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CHAPTER 6 CRITIQUE OF ETHICS AND THEOLOGY

There is still one objection to be met before we can
claim to have justified our view that all synthetic pro-
positions are empirical hypotheses. This objection is based
on the common supposition that our speculative know-
ledge is of two distinct kinds – that which relates to ques-
tions of empirical fact, and that which relates to questions
of value. It will be said that ‘statements of value’ are
genuine synthetic propositions, but that they cannot with
any show of justice be represented as hypotheses, which
are used to predict the course of our sensations; and, ac-
cordingly, that the existence of ethics and aesthetics as
branches of speculative knowledge presents an insuper-
able objection to our radical empiricist thesis.

In face of this objection, it is our business to give an
account of ‘judgements of value’ which is both satisfac-
tory in itself and consistent with our general empiricist
principles. We shall set ourselves to show that in so fax
as statements of value are significant, they are ordinary
‘scientific’ statements; and that in so far as they are
not scientific, they are not in the literal sense significant,
but are simply expressions of emotion which can be
neither true nor false. la maintaining this view, we may
confine ourselves for the present to the case of ethical
statements. What is said about them will be found to
apply, mutatis mutandis, to the case of aesthetic state-
ments also.’

The ordinary system of ethics, as elaborated in the
works of ethical philosophers, is very far from being a
homogeneous whole. Not only is it apt to contain pieces
of metaphysics, and analyses of non-ethical concepts t its
actual ethical contents arc themselves of very different
kinds. We may divide them, indeed, into four main classes.
There are, first of all, propositions which express defini-
tioiis of ethical terms, or judgements about the legitimacy
or possibility of certain definition*, Secondly, there are
propositions describing the phenomena of moral experi-
ence, and their causes. Thirdly, there are exhortations to
mora! virtue. And, lastly, there are actual ethical judge-
ments. It is unfortunately the case that the distinction
between these four classes, plain as it is, is commonly ig-
nored by ethical philosophers; with the result that it Is
often very difficult to tell from ihcir works what it is that
they are seeking to discover or prove.

In fact, it is easy to see that only the first of our four
classes, namely that which comprises the propositions re-
lating to the definitions of ethical terms, can be said to
constitute ethical philosophy. The propositions which de-
scribe the phenomena of moral experience, and their
causes, must be assigned to the science of psychology, or
sociology. The exhortations to moral virtue are not pro-
positions at all, but ejaculation? or commands which are
designed to provoke the reader to action of a certain sort.
Accordingly, they do not belong to any branch of philo-
sophy or science. As for the expressions oi ethical judge-
ments, we have not yet determined how they should be
classified. But inasmuch as they are certainly neither defi-
nitions nor comments upon, definitions, nor quotations,
we may say decisively that they do not belong to ethical
philosophy. A strictly philosophical treatise on ethics
should therefore make no ethical pronouncements. But it
should, by giving an analysis of ethical terms, show what
is the category to which all such pronouncements belong.
And this is what we are now about to do.

A question which is often discussed by ethical philo-
sophers is whether it is possible to find definitions which
would reduce all ethical terms to one or two fundamental
terms. But this question, though it undeniably belongs to
ethical philosophy, is not relevant to our present inquiry.
We are not now concerned to discover which term, with-
in the sphere of ethical terms, is to be taken as fundamen-
tal; whether, for example, ‘good’ can be defined in terms
of ‘right* or ‘right’ in terms of ‘good’, or both in terms
of ‘value’. What we are interested in is the possibility of
reducing the whole sphere of ethical terms to non-ethical
terms. We are inquiring whether statements of ethical
value can be translated into statements of empirical f get.

That they can be so translated is the contention of those
ethical philosophers who are commonly called subject!-
vists, and of those who are known as utilitarians. For the
utilitarian defines the Tightness of actions, and the good-
ness of ends, in terms of the pleasure, or happiness, or
satisfaction, to which they give rise; the subjectivist, in
terms of the feelings of approval which a certain person,
or group of people, has towards them. Each of these types
of definition makes moral judgements into a sub-class of
psychological or sociological judgements; and for this rea-
son they are very attractive to us. For, if either was cor-
rect, it would follow that ethical assertions were not
gcnerically different from the factual assertions which are
ordinarily contrasted with them; and the account which
we have already given of empirical hypotheses would apply
to them also.

