of his verdict that Gareth's views were tantamount to atheism. Grounds of the first sort are, as I shall put it, directly textual. In this part of his case against Gareth, Robinson exhibits one or two passages from the book and then argues, in effect, “How could you not be (something like) an atheist if you say things like this?”

The other sort of reasons supplied by Robinson provide, at best, only indirect evidence for Gareth's allegedly atheistic tendencies. For in this part of his argument, he cites a passage or two and then construes them as saying something which he, Robinson, treats as sufficient evidence that Gareth adhered to the “radical Wittgensteinianism” of his title. By this Robinson means a distinctive philosophical position which he associates with philosophers like D. Z. Phillips and Peter Winch. It becomes clear that Robinson identifies three main ideas with this school of thought. One is a deep hostility towards metaphysics, something motivated by a “positivist account of what is factual.” (p. 354). Second, members of this school embrace a particular conception of religious language, according to which

Finally, Robinson thinks of these radical followers of Wittgenstein as being, at bottom, materialists. He speaks, accordingly, of their reliance on “an essentially materialist framework” for approaching language (p. 356). And he describes them as holding that “facticity is restricted to the domain of the spatio-temporal, the physical, the empirically verifiable.” (p. 356)

To be sure, Robinson acknowledges that, in spite of the similarities between the logical positivists and the “radical Wittgensteinians”, when it comes to religious language, there are important differences between them. What they share is a common attitude about what deserves to be counted as factual: scientific statements and descriptions of the physical world are the only things in the running for being true. Where they divide, according to Robinson, is that the positivists hold that talk of God actually purports to be factual but necessarily fails to be such. This failure is enough to render such talk meaningless by the positivists’ verificationist standards for sensible discourse. It is at this juncture that Wittgenstein and his radical followers demur, insisting instead that religious talk is not intended to state facts at all, but that it can and should be understood to be purely expressive in character. Consequently, although they are neither intended to be nor capable of being true, according to the “radical Wittgensteinians”, sentences like “There is a God” convey deep and significant feelings and attitudes towards human life and the world in which it is lived.

Where Robinson's first set of reasons is direct and narrowly textual, by the nature of the case, his second set is necessarily much less straightforward. Indeed, it seems right to think that when it comes to these latter considerations, Robinson treats them as sufficient to establish a finding of guilt by association. The syllogism is not hard to reconstruct: Every “radical Wittgensteinian” is an atheist. (After all, such “Wittgensteinians” are radical empiricists and out-and-out materialists!) Gareth Moore was a “radical Wittgensteinian”. QED.

My effort to vindicate the integrity of Gareth's position in Believing in God works in two stages. In the first, I look at the direct textual evidence that Robinson presents to show that Gareth's views were on a par with atheism. In the second stage, I examine what I called Robinson's “guilt by association” argument.

III. The direct textual argument

Here is the first excerpt from Believing in God on which Robinson focuses:

I take this to be Robinson's primary piece of evidence against Gareth. Since the third sentence exhibited here plainly says that there is nothing that we might call God, and the text as presented says nothing to suggest anything different, Robinson appears to infer (and wants us to agree) that Gareth is really saying that there is no such thing as God.

Robinson then imagines someone trying to defend Gareth by suggesting that all that Gareth really meant here was that God is not any sort of ordinary object – the point being that God is not a member of the class of medium sized dry goods, as it were. But Robinson rejects that mollifying response by citing a second passage from the book. This time Gareth is speaking about poltergeists:

Robinson comments:

So Robinson concludes that although Gareth says that God is not the name of any thing or any person, Gareth actually meant that the word ‘God’ is, in point of fact, a name. And what the name ‘God’ refers to is an absence rather than to any kind of agent or cause.

Before contesting Robinson's interpretation of these passages, I need to say more about the first of the two dimensions of the integrity of Believing in God of which I spoke. I mean the way in which the text needs to grasped as forming an integral whole. To see this, we need a proper understanding of the book's overarching dialectical context.

