Reflections on Realism vs. Non-Realism

Abstract

Dewi Phillips’s Wittgensteinian animadversions failed to persuade us that there is not an issue of substance between the realists and the non-realists in talk of God. The starkness of Don Cupitt’s anti-realism, his insistence that the history of thought has made belief in an objective God impossible and that Christian God-talk must consequently be wholly reinterpreted in merely human terms, made it absolutely clear that, whatever the difficulties in articulating the ‘grammar’ of traditional Christian God-talk, Cupitt’s version was something very different from what the vast majority of Christian believers and Christian worshippers have thought they were holding and doing.