Prelude: the Atheist and the Believer

In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein articulated what has come to be known as the ‘picture theory’ of language. This foundational text for 20th century philosophical and scientific reflection characterised every assertion we make as a ‘picture’ we hold up before the world. We say, ‘this is how things are’, and what makes our assertion true or false is a certain correspondence (or lack thereof) between the picture and the reality portrayed.

Part of this story is largely uncontroversial (‘you should get an umbrella, it’s pouring down today!‘, says your friend, and you look through the window to see whether that’s true—you have known him to exaggerate a bit in the past). Yet something that mystified Wittgenstein was the fact that to every assertion corresponds one and only one negative statement (‘well, actually, it is not pouring down—just the usual drizzle!’). Both are mutually excluding, and so if one is true, the other must be false.

And in this way, it can be said: Two propositions are opposed to one another, if they have nothing in common, and: Every proposition has only one negative, because there is only one proposition which is wholly outside it.

Tractatus, 5.513.

Now this is a bit more controversial. Some logicians and philosophers have tried to show that certain statements are neither true nor false, fondly invoking fanciful examples like, ‘the present king of France is bald’. Besides some undeclared reactionary sympathies on their part, and a somewhat unhealthy concern with haircare, we are supposed to infer from cases like this that the presumed opposition between the true and the false, the assertion and the negation, does not always hold.

Not so for Wittgenstein, who thought this trick only postpones the question: ultimately, we must arrive at the fact that ‘there is no present king of France’, and so come back to our basic true-false schema. Defending this fundamental intuition was important for the author of the Tractatus: we should regard every assertion as a line dividing up a space into two regions, like a boundary on a map marking off the land from the sea (or, in Wittgenstein’s own example, as a black dot on a white surface, where the dot corresponds to ‘true’ and everywhere else to ‘false’).

Is this the case of the Atheist and the Believer? Their assertions seem mutually excluding; their worldviews appear to lie wholly outside each other. One says, ‘God exists’; the other replies, ‘God does not exist’. If one is right, the other must be wrong. But immediately a problem confronts us. What kind of picture is this? To what shall it be compared?

The Atheist says, ‘I look around, but I don’t see God. There is nothing this picture corresponds to’. Yet the Believer replies, ‘there is nothing I can point to in the world that matches my picture. In fact, I don’t quite know what this word God looks like’. Both the Atheist and the Believer have something of an iconoclast: they feel this picture they are arguing about is somehow inadequate. Still, both have a sense their assertions matter.

How is this so? Even Wittgenstein came to realise in the Tractatus that there are limits to what a picture can represent. It cannot, for instance, represent itself, nor can it represent the whole of reality (imagine drawing a map of a country on a 1:1 scale?). There are cases where words, simply, fail us, and we’d better be silent, says Wittgenstein: our words are not enough to assert or to deny.

The Believer seems to be in a similar situation. For if ‘God’ means what the Believer purports it to be, the creator and source of everything that exists, what could stand for it? Nothing can ultimately represent it. Anything could be summoned in defence of what the Believer is trying to portray, and the Atheist trying to deny. Every aspect of their experience enters into the picture. They themselves become part of it.

In adopting incompatible positions, ironically, the Atheist and the Believer end up having something fundamental in common. Unlike the Agnostic or the Indifferent, they have taken a definite stance. Their position is characterised by a certain commitment, to which they respond with their entire lives. Each, then, is vulnerable to what the other has to say.

It is to pursue this vulnerability that this blog begins today. A blog I dedicate it to all my non-believing friends, and those I may still make on the way. The following (rather lengthy) quotation from a contemporary theologian speaks eloquently about the dangers and rewards of the journey:

The believer is always threatened with an uncertainty that in moments of temptation can suddenly and unexpectedly cast a piercing light on the fragility of the whole that usually seems so self-evident to her […] In other words, in what is apparently a flawlessly interlocking world someone here suddenly catches a glimpse of the abyss lurking—even for her—under the firm structure of the supporting conventions. In a situation like this, what is in question is not the sort of thing that one perhaps quarrels about otherwise—the dogma of the Assumption, the proper use of confession—all this becomes absolutely secondary. What is at stake is the whole structure; it is a question of all or nothing. That is the only remaining alternative; nowhere does there seem anything to cling to in this sudden fall. Wherever one looks, only the bottomless abyss of nothingness can be seen.

[…] Just as we have already recognized that the believer does not live immune to doubt but is always threatened by the plunge into the void, so now we can discern the entangled nature of human destinies and say that the nonbeliever does not lead a sealed-off, self-sufficient life, either. However vigorously he may assert that he is a pure positivist, who has long left behind him supernatural temptations and weaknesses and now accepts only what is immediately certain, he will never be free of the secret uncertainty about whether positivism really has the last word […] Anyone who makes up their mind to evade the uncertainty of belief will have to experience the uncertainty of unbelief, which can never finally eliminate for certain the possibility that belief may after all be the truth.

[…] Both the believer and the unbeliever share, each in their own way, doubt and belief, if they do not hide from themselves and from the truth of their being. Neither can quite escape either doubt or belief; for the one, faith is present against doubt; for the other, through doubt and in the form of doubt. It is the basic pattern of human destiny only to be allowed to find the finality of existence in this unceasing rivalry between doubt and belief, temptation and certainty. Perhaps in precisely this way doubt, which saves both sides from being shut up in their own worlds, could become the avenue of communication. It prevents both from enjoying complete self-satisfaction; it opens up the believer to the doubter and the doubter to the believer; for one, it is his share in the fate of the unbeliever; for the other, the form in which belief remains nevertheless a challenge to him.

Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity