Wittgensteinian Fideism?

The question mark seems to be apposite. Neither term in the title here is in common circulation, so before discussing the content of this book:

Nielsen, K., & Phillips, D. Z. (2005). Wittgensteinian Fideism? London: SCM.

I think unpacking the title might be an idea.

To start from the end, ‘fideism’. According to Penelhum, fideists argue that faith does not need the support of argument, and therefore reject the approach of philosophical defenders of faith who try to show that faith is compatible with reason, scientific knowledge, and so on. Faith, on this view, need not be rational. There are some venerable names in this tradition: Tertullian and Kierkegaard, for example, although their positions still can be defended on philosophical grounds.

In fideism, the key is a state of trust and commitment to God, not to some doctrine or argument about God. We reject, as sinful beings, signs of God’s presence revealed to us, and think that only human powers are the cure for human ills. Reason and science require detachment; faith requires a passionate involvement. Faith requires rebirth and submission; without these God remains hidden from us.

The’ Wittgensteinian’ bit of the title refers, of course, to the Twentieth Century philosopher Wittgenstein, and, more specifically here, to his idea of language games. Wittgenstein’s own relationship to faith, religion, and, more specifically in his context, Christianity, is ambiguous, but it is certainly true that some of his ideas have been incorporated into philosophy of religion and theology.

Wittgensteinian Fideisim, therefore, is the accusation that some philosophers of religion claim that faith (particularly Christian faith, but the claim is usually advanced against Judaism and Islam as well) is a particular language game and that the language game can only be understood from within the faith, that is, by someone who is a believer already. Therefore, the argument goes, these philosophers argue that religion cannot be criticised from outside the faith. Hence, if we agree that, say, Christianity is a language game, or at least that that language and meanings, actions and activities that constitute Christianity constitute a language game then was can claim that the faith is immune to criticism from without, although not from within, the language game.

These claims about some philosophers of religion were first put forward by Kai Nielson in the mid-1960s. The philosophers in his sights were Peter Winch, Norman Malcolm, and D. Z. Phillips. Eventually, Phillips replied, denying that there is or was such a thing as Wittgensteinian Fideism and that, even if it did exist, he was not such a fideist, and the argument, slowly, developed from there, culminating in the book referred to above, which has Nielson’s original 1967 paper, some of Phillips’ responses, Nielson’s responses to those, and some papers from a 2003 conference on the subject.

It is, admittedly, the sort of book that gets philosophy, and particularly, in this case, philosophy of religion, a bad name. Mostly Phillips and Nielson seem to spend their time talking past each other and accusing each other of not having read what they have written carefully enough. In short, the book can be characterised as two rather grumpy elderly men arguing about who said what about them when. External interventions in the debate do not really seem to help, either. On the whole, I did not feel that the discussion was advanced, let alone resolved, by the papers in the book.

I think the principal problem with the whole debate is that Christianity (and, I suspect, Judaism and Islam, although I do not know) is not a philosophical discussion. Of course, right back to the Patristic Fathers philosophy has been a part of the debates within and about Christianity, but that does not mean that either philosophy or the philosophical categories imported into Christian theology by engagement with philosophy, represent anything other than human ways of exploring, describing and discussing the faith.

Therefore, we can say that while Christian faith has some of the aspects of a language game in Wittgenstein’s terms, the same can be said for, say, chemistry. That does not mean that either Christianity or chemistry is immune from discussion outside those subjects, however. A physicist may comment on either, as may an ethicist or politician. What the comments amount to is not the point; with a fair amount of care and engagement with an alien subject, the external commentator can make pertinent points that require a response.

The other thing about Christianity specifically (asides about how Judaism and Islam are included are only, I fear, there for political correctness rather than the result of any engagement with those faiths) is that it completely ignores, on both sides, any encounter with God. The debate is about the existence of God, the coherence of belief in God, and so on. There is no discussion about how God might be encountered.

In Christianity, of course, the clue is in the name. Christianity is, first and foremost, about the encounter with God in the shape of His incarnate, crucified, and risen Son, Jesus. That is, Christianity is not a series of more or less coherent doctrines, debates, creeds, and activities, but ultimately about the encounter with Jesus. The encounters came first, after all. The accounts of Jesus’ life came afterward and then, as the message was carried out into the world, came the doctrines, creeds, and liturgies that have developed over the last two thousand years or so.

It is, of course, open to us as humans to accept or reject the encounter with God and Jesus. That is a slightly different debate about human freedom and will rather than fideism as such. The language game (or games) which that encounter might produce are perhaps, human constructs and are open to criticism, much like any other human construct or the idea of human constructs itself. If an individual never has the encounter then they are left with a language game to engage with or to reject. If the encounter develops a deeper faith than that in a person who never has it, then that is a matter or human experience and lack of it, not, surely, a philosophical position.

