So am I supposed to doubt this claim or not?

Yes, you should doubt it. I think. But I’m not so sure about the last one I just said, ’cause maybe I don’t think that way. Or maybe not that one either, ’cause I might be sure, after all. It’s kinda doubtful. Or that one. Or that one. Or…

So am I supposed to doubt this claim or not?

But you’ve picked up on an important point that (the later) Wittgenstein makes about the impossibility of certainty. However, I’m also especially struck by his idea of “language games”, i.e. that within a certain social context of discourse, language does have real meaning and we can have a degree of certainty. Those contexts (or language games) I would say are our basic assumptions or “worldviews” that make further conversation possible. That’s the tie-in I was going for with the Wittgenstein reference.

Anyhow, you ask an excellent question Richard (re: how I can get along with other Christians), one that strikes closer to home than you know. I was actually fired (well, “pressured to resign”) from my last pastoral position because of these ideas. I was too “postmodern” for the conservative, ABSOLUTE TRUTH believing evangelical church I was a part of then. (So I do know exactly what you mean when you describe that Absolutist brand of Christianity).

But there is a more recent and growing movement of “postmodern” Christians who think more like me. It’s known as the Emerging Church movement. It’s been around (in various forms) for nearly a decade, and encompasses a wide variety of Christian denominations. For the last two years I’ve been busy starting a new emerging church in the Chicago suburbs, and I also lead the Chicago area Emergent Cohort (i.e. monthly discussion group).

Right now there are probably several thousand churches around the U.S. and in other parts of the world that would self-identify as an Emerging Church. And in terms of book sales of some of the most influential books in the movement, there are several hundred thousand involved in the conversation.

Personally I probably would have given up on Christianity and maybe become an atheist several years ago if I hadn’t found the emerging church conversation, which convinced me that there was a new way to be a Christian.

Actually prior to that I had been exposed to all this postmodern philosophy, believe it or not at my conservative evangelical school, Wheaton College. They have one excellent postmodern philosophy prof there who has managed to “corrupt” a lot of us. He was the one that got me into Wittgenstein, Derrida, Nietzsche and others.

BTW, you can read my own short description of the emerging church here.

It reminds me of the early quantum guys and their uncertainty principle. No matter how many times you measure something with precise instruments you’re always going to get at least slightly different measurements. You can only make sense of it when you establish a realm of uncertainty inside which those measurements fall. You can reduce that realm with more and better measurements, but never get it to zero variance. I completely agree with all that too….at least this time….last time I did too….pretty closely.

I can let go of a hammer over my toe a thousand times, and it is possible that once it may fall up instead of hitting my poor battered toe, and hit me in the forehead instead, but I ain’t gonna bet any money on it. This is why whenever I see a bumper sticker that says, “With God all things are possible” I want to sneak up and write underneath, “but some things are highly unlikely” and run away giggling, but I haven’t done it.

My fellow atheists, do not do this. It is bad manners.

Now I’m actually going somewhere with this, and that is to ask you how can you get along with other Christians? I know you’re getting similar questions from TxAtheist elsewhere and Christopher Bradley here, and I don’t want to overwhelm you. Maybe I should read your answers to them more carefully. Responding to Christopher much earlier here you said, “Couldn’t there be degrees of truth?” That took me by surprise. The Christians I’ve encountered up until now are obsessed with absolute Truth, (they capitalize it) absolute knowledge and my absolute damnation unless I absolutely surrender to their absolute way of salvation. To which I usually respond with any number of varieties of “Absolutely kiss my absolute ass.”

I don’t want you to change to be like me. I just want to know if there are more than five or six like you.

Whenever I get to wondering “What is really real, and how do I know what I know, if I know even that, etc, etc,” which fortunately isn’t too often, I just go outside without my coat in winter, or look at the smiling face of my daughter, or the trembling fingers of my mother, or touch my wife’s hand, or stand up too fast under an open kitchen cabinet. Things seem to re-boot, and sort themselves back into workable priorities.

As in Tractatus?

Dear God no! The early Wittgenstein was far too much of a Logical Positivist for me (which, obviously, is precisely the philosophy I’m arguing against). I was referring more to his Philosophical Investigations or On Certainty.

Why do we need a comprehensive worldview? Now one needs to draw a map out for me as to how to live life and isn’t that what most religions try to do?

Few people have a “comprehensive” worldview. But we all have at least some basic assumptions about life and reality that we use as the basis by which we live our lives. That’s not to say those assumptions need necessarily be imposed by any outside authority (whether religious or otherwise). IMO, most people (yes, even religious people), compose their own worldviews based on input from a diversity of sources – not least of which would be their own reason and experiences – not just one authoritarian source.

And again, there is rarely anything comprehensive about it. Most our “belief” systems (forgive me for using that word in a broadly philosophical way) are a jumbled web of interconnected (and sometimes conflicting) ideas. (I say this not as a “prescription” of how I think things ought to be, but merely as a description of how I think human cognition works.) If that is the case, then why shouldn’t we feel free to embrace truth wherever we discover it, regardless of which worldview or conceptual system we find it in?

Just my .02…

Thank you for your lengthy reply. I’m not quite sure how to respond, as I feel like most of your comments were responding to arguments that I didn’t actually make – things that you perhaps incorrectly inferred or thought were implied by what I did say. For instance, I never meant to imply that atheism was a monolithic worldview, or that there was only a choice between religion or atheism (I don’t think I even mentioned atheism at all). I agree with you that it is far more complex than that. Indeed, my whole point was that there are a multiplicity of worldviews, and that all of them may contain elements of truth and falsity. Personally I don’t think any particular group has a corner on reality.

Anyhow, I apologize if my questions or statements were unclear. That is my fault. However, since most of your reply was a response to things I didn’t actually say, I won’t bother defending viewpoints that I don’t personally hold. If someone else identifies more with the position you were arguing against and wants to defend it, I’ll leave that to them.

Frieden