Far from being a mindless rehash of something called “radical Wittgensteinianism”, Believing in God is an astonishingly clever and elaborate philosophical response to Antony Flew's paper “Theology and Falsification”.Footnote ⁴ In it, Flew famously elaborates on John Wisdom's parable of the two explorers who come across what appears to be a well-tended clearing in the jungle. One of them, the Believer, asserts that this must be the work of some kind of gardener. The other, the Sceptic, disagrees: on his view, there is no such thing as a gardener responsible for the clearing in the jungle. Flew intends the parable to shed philosophical light on the dispute between Christian believers and atheists. In doing so, we should note that there appear to be two vital philosophical assumptions that Flew takes to be shared by the Sceptic and the Believer. The first, we can think of as metaphysical in nature: what it would mean for there to be a God is that a certain invisible, bodiless, person would have to exist. The shared second assumption is epistemological: to come to believe in God is to make an inference from observed phenomena (the clearing in the jungle, or the overwhelming degree of “fit” between means and ends in nature) to the existence of a certain invisible, bodiless, person (the gardener, God). Belief in God, then, is revealed to be a kind of explanatory hypothesis, a species of inference to the best explanation of observations we are all in a position to make.

Gareth makes no secret of the fact that his book is intended to be a sustained set of arguments against Flew. Apart from Wittgenstein, Flew is the only other philosopher mentioned in the book. To the extent that there are “empiricist and materialist views” floating about in the book, they are there because they constitute the premises of Flew's sceptical or atheist position. Gareth would simply have been talking past his main philosophical interlocutor had he appealed to different premises. That he accepted such premises for the sake of argument is, in itself, no reason at all to think that Gareth actually endorsed them.

But, understood in the right light, the book is much more than a philosophical response to atheism of the Flew variety. And this brings us to the second kind of integrity it has. For Believing in God contains several profound discussions of the proper shape and character of Christian life. In what are to my mind among the most impressive parts of the book, Gareth discusses with much subtlety and insight what it is to trust in God, to fear God, to love God, and to seek the kingdom of heaven.Footnote ⁵ Given what he says in these chapters, Gareth's model is obviously not Wittgenstein at all, but rather his great Dominican forbear, Meister Eckhart.

It's worth noting that Robinson's hostility to what he calls “radical Wittgensteinianism” appears to have blinded him to the literary conceit at the heart of Believing in God. This has to do with the role played in the book by the character Gareth named ‘Otto’. Robinson says of him that he

Obviously, Robinson takes Otto as intended to voice Gareth's own deepest philosophical commitments. This is because, as we have seen, Robinson sees Gareth himself as cleaving to “strongly empiricist and materialist views”.

In fact, Gareth does several things with Otto. One is to use him as a device to follow another of Wittgenstein's crucial injunctions: when you are puzzled by the use of a word, ask yourself how you would teach someone else to use it, someone who was wholly unfamiliar with it. Otto, Gareth tells us, grew up on a logical positivist commune. This gives him a fluent command of English, and a sound grasp of logic and science. It also means that until he encounters “us” – orthodox believers such as Gareth took himself to be – Otto has never come across people who use the word ‘God’. Gareth wants us to ask ourselves: How would we set about explaining to Otto what we do and say with this word?

But Otto is a literary device in a further sense: his appearance in the book is an expression of Gareth's delightfully wry sense of humour. This is finely brought out in many of the additional details. For instance, although at the time that Gareth was writing, logical positivism was no longer de rigueur amongst British and American philosophers, the philosophical Establishment then – as now – embraced a kind of “reasonable empiricism”, of the Quine or Strawson variety, depending on where you trained. But what could be more “anti-Establishment” than a group of likeminded people living and raising children in a commune, set apart from the benighted hoi-polloi, with their superstitious ways?

The leader of the positivist commune turns out to be an occasionally threatening character named ‘Freddie’. A. J. Ayer had been one of Gareth's teachers when he read the B. Phil and Gareth once told me that he had to inform Ayer of which papers he was going to be sitting for the B. Phil. If I remember correctly, they included the Wittgenstein paper as well as the one in philosophy of religion. Upon hearing this, Ayer raised a quizzical eye-brow and said to Gareth: “Got religion, have you? – Don't worry, it'll pass.” Towards the end of the book, Gareth muses that

But the main thing I want to insist on is that Robinson has missed the dialectical significance of Gareth's use of Otto. Otto is meant to stand somewhere between Flew's Believer and Flew's Sceptic. What Gareth wants to do is to present the most convincing philosophical response to Flew by helping us to see what might actually be involved in teaching someone with a perfectly good grasp of English what believers are actually up to when they speak to or about God.

With a better sense of the book's overall argumentative framework in mind, we can now return to the text itself. If we go back to the passage from Believing in God which was Robinson's central piece of evidence of Gareth's putative atheism, we find something extraordinary. This is that Robinson has either wilfully or negligently omitted several crucial things that Gareth says in it. Whether deliberate or not, these omissions amount to a grievous injustice against Gareth. To show this, let me reproduce the full text with the excised portions restored and marked by (my own use of) italics:

Before attending more carefully to what Gareth is arguing here, let's be very clear: it turns out that the heart of Robinson's case that Gareth was some kind of atheist depends on the willful or negligent suppression of crucially relevant evidence. Gareth says, in the plainest of plain English, that “for most purposes we want to say that God is present everywhere, at all times” (my italics).