Nevertheless we shall not adopt either a subjectivist or
a utilitarian analysis of ethical terms. We reject the sub-
jectivist view that to call an action right, c-r a thing good,
is to say that it is generally approved oi, because it is not
self-contradictory to assert that some actions which are
generally approved of are not right, or that some things
which are generally approved of are not good. And we re-
ject the alternative subjectivist view that a man who as-
serts that a certain action is right, or that a certain thing
is good, is saying that he himself approves of it, on the
ground that a man who confessed that he sometim-es
approved of what was bad or wTong would not be contra-
dicting himself. And a similar argument is fatal to utili-
tarianism. We cannot agree that to call an action right is
to say that of all the actions possible in the circumstances
it would cause, or be likely to cause, the greatest happiness,
or the greatest balance of pleasure over pain, or the great-
est balance of satisfied over unsatisfied desire, because we
find that it is not self-contradictory to -say that it is some-
times wrong to perform the action which would actually
or probably cause the greatest happiness, or the greatest
balance of pleasure over pain, or of satisfied over unsatis-
fied desire, And since it is not self-contradictory to say
that some pleasant things are not good, or that some bad
things are desired, it cannot be the case that the sentence
‘\ is good’ is equivalent to ‘x is pleasant’, or to *x is de-
sired’. And to every other variant of utilitarianism with
which I am acquainted the same objection can be made.
And therefore we should, I think, conclude that the vali-
dity of ethical judgements is not determined by the felicl-
fic tendencies of actions, any more than, by the nature of
people’s feelings; but that it must be regarded as ‘absolute’
or ‘intrinsic’, and not empirically calculable.

If we say this, we are not, of course, denying that it is
possible to invent a language in which all ethical symbols
are definable in non-ethical terms, or even that it is desir-
able to invent such a language and adopt it in place of our
awn; what we are denying is that the suggested reduction
of ethical to non-ethical statements 3s consistent with the
conventions of our actual language. That is. we reject utili-
tarianism and subjectivism, not as proposals to replace our existing ethical notions by new ones, but as analyses
of our existing ethical notions, Our contention is simply
that in our language, sentences which contain normative
ethical symbol are not equivalent to sentences which ex-
press psychological propositions, or indeed empirical pro-
positions of any kind.

It is advisable here to make it plain that it is only norma-
tive ethical symbols, and not descriptive ethical symbols,
that are held by us to be indefinable in factual terms. There
is a danger of confusing these two types of symbols, because
they are commonly constituted by signs of the Same sensible
form. Thus a complex sign of the form ‘x is wrong’ may
constitute a sentence which expresses a moral judgement
concerning a certain type of Conduct, or it may constitute
a sentence which states that a certain type of conduct is
repugnant to the moral sense of a particular society. In
the latter case, the symbol ‘wrong’ is a descriptive ethical
symbol, and the sentence in which it occurs expresses
an ordinary sociological proposition; in the former Case,
the symbol ‘wrong’ ts a normative ethical symbol, and
the sentence in which it occurs does not, we maintain, ex-
press an empirical proposition at all. It as only with norma-
tive ethics that wc arc at present concerned; so that when-
ever ethical symbols are used in the course of this argument
without qualification, they are always to be interpreted
as symbols of the normative type.

In admitting that normative ethical concepts are irre-
ducible to empirical concepts, we seem to be leaving the
way clear for the “absolutist” view of ethics – that is, the
view that statements of value are not controlled by ob-
servation, as ordinary empirical propositions 3re, but only
by a mysterious ‘intellectual intuition’. A feature of this
theory, which is seldom recognized by its advocates, is
that it makes statements of value unverifiable. For it is
notorious that what seems intuitively certain to one person may seem doubtful, or even false, to another. So that unless it is possible to provide some criterion by which
one may decide between conflicting intuitions, a mere ap-
peal to intuition is worthless as a test of a proposition’s
validity. But in the case of moral judgements no such cri-
terion can be given. Some moralists claim to settle the
matter by. saying that they ‘know’ that their own moral
judgements are correct. But such an assertion Is of purely
psychological interest, and has not the slightest tendency
to prove the validity of any moral judgement. For dissen-
tient moralists may equally well ‘know’ that their ethical
views are correct. And, as far as subjective certainty goes.
there will be nothing to choose between them. When such
differences of opinion arise in connexion with an ordin-
ary empirical proposition, one may attempt to resolve
them by referring to, or actually carrying out, some rele-
vant empirical test. But with regard to ethical statements,
there is, on the ‘absolutist’ or “intuitionist’ theory, no
relevant empirical test- We arc therefore justified in saying
that on this theory ethical statements are held to be
unvcrifiable. They arc, of course, also held to be genuine
synthetic proportions.

