285 - Metaphysics and Religious Language

Metaphysics and Religious Language
By Frank B. Dilley
173 pp. New York, Columbia University Press, 1964. $4.00.

Mr. Dilley offers an account of the nature of metaphysics, drawing upon the work of A. N. Whitehead, Stephen Pepper, Susan Langer, Dorothy Emmet, and others. His main concern is with religious metaphysics. He claims that disagreements in this field-for example, the disagreement as to whether God exists-are factual rather than logical. "The existence of God," he says, "is logically possible; whether God exists or not is a matter of fact and ought to be discussed on the level of fact" (p. 3). I am sure that Dilley is right in making this claim for theism. But it is a claim which many philosophers emphatically challenge. They allege that the notion of a supreme being who exists "out there," as a reality other than and independent of ourselves, is so incoherent that the question of the existence of such a being cannot properly arise. Dilley does not consider this fundamental difficulty (except very briefly as regards the one attribute of necessary being), and this omission must make his book of less interest to philosophical readers than it would otherwise have been.

He does, however, discuss the closely related question of the verifiability or otherwise of theological statements. He accepts Schlick's version of the verification principle, to the effect that in order to be entitled to take a sentence as factually meaningful one must be able to specify the conditions under which it would be respectively true and false. Dilley regards this requirement as fatal to theology. He says, "It is important to show that Christian theism cannot satisfy that criterion however it is put, and that this means theists ought to reject the claim that the verification principle is the final criterion for truth claims" (p. 39). We see why he is so afraid of the verification principle when we find him assuming that verification can only be in terms of physical sense data. But this is a naturalistic dogma which forms no part of the basic concept of verification. Schlick himself recognized this in the very important paper from which Dilley quotes, for it was here that he made the significant concession, which theologians have been too slow to take up, that the hypothesis of immortality is in principle verifiable-namely by waiting to see if one still has experiences after bodily death. However Dilley does not seriously consider the

286 - Metaphysics and Religious Language

notion of eschatological verification. He dismisses, rightly, the possibility that "whether or not one wakes up again after death" would serve to verify or falsify Christian theism. But the more interesting question is whether Christian theology entails further expectations beyond the bare circumstance of survival, fulfillment of which would approximate sufficiently to a verification of that theology as to authorize rational belief in it. It must be accounted a defect of this book that it raises this general topic, but discusses only a weak caricature of the possibility that is to be considered.

Dilley's account of the nature of metaphysics is as follows. A metaphysical system is a hypothesis about the nature of the world as a whole. The main criterion by which such hypotheses are to be judged is their descriptive adequacy. "Adequacy, however, is a function of perspective, of one's starting point, of one's basic judgment as to what is metaphysically significant in experience, of one's 'faith' . . . Metaphysical systems are elaborated and criticized extensions of faith" (pp. 69-73). But what is faith? it consists, according to Dilley, in the adoption of a root metaphor drawn from some phase of human experience and generalized to apply to the universe as a whole. This is probably a good account of metaphysical thinking. But it compels us to reopen the question whether a religious faith is properly to be classified as a metaphysical hypothesis. For the faith of the prophets and apostles did not consist in their adoption of a root metaphor. It was a form of experience, the experience of the presence and activity of God, rather than an exercise in metaphysical theory construction. The assumption that religious faith is the acceptance of a world view is one of several points at which Dilley's most important positions are both insufficiently argued and open to serious question.

John Hick
Cambridge University
Cambridge, England