Gareth's first point in this passage, and it's one he stresses repeatedly in the book, is that there is something striking about the use that believers make of the word ‘God’. When they utter this word – say, in the course of saying their prayers – they do so in the manifest absence of any thing or any person that they (or anyone else) could demonstratively pick out with the word ‘God’. In claiming this manifest absence to be a plain fact, what Gareth means is something very simple: nobody can deny that when, for example, the officiant at Evening Prayer says “O God, come to our aid” he or she does so without there being anyone present – any man, woman, or child – whose proper name is ‘God’. What makes this odd is that, by and large, it only makes sense for us to address someone when they are in the room with us (or any rate, when we have reason to believe that they are within earshot). And this is because we address people we know using their names (we use the word—the name – ‘Charlie’ to refer to Charlie). To address people we don't know, we employ expressions like “Hey you there!” Whenever we are addressing someone, other people can always ask “Who are you talking to?” and we typically offer replies like “The chap over there, the one in the blue shirt.” Of course, one can speak to Charlie when he is not in the house at all, but on holiday in Spain; we would then talk by phone or over the internet. But if one were to persist in speaking to Charlie when there was absolutely no one at all of that name in the house and when there was absolutely no one who could be identified as Charlie, one would be thought quite mad. (If one were not mad, then some special explanation of one's behaviour would be needed. Perhaps I was rehearsing my lines for Charley's Aunt).

Gareth's second point is that the absence of anyone called ‘God’ is as it were constitutive of the proper use of that word because that absence is not a contingent fact (as Charlie's absence would be a contingent fact if I were in my room calling him, when he'd just stepped out for a stroll). That's why if someone phoned for Charlie while he was out, it would be quite proper to say “Unfortunately, he's not here right now. May I take a message?” Whereas it would never make sense to say “Unfortunately, God's not here right now.” God is not a thing or a person whose presence can come and go, like Charlie's. And this helps to explain why it's not madness for Christians to address themselves to God when there is no one there named ‘God’ while it would be madness for me to speak to Charlie in the complete absence of anyone called ‘Charlie’.

And now we come to the crucial part in the middle of this passage, the part that Robinson excised in his paper. In this section of the text, Gareth says quite explicitly that “we” – that is orthodox Christian believers, among whom he numbers himself – do not want to say that God is absent. What I take Gareth to be doing here is emphasizing a further logical or grammatical difference between the presence of God and the presence of medium sized dry goods. The tractor might be in the barn or being used to plough the fields or at the shop being repaired. But the tractor cannot ever be everywhere. It's part of the grammar of word like ‘chairs’, ‘tables’, ‘tractors’ and ‘people’ that the items we pick out with those words have to be somewhere or other. They cannot be everywhere at once. But, ‘God’ is different: of God alone is it true to say that he “is present everywhere, at all times.” Nowhere in the book does Gareth claim that the sentence ‘God is present’ has no place in Christian belief and practice. His rather different point is that the importance of that use of ‘present’ should not lead us to overlook its logical or grammatical differences from its use in a sentence like “Was Charlie present in the house at the time of the alleged crime?” The answer to the latter could equally be “yes” or “no” depending on the facts, while the answer to the question “Is God really present?” could never, under any circumstances be “no”.

Finally, we come to the philosophical upshot of what Gareth Moore is arguing in this passage. He is arguing against those atheists who want to say: “Look, it's obvious that there is no God, since you can never produce anyone or anything called ‘God’.” To which Gareth's reply is, in effect: “You are quite right that we can never produce anyone or anything called ‘God’. There really would be no God, no such thing as God, if God were supposed to be a thing or a person – an object – named by the word ‘God’: someone or something that could be exhibited or produced at will. But I am suggesting that your presumption is false: we orthodox believers are not supposing God to be a thing or a person – or any kind of object – named by the word ‘God’. But it does not follow that God does not exist: rather, what follows is that what it takes for God to exist is – as a matter of logic – different from what it takes for things and people to exist.”

