I do wonder whether we are a little naive to assume that it is even possible to believe in what we cannot conceive.
What is the actual extent of our understanding? It seems to me that most of what we do is rearrange a set of flexible metaphors and symbols into pleasing pictures. With language we combine loose tropes within a system of holistic meaning; we attempt to domesticate and schematise this nebulous thing ‘experience’. And yet we are already within it.
We enlarge the use of our language by taking familiar usages and applying them in new ways. I want to ask, if this process has anything of the character of analogy, then does this mean that the whole process is critically unpinned, lacking deliberate direction, and ultimately arbitrary in a way which casts serious doubt on our ability to even grasp, let alone master, the system of meaning we inherit in language?
This is certainly not all. If belief is a having-before-oneself, a kind of knowledge or intimacy, then it would seem that whatever cannot be known cannot be believed.
Specifically, if God cannot be known, if he is Wholly Other and beyond the impetuous attempts of metaphysics to domesticate him, then what hope have we for a meaningful faith? Whosoever thought that they believed in God, would merely believe that they believed in God. Epistemologically, a soaring gulf would prevent any further intimacy.
And yet this seems almost too easy. There is an undergrowth of nebulous conceptualisations here which resist being brought into the light. I will restrict my observations only to that conception of religion in the west which, following on from Zwingli and Calvin, came to see its defining and most important characteristic as ‘belief’, rather than ritual. This is belief as a kind of articulated conviction conveyed in the medium of language. As far as I can tell, this makes the entire argumentative position of Christianity weaker.
As soon as we talk about language we run into the above problems concerning metaphor. The very idea of symbolic language in religion is problematic. I am not referring just to the kind of criticisms which have grown out of the development of radical interpretation (think Donald Davidson). I think that these kinds of arguments are often thought to pull more argumentative weight than they actually do.
For the sake of exposition, the argument says that symbolic language cannot reach out to something which is Wholly Other, and whatever is only ‘partially’ Other, such as the revealed God, can just as well be described in literal langauge, making symbolism redundant. I think this argument stands or falls on the tenability of any delineation between ‘symbolic’ and ‘literal’ - and seeing as this is unresolved I will not use this as foundational for my argument.
(If it is not, then we go down the road towards Richard Rorty, or so it seems to me. If it is valid in some sense (a view I am inclined towards), this would not be an argument against God, and it would not necessarily be an argument against the possibility of believing in him (as some who make this argument might want it to be). However it would mean that anyone unable to explicate their conception of God would be open to the criticism that what they believed in was actually a kind of covert negative theology. This is especially true of all those people who in frustration, and perhaps a kind of repressed contempt (a rarer thing I have found than is sometimes thought), say something like ‘God is beyond our comprehension’.)
In other words, we come to the conclusion; ‘if you cannot tell me what you believe, then you do not believe it.’
I think there is something to be said though for the idea that even a literal language involves a kind of domestication of what is foreign. Anything else, I am sure Quine would tell us (amongst most others these days), would be a reversion to Platonic realism and the bad old days. Not that most analytic thinkers I have read have a very contextually or historically adequate understanding of Plato or any of the other Greek thinkers.
This kind of domestication, I am tempted to say, erects an idea of God in place of the real thing. I am told, however, that this is not allowed.
(Between a rock and a hard place.)
James