Levelling Up

There are a few political rallying cries which stir most liberal Westerners: freedom and slavery, for example. This has been an issue in certain right-wing arenas during the Covid-19 pandemic and associated lock-downs and other restrictions on freedom of movement. The freedom from having irresponsible people infect me with a possible lethal and (at the time) hard to treat illness does not seem to be quite so much on the agenda, but no one is perfect.

Equality before the law is another thing upon which liberal democracy is founded, as is the universal franchise, that is that all people should have a vote in deciding who is going to represent them. These things were not always part of our national structures, of course. The obtaining of them was a struggle, and took, in fact, centuries.

One of the early groups to argue and agitate for those things we now consider to be rights under our national constitution were the Levellers. These are to be distinguished from the Diggers (discussed a couple of weeks ago. Indeed, the Diggers seem to have regarded the Levellers as insufficiently radical, describing themselves as the ‘True Levellers’.

The Levellers had their beginnings in the First English Civil War (1642-6). They were never a united political party; more a few well-known leaders and their followers, and a large number of pamphlets and tracts describing a program of reforms. Their main claims and arguments were for a reform of Parliament and religious tolerations. Everyone was born equal in their political philosophy, and no one had a natural right to govern or rule over another free-born person. Government had, therefore to be by consent.

Fair enough, but that begs the question of ‘consent by whom?’ to which the answer was ‘the people’. That raises another question, of whom ‘the people’ are. The complaint was that Parliament was, in two ways, undemocratic. Firstly, the undemocratic elements, the House of Lords and the Monarch had to be stripped of their power. Secondly, while Parliament was officially democratic, in fact, the franchise was so small in many constituencies and many seats were in the pockets of the local gentry as rotten boroughs, the democracy as the voice of the people, in general, was stifled.

The Leveller suggestions were to elect Parliament more frequently – every year or two (depending on which pamphlet we read), giving MPs a modest salary to prevent them being dependent on rich patron and their programs and for the electorate to be all men over 21 except servants (who were expected to vote as their employers directed), the recipients of alms (ditto) and royalists (who would have to wait a decade). If voting was a birthright, it was only to be removed from those who had squandered it – criminals, supporters of the king, the wage earners and so on. Thus the Levellers actually limited the franchise significantly and never seem to have considered the right of women to vote.

The Leveller position was founded on Scripture, a fact which those who regard them as the foundation of the British political left might like to ponder a little. Limitations on the power of government were necessary because the human heart was corrupt and magistrates were likely to err. Certain freedoms were to be respected no matter what Parliament decreed, be it never so democratically elected. Freedom of conscience was likewise to be protected. Conscription was to be outlawed and everyone was to be treated equally under the law.

There were to be limits, of course. True freedom of conscience was liable to land up with trouble. Freedoms should not land up troubling other people or endangering the state. Natural law, of comeliness and civility, should trump religious freedom when required. For the Levellers, perhaps, political liberty was the route to religious liberty. The two could not, at the time, be separated.

For the Levellers God did not choose the university-educated men to be ministers of the Gospel, but the ill-educated, the fishermen and tent-makers of the New Testament. Anyone could, therefore, preach; clergy who spoke of obedience and submission to the government were serving other gods than Jesus. This is a consequence of the Reformation and the printing press – the Bible was available for all the read and discuss, and people did, drawing their own conclusions.

However, people also needed to be instructed in the Gospel, and hence there was a case for having ministers, but these should be elected by the people of gathered churches, rather than imposed by the government and a national church. The Levellers therefore would have separated church and state, something which was not to the liking of many in the country at the time. Politics and religion were not that easily separated.

Of course, theological positions among the Leveller pamphleteers varied, and there is dispute as to how much of their program (such as it was) was theological. Lilburne of course was a well known religious radical, in trouble as a young man before the outbreak of the civil war over distributing banned pamphlets. Many Levellers seem to have taken the core of Christianity as the Golden Rule and it was the basis of their arguments for equality. Old Testament forms of government were overturned by the incarnation. The Old Testament was not, according to the Levellers, a prefiguring of later practices. If the church was a voluntary assembly, then Old Testament ideas of church and government could not apply.

After the 1647 Putney debates, the Levellers were suppressed. They had been too influential, particularly in the army, for the comfort of the government and an ill-timed and ill-planned mutiny led to their decline. They may well have felt betrayed by Cromwell (who spent some time defending Lilburne) and Parliament. The impact of the Levellers was rather small; they existed as a group, albeit loosely, for around six years. None of their proposals were established, and they were forgotten about for two to three centuries, until the Chartists revived some of their demands and, slowly, some of the demanded freedoms were established.

