On the Alleged Unimportance of Arguments for God’s Existence

Abstract

It is often maintained that arguments for the existence of God are not really of any significance for religious faith. If a person is untouched by religious feeling or the disposition to worship, or is not responsive to the claims of any religious revelation, it is said, argument will certainly not make him so. If he is, on the contrary, disposed to engage in the practices and related discourse constitutive of a religion, and thus to have a real relationship to the God (if any) of that religion, such arguments will be superfluous. One either plays some religious language-game, participates in some religious form of life, or one does not. Philosophical argument can have, or at least ought to have, no bearing on the matter either way; except to show that philosophical argument has no such bearing.¹ Even if such arguments as purport to prove, or to render probable, the existence of some ‘transcendent Being’, or what have you, did succeed, they would only provide the metaphysician with an abstraction who had nothing to do with the God of the worshipper.