Considering the use which we have made of the prin-
ciple that a synthetic proposition is significant only if it
is empirically verifiable, it is clear that the acceptance of
an ‘absolutist’ theory of ethics would undermine the
whole of our main argument. And as we have already re-
jected the ‘naturalistic’ theories which are commonly
supposed to provide the only alternative to ‘absolutism’
in ethics, we seem to have (reached a difficult position. We
shall meet the difficulty by showing that the correct treat-
ment of ethical statements is afforded by a third theory,
which is wholly compatible with our radical empiricism.

We begin by admitting that the fundamental ethical
concepts are unanalysable, inasmuch as there is no
criterion by which one can test the validity of the judge-
ments in which they occur. So far we are in agreement
with the absolutists. But, unlike the absolutists, we are
able to give an explanation of thte fact about ethical con-
cepts, We say that the reason why they are unanalysable is
that they are mere pseudo-concepts. The presence of an
ethical symbol in a proposition adds nothing to its factual
content. Thus if 1 say to someone, ‘You acted wrongly in
stealing that money,’ I am not stating anything more than
if 1 had simply said, ‘You stole that money.’ In adding that
this action is wrong I am not making any further state-
ment about it. 1 am simply evincing my moral disapproval
of it. It is as if I had said, ‘You stole that money,’ in a
peculiar tone of horror, or written it with the addition of
some special exclamation marks. The tone, or the exclama-
tion marks, adds nothing to the Jiteral meaning of the
sentence. It merely serves to show that the expression of
it is attended by certain feelings in the speaiker.

If now I generalize my previous statement and say.
‘Stealing money is wrong.’ I produce a sentence which
has no factual meaning – that is, expresses no proposition
which can he cither true or false, it is as if I had written
‘Stealing money! ! ‘ – where the shape and thickness of
the exclamation marks show, by a suitable convention,
that a special sort of moral disapproval is the feeling which
is being expressed. It is clear that there is hothing said
here which can be true or false, Another man may dis-
agree with me about the wrongness of stealing, in the
sense that he may not have the same feelings about steal-
ing as I have, and he may quarrel with me on account of
my mora] sentiments. But he cannot, strictly speaking,
contradict me. For in saying that a certain type of action
is right or wrong. I am not making any factual statement,
not even a statement about my own state of mind. I am
merely expressing certain moral sentiments. And the man
who is ostensibly contradicting me is merely expressing
his moral sentiments. So that there is plainly no sense in
asking which of us is in the right. For neither of us is as-
serting a genuine proposition.

What we have just been saying about the symbol
‘wrong* applies to all normative ethical symbols. Some-
times they occur in sentences which record ordinary em-
pirical facts besides expressing ethical feeling about those
facts: sometimes they occur an sentences which simply
express etbicar* feeling about a certain type of actio*, or
situation, without making any statement of fact. But in
every case in which one would commonly be said to be
making an ethical judgement, the function of the relevant
ethical word is purely ’emotive’. It is used to express feel-
ing about certain objects, but not to make any assertion
about them.

It is worth mentioning that ethical terms do not serve
only to express feeling. They are calculated also to arouse
feeling, and so to stimulate action. Indeed some of them
are used in such a way as to give the sentences an which
they occur the effect of commands. Thus the sentence ‘It
is your duty to tell the truth’ may be regarded both as
the expression c>f a certain sort of ethical feeling about
truthfulness and as the expression of the command ‘Tel!
the truth.” The sentence ‘You ought to tell the truth’ also
involves the command ‘Tell the truth’, but here the tone
of the command is less emphatic. In the sentence ‘It is
good to tell the truth’ the command has become tittle
more than a suggestion. And thus the ‘meaning’ of the
word ‘good*, in its ethical usage, is differentiated from
that of the word ‘duty’ or the word ‘ought’. In fact we
may define the meaning of the various ethical words in
terms both of the different feelings they are ordinarily
taken to express, and also the different responses which
they are calculated to provoke.