The right conclusion to draw is that, on Gareth's view, there is no way for God not to be present. (Though again, there is an important spiritual role for sentences like “God is absent from me right now” – consider the Psalmist's cry “Why have you hidden your face from me?”). And while it might be fitting to say that God is present, we need to be mindful in saying this that the sentence ‘God is present’ is used differently from a sentence like ‘Charlie is present.’ For instance, God and Charlie do not compete for space: it's not that in order for Charlie to sit at his desk, God has to vacate the desk. If we say ‘God is present everywhere’, what we mean is that there is nowhere that is outside of God, that there is, as a matter of logic, no such thing as a space outside of or external to God. But we need to be careful: when we say this we are not saying God is so big that there is nothing outside of God, because in the sentence ‘God is big’ (if we were to say it) we would not mean God is a vastly huge thing or region of space. Things and regions are in the universe, they could appear on a list of what there is. God is not any kind of thing or any kind of region of space.

We saw that among the central claims that Robinson takes away from Believing in God is that the word ‘God’ is, according to Gareth, a name – only it's a name that refers to an absence (in the way that the definite description ‘the hole in my tooth’ might be taken to refer to an absence of enamel in one of my molars). It's beyond reasonable doubt that this is a mistake: for Gareth, ‘God’ is not a funny kind of name or referring expression (odd because it names an absence), it's not a name at all.

As we have noticed, although he is keen to emphasize the logical or grammatical role that absence plays in orthodox talk of God, Gareth is no less keen to emphasize the significance that presence plays in it. Many additional examples can be cited, including this one:

The word ‘God’ cannot name an absence, since God is always and everywhere present. It's just that establishing that God is present is not something that can be done by looking about, or feeling things in the dark. And again

This shows that Gareth actually wants to give us a positive account of God's presence; he wants to reminds us that God's presence is not anything inert or indifferent. As my final example of the positive affirmations of God's existence that occur frequently in Believing in God, I'll provide this one:

Again, Gareth is emphatically conveying his commitment to the existence and reality of God. What is of concern to him is to provide a proper philosophical account of what it might mean to have such a commitment.

Let me end this part of my response to Robinson by challenging his reading of what Gareth was up to in the discussion of poltergeists. Robinson took him to be affirming that ‘God’ names an absence, just as ‘poltergeist’ does. But Gareth's real target here is the conjunction of claims that Flew took to be common cause between believers and atheists. One of these was that religious beliefs are reached by making inferences from observable phenomena. Here we are meant to have in mind an analogy with our ordinary ways of explaining things. If Alvin's fingerprints are found on the gun used to kill Otto, we might infer that Alvin shot Otto, and this despite our not having seen the murder take place. We make an inferential move from what is observed (the fingerprints) to something that is not observed (the identity of the murderer). The second claim that Flew took to be common cause is that what makes religious beliefs religious is that those who hold them postulate special supernatural entities to account for what they observe.

Gareth's hostility to this pair of assumptions seems to be motivated by several things. One is that it seems to get the character of Christian belief all wrong. Typically, when we engage in inferences to unobserved things, we do so in an open-minded, fallibilist kind of way. It's quite possible that the real killer erased her fingerprints from the gun and then asked innocent, gullible Alvin to hold it for her, thereby causing his fingerprints to be found on it. So although we inferred that Alvin was the killer, we can and should be willing to revise our belief when and because new evidence comes to light. Another way to put this would be to say that we happily entertain competing hypotheses when it comes to ordinary explanations. But this is not what believing in God is actually like.

That belief in God is not an hypothesis at all is shown by the fact that we don't start by postulating God as a way of accounting for observable things. In the course of offering ordinary explanations, all of the hypotheses are “on the same level”, as it were. We accept and reject any such hypothesis – to the extent that we are reasonable – in proportion to the strength of its supporting evidence. But we don't say: “God probably made the world from nothing, although perhaps the Big Bang explains it all.” One reason why the thought that God made the world and the thought that the Big Bang explains everything are not on the same level is this. You can, without contradiction, entertain both beliefs, whereas you cannot without contradiction believe that each of Alvin and Alice alone killed Charlie. The Big Bang is supposed to have happened at the start of the universe. For a believer, God is not just supposed to exist – God has to exist, he cannot not exist. Furthermore, you can't shape your whole life around a belief you've come to by formulating an explanatory hypothesis in the way that Christians shape their entire lives around their belief in God.

Gareth's other main reason for rejecting this picture of belief in God has to do with what a successful philosophical response to Flew's challenge might look like. In sum, Flew says to Christian believers: “Show me the hard empirical evidence for God's existence and I'll believe.” To which Gareth wants to reply: Nothing could count as empirical evidence for God's existence because God is not an empirical kind of thing. There is nothing in the universe – nothing seen or unseen – that could be counted as God.

Having disposed of Robinson's direct textual arguments, I turn now to the second part of his case against Gareth.

IV. The indirect “guilt by association” argument

One of the reasons I have called this part of Robinson's case against Gareth his “guilt by association” argument is that it kicks off not with a quotation from Believing in God but rather with two passages taken from D. Z. Phillips's Death and Immortality. Robinson interprets Phillips to be saying that it would be utter nonsense to speak of surviving death. And as we have seen, according to Robinson, if you are “radical Wittgensteinian” you must be a card-carrying materialist: ipso facto, you deny the very possibility of anyone's surviving death.

Whatever exactly Phillips believed about immortality, the real question is whether Gareth says anything in the book to indicate that he subscribed to such a materialist doctrine. It is of great relevance to heed his remarks about heaven:

It beggars belief that anyone could read these words and think that they were written by a materialist or that they in any way “undermine religious belief.” (Robinson, p. 355)

There is, of course, no gainsaying Gareth's wholehearted commitment to Wittgenstein's approach to philosophical questions. Let me turn now to two other areas where Robinson is troubled by “Gareth's choice of philosophical medium” (p. 360).

The first is tied up with what Robinson calls “the non-realist construal of religious language.” (p. 357) Roughly this comes to the claim that religious utterances are not statements of fact, but are, instead, something akin to “expressions of value and attitude towards the world.” (p. 354) Is there any reason to think that Gareth subscribes to such a view?

Understood as a doctrine about the meaning religious utterances, the thing that worries Robinson might be called expressivism. There can be no doubt that Gareth was some sort of expressivist, but to gain proper clarity, it would be helpful to distinguish between two versions of that position. One might be labelled strong expressivism – the claim that religious sentences are never in the running for being true or false because they always and only express (non-cognitive) attitudes. The other position is moderate expressivism. On this view, while religious utterances are often used to express (non-cognitive) attitudes, at least some of the time, religious sentences are in the running for being true or false.

Gareth was undoubtedly a moderate expressivist. There are two crystal-clear pieces of evidence that he thought that the predicates ‘true’ and ‘false’ can properly be applied to religious beliefs and religious statements. One is found in Believing in God:

The other appears in a paper he published a few years after the book.Footnote ⁷ In it Gareth wrote:

There is not even the vaguest hint that Gareth thought that religious utterances could not be in the running for truth or falsity.

Robinson's other Wittgenstein-related concern is that Gareth thinks that

Let's take the last claim first. If anything belongs to “noumenal reality” God most certainly does. In the course of discussing the claims that God is invisible and intangible and so forth, Gareth says very plainly that God is transcendent:

What are we to make of Robinson's other claim (that Gareth thought that religious belief is nothing more than finding consolation in certain practices)? It seems to me that Gareth is as clear as can be that beliefs are one thing and practices another. He says

Saying that the beliefs are logically linked to ( = cannot be understood apart from) the practices actually presupposes that the beliefs are one thing and the practices another. To say that “X is simply a matter of being Y” is not just to say that X and Y are conceptually connected, it is to say that X and Y are, at bottom, the same. Gareth never says the truth of Christian beliefs is simply a matter of finding Christian practices to be life affirming or whatever. Rather, he is insisting that the ways in which Christian believers act and speak show how they take the claims of Christianity to be true.

I conclude that if to be a “radical Wittgensteinian” is to be an empiricist or a materialist or some kind of reductionist about belief, Gareth was no such thing.

V. By way of an ending

This brings me almost to the end of my vindication of the integrity of Gareth's position in Believing in God. I want to close by emphasizing the fact that among his primary motivations for taking up the stance he does is a deeply religious one. More precisely, it is a deeply Christian motive, to wit, a profound aversion towards idolatry and a strenuous effort to eschew idolatry in the ways we think and talk about God. And here ‘idolatry’ means any kind of worship directed towards something other than God himself.

Gareth's insistence on the transcendence of God was driven by a desire to overcome our constant tendency to picture God as just another inhabitant of or agent within the universe. If God is that which lets (or makes) all things be, God cannot, “upon pain of idolatry” (p. 17), be anything that might be discovered or encountered in the world. That this was, for Gareth, far from being merely an idle “philosophical” point is shown by his saying things like this:

This is what I meant by Gareth's forthright effort in Believing in God to be true to Christianity, not a Christianity of “empty” or idolatrous belief, but a Christianity whose central focus is the living and true God. Could anything count as more integral to being a Christian?