Their program was radical – equality under the law, inalienable natural rights, freedom of conscience, limitations on government, concepts of natural justice and voting rights for the poor. These had never existed, except in their imagined Anglo-Saxon past (before the Norman yoke was imposed). It is little wonder that their demands were too rich for the grandees of the time and, in many places, are still too much for governing classes to swallow.

The Emergent Multiverse Part I

I have been, slowly and painfully, reading

Wallace, D. (2012). The Emergent Multiverse: Quantum theory According to the Everett Interpretation. Oxford: OUP.

Slowly, because it is a complex subject, and painfully because while I am a fully paid up quantum mechanic, or at least I was, my skills are a bit rusty.

Still, Wallace’s claims so far (I have read Part One of the book) are reasonably clear, even to a rusty quantum physicist. The main claim is that the multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics is the only one that does not require additional bits to be added to the formalism of quantum mechanics. Hence, the argument goes, it is the best interpretation of quantum mechanics that we have.

Now, as an argument, this is valid, but it is a bit weak, in my view. Firstly, the interpretation produces nothing measurable, it seems (perhaps it will in due course). Secondly, just because we cannot think of a better interpretation of quantum mechanics than the emergent multiverse view does not mean it is right, it simply means that we cannot think of anything better. So much the worse for us.

A post or two ago I produced a couple of questions about the emergent multiverse view. So far, the book has addressed one of the. I wondered about the multiverse view and Occam’s razor. That is, we are strongly encouraged by Occam’s razor not to multiply entities unnecessarily. Wallace’s reply is that Occam’s razor is valid, but the key word is unnecessarily. That is, his view is that as the formalism of quantum mechanics requires it, creating additional universes does not break Occam’s razor. We multiply entities but not unnecessarily.

This may or may not be true, of course. Within the assumptions that Wallace makes it is reasonable, but I think that worries do remain and are not answered by this assertion. This relates to the over concern I raised, which is where the energy comes from to create another universe, exactly the same as this one, every time something happens to require that to happen in the quantum mechanical formalism. Creating anything, including universes, takes energy, and quantum mechanics, while it can, temporarily, play fast and loose with conservation laws, has to obey them in the final analysis. Quantum mechanics may be weird, but it does not break the conservation of energy.

Without getting too technical, Wallace seems to be arguing, so far as I have followed him, that each quantum transition does not cause a new universe to emerge. Hence, if I have an atom in its ground state and it collides with another atom, and it has a probability of gaining energy to promote its electron to one of two other states, two new universes are not created for the two possible outcomes. It is only when we have (to use the standard example) a cat in a box which may be in one of two states that there are two universes, one with a dead and one with an alive cat. So the number of universes that are created is not so big as it might be, but it is still uncountable.

I still think that there are further worries. Firstly, as an extension of the above, there is still the underlying question of what the quantum formalism means. The normal interpretation of the wave function is that it gives the probability of finding a particle in a given state. While Wallace raises concerns as to what probability means in this case (and, indeed, in wider cases) the wave function is not the particle. That is, the quantum formalism is not a full description of what is going on at the micro-scale. The quantum scale has little to do with our intuitions and understandings, which is based on our macro-scale experience. What we get out of the equations is not reality, or a description of it, but something we can work with.

It seems to me that there is a danger here of taking the relatively clean quantum mechanical description of the world available through the mathematics of Hilbert space and it associated entities, and thinking that this is the description of the world and all that is in it. That seems unlikely. Quantum mechanics is not, despite its success in the twentieth century, the be-all and end-all of physics, let alone science as a whole, or human experience. The status of scientific theories, especially in physics is disputed. Wallace seems to think that because we do not dispute our theories of dinosaurs and take their description of the world to be pretty well true, we should do the same with quantum mechanics, otherwise something is wrong with our conception of science.

However, we need not take the quantum mechanical description of sub-atomic particles to be true in the same sense that we take dinosaurs to be true. Both theories (no doubt; I am not an expert on dinosaurs) have problems in interpretation, but we are not constrained to take both theories as having the same sense of truth about them. Dinosaur theories are true because we can find bones and reconstruct what the creatures may have looked like. Quantum theories are true because we can make predictions about what will happen under certain circumstances which turn out to be valid within experimental error. These are not scientific theories on the same level as each other, it seems to me.

Theories in physics, therefore, are somewhat odder than those in other subjects in science. Mostly, this is because they rely on two aspects that Wallace seems to rather (so far at least) ignore. Firstly, of course, they are based on mathematics. This is not, of course, a problem (except for people who have to learn how to do the mathematics in the first place) but there are questions about what the mathematical entities thus created mean. Secondly, most physics, including quantum mechanics, is the outcome of a process of modeling some aspects of reality. Again, there arises, perhaps more pressingly, questions about what the models mean as representations of reality. We certainly do not have to take them literally. If we do, then perhaps we do land up with an emergent multiverse from quantum mechanics, but the move is not forced.