We can now see why it is impossible to find a criterion
for determining the validity of ethical judgements. It is
not because they have an ‘absolute’ validity which is mys-
teriously independent of ordinary sense-experience, but
because they have no objective validity whatsoever. If a
sentence makes no statement at all, there is obviously no
sense in asking whether what it says is true or false. And
we have seen, that sentences which simply express moral
Judgements do not say anything. They are pure expres-
sions of feeling and as such do not come under the cate-
gory of truth and falsehood. They are unverifiable for the
same reason as a cry of pain or a word of command ts un-
verifiable – because they do not express genuine proposi-
tions.

Thus, although our theory of ethics might fairly be said
to be radically subjectivist, it differs in a very important
respect from the orthodox subjectivist theory. For the or-
t-hodox subjectivist does not deny, as we do, that the sen-
tences of a rooralizer express genuine propositions, All he
denies is that they express propositions of a unique non-
empirical character- His own view is that they express
propositions about the speaker’s feelings. U this were so,
ethical judgements dearly would be capable of being true
or false. They would be true if the speaker had the rele-
vant feelings, and false if he had not. And this is a mat-
ter which is> in principle, empirically verifiable. Further-
more they could be significantly contradicted. For if I say,
‘Tolerance is a virtue.’ and someone answers, 4 Yqu don’t
approve of it,’ he would, on the ordinary subjectivist
theory, be contradicting me. On our theory, he would not
be contradicting me. because, in saying that tolerance was
a virtue, I should not be making any statement about my
own feelings or about anything else. I should simply be
evincing my feelings, which is not at all the same thing.

The distinction between the expression of feeling and
the assertion of feeling is complicated by the fact that the
assertion that one has a certain feeling often accompanies
the expression of that feeling, and is then, indeed, a fac-
tor in the expression of that feeling. Thus I may simul-
taneously express boredom and say that I am bored, and
in that case my utterance of the words ‘I am bored’ is
one of the circumstances which make it true to say that I
am expressing or evincing boredom. But ! can express
boredom without actually saying that I am bored. I can
express it by my tone and gestures, while making a state-
ment about something wholly unconnected with it, or by
art -ejaculation, or without uttering any words at aU, So

that even if the assertion that one has a certain feeling al-
ways involves the expression of that feeling, the expres-
sion of a feeling assuredly does not always involve the
assertion that one has it. And this is the important point
to grasp in considering the distinction between Our theory

and the ordinary subjectivist theory- For whereas the sub’
jectivist holds that ethical statements actually assert the
existence of certain feelings, we hold that ethical state-
ments: arc expressions and excitants of feeling which do
not necessarily involve any assertions.

We have already remarked that the main objection to
the ordinary subjectivist theory is that the validity of
ethical judgements is not determined by the nature of
their author’s feelings. And this is an objection which our
theory escapes. For it does not imply that the existence of
any feelings b a necessary and sufficient condition of the
validity of an ethical judgement. It implies, on the con-
trary, that ethical judgements have no validity.

There is, however, a celebrated argument against sub-
jectivist theories which our theory does not escape. !t has
been pointed out by Moore that if ethical statements were
simply statements about the speaker’s feelings, it would be impossible to argue about questions of value.’ To take

a typical example: if a man said that thrift was a virtue,
and another replied that it was a vice, they would nbt,
on this theory, be disputing with one another* One would
be saying that he approved of thrift, and the other that he
didn’t; and there is no reason why both these statements
should not he true. Now Moore held it to be obvious that
we do dispute about questions of value, and accordingly
concluded that the particular form of subjectivism which
he was discussing was false.

It is plain that the conclusion that it is impossible to
dispute about questions of value follows from our theory
also. For as we hold that such sentences as ‘Thrift is a
virtue’ and ‘Thrift is a vice” do not express propositions
at all, we clearly cannot hold that they express incom-
patible propositions. We must therefore admit that i£
Moore’s argument really refutes the ordinary subjectmst
theory, it also refutes ours. But. in fact, we deny that it
does refute even the ordinary subjfrctfvist theory. For we
hold that one really never does dispute about questions of
value.

This may seem, at first sight to be a very paradoxical
assertion. For wc certainly do engage in disputes which
are ordinarily regarded as disputes about questions of
value, But, in all such cases, we find, if we consider the
matter closely, that the dispute is not really about a ques-
tton of value, but about a question of fact. When someone
disagrees with us about the moral value of a certain action
or type of action, we do admittedly resort to argument in
order to win him over to our way of thinking. But we
not attempt to show by our arguments that he has the
‘wrong* ethical feeling towards a situation whose nature
he has correctly apprehended. What wc attempt to show
is that he is mistaken about the facts of the case. We argue
that he has misconceived the agent’s motive: or that he
has misjudged the effects of the action, or its probable
effects in view of the agent’s knowledge; or that he has
failed to take into account the special circumstances- in
which the agent was placed. Or else we employ more gen-
eral arguments about the effects which actions of a certain
type tend to produce, or the qualities which are usu-
alLy manifested in their performance. Wc do this in the
hope that we have only to get our opponent to _ a S ree ™ ih –
us about the nature of the empirical facts for him to adopt
the same moral attitude towards them as we do. And as
the people with whom we argue have generally received
the same moral education as ourselves, and live in the
same social order, our expectation is usually justified. But
if our opponent happens to have undergone a different
process of moral ‘conditioning’ from ourselves, so that,
even when he acknowledges all the facts, he still disagrees
with us about the moral value of the actions under dis-
cussion, then we abandon the attempt to convince him by
argument. We say that it is impossible to argue with him
because he has. a distorted or undeveloped moral sense;
whichsignines merely that he employs a different set of
values from our own. We feel that our own system of
values is superior, and therefore speak in such derogatory
terms of his. But we cannot bring forward any arguments
to show that our system is superior. For our judgement
that it is so is itself a judgement of value, and accordingly
outside the scope of argument. It is because argument fails
us when we come to deal with pure questions of value, as
distinct from questions of fact,, that we finally resort to
mere abuse.

In short, we find that argument is possible on mora!
questions only if some system of values is presupposed. If
our opponent concurs with us in expressing moral dis-
approval of all actions of a given type t, then we may get him to condemn a particular action A, by “bringing for-
ward arguments to show that A is of type t. For the ques-
tion whether A does or does not “belong to that type is a
plain question of fact. Given that a man has certain moral
principles, we argue that he must, in order to be consistent,
react moral!/ to certain things in a certain way. What we
do not and cannot argue about is the validity of these
moral principles. We merely praise or condemn them in
the light of our own feelings.

If anyone doubts the accuracy of this account of moral
disputes. let him try to construct even an imaginary argu-
ment on a question of value which does not reduce itself
to an argument about a question of logic or about an em-
pirical matter of fact, i am confident that he will not suc-
ceed in producing a single example. And if that is the case,
be must allow that its involving the impossibility of purely
ethical arguments is not. as Moore thought, a ground of
objection to our theory, but rather a point in favour of it.

Haying upheld our theory against the only criticism
which appeared to threaten it, we may now use it to de-
fine the nature of all ethical inquiries. We find that ethical
philosophy consists simply in saying that ethical concepts
are pseudo-concepts and therefor* unanalysable. TTie fur-
ther task of describing the different feelings that the dif-
ferent ethical terms are used to express, and the different
reactions that they customarily provoke, is a task for the
psychologist. There cannot be such a thing as ethical
science, if by ethical science one means the elaboration of
a ‘true’ system of morals. For we have seen that, as ethi-
cal judgements are mere expressions of feeling, there can
be n9 way o£ determining the validity of any ethical sys-
tem, and. indeed, no sense in asking whether any such sys-
tem is true. All that one may legitimately inquire in this
connexion is. What are the moral habits of a given per-
son or group of people, and what causes them to have precisely those habits and feelings? And this inquiry falls
wholly within the scope of the existing social sciences.

It appears, then, that ethics, as a branch of knowledge,
b nothing more than 3 department of psychology an< *
sociology. And in case anyone thinks that we are over-
looking the existence of casuistry, wc may remark that
casuistry is not a science, but is a purely analytical in-
vestigation of the structure of a given moral system. In
other words, it is an exercise in formal logic.

When one comes to pursue the psychological inquiries
which constitute ethical science, one is immediately en-
abled to account for the Kantian and hedonistic theories
of morals. For one finds that one of the chief causes of
moral behaviour £s fear, both conscious and unconscious,
of a god’s displeasure, and fear of the enmity of society.
And this, indeed, is the reason, why moral precepts pre-
sent themselves to some people as ‘categorical’ com-
mands. And one finds, also, that the moral code of a society
is partly determined by the beliefs of that society con-
cerning the conditions of its own happiness – or, in other
words, that a society tends to encourage or discourage a
given type of conduct by the use of moral sanctions ac-
cording as it appears to promote or detract from the con-
tentment of the society as a whole. And this is the reason
why altruism is recommended in most moral codes and
egotism condemned. It is from the observation of this con-
nexion between morality and happiness that hedonistic or
eudaemonistic theories of morals ultimately spring, just as
the moral theory of Kant is based on the fact, previously
explained, that moral precepts have for some people the
force of inexorable commands. As each of these theories
Ignores the fact which lies at the root of the other, both
may be criticized as being onesided; but this is not the
main objection to either of them- Their essential defect
is that they treat propositions which refer to the causes
and attributes of our ethical feelings as ff they were de-
finitions of ethical concepts. And thus They fail to recog-
nize that ethical concepts are pseudo-concepts and consequently indefinable.

As we have already said, our conclusions about the na-
ture Of ethics apply to aesthetics also. Aesthetic terms are
used in exactly the same way as ethical terms. Such aes-
thetic words as ‘beautiful’ and ‘hideous’ are employed, as
ethical words are employed, not to make statements of
fact, hut simply to express certain feelings and evoke a
certain response. It follows, as in ethics, that there is no
sense in attributing objective validity to aesthetic judge-
ments,^ and no possibility of arguing about questions of
value in aesthetics, but only about questions of fact. A
scientific treatment of aesthetics would show us what in
general were the causes of aesthetic feeling, why various
societies produced and admired the works of art they did,
why taste varies as it does within a given society, and so
forth. And these are ordinary psychological or sociological
questions. They have, of course, little or nothing to do
with aesthetic criticism as we understand it. But that is
because the purpose of aesthetic criticism is not so much
to give knowledge as to communicate emotion. The critic,
by calling attention to certain features of the work under
review, and expressing his own feelings about them,, en-
deavours to make us share his attitude towards the work
as a whole. The only relevant propositions that he formu-
lates are propositions describing the nature of the work.
And these art plain records of fact. We conclude, there-
fore, that there is nothing in aesthetics, any more than
there is in ethics, to justify the view that It embodies a
unique type of knowledge*.

It should now be clear that the only information which
we can legitimately derive from the study of our aesthetic
and moral experiences is information about our own mental and physical make-up. We take note of these experiences as providing data for our psychological and socio-
logical generalizations. And this is the only way in which
they serve to increase our knowledge- It follows that any
attempt to make our use of ethical and aesthetic concepts
the basis of a metaphysical theory concerning the exis-
tence of a world of .values, as distinct from the world of
facts, involves a false analysis of these concepts. Our own
analysis has shown that the phenomena of moral experi-
ence cannot fairly be used To support any rationalist or
metaphysical doctrine whatsoever. In particular, they can-
not, as Kant hoped, be used to established the existence of a
transcendent god.

This mention of God brings us to the question of the
possibility of religious knowledge. We shall see that this
possibility has already been ruled out by our treatment of
metaphysics. But, as this is a point of considerable interest,
we may be permitted to discuss it at some length.

It is now generally admitted, at any rate by philoso-
phers, that the existence of a being having the attributes
which define the god of any non-animistic religion cannot
be demonstratively proved. To see that this is so, we have
only to ask ourselves what are the premises from which
the existence of such a god could be deduced. If the con-
clusion that a god exists is to be demonstratively certain,
then these premises must be certain; for, as the conclusion
of a deductive argument is already contained in the pre-
mises, any uncertainty there may be about the truth of
the premises is necessarily shared by it. But we know that
no empirical proposition can ever be anything more than
probable. It is only a priori propositions that are logic-
ally certain. But we cannot deduce the existence of a god
from an a priori proposition. For we know that the rea-
son why a priori propositions are certain is that they are
tautologies. And from a set of tautologies nothing but a
further tautology can be validly deduced. It follows that
there is no possibility of demonstrating the existence of a
god.

What is not so generally recognized is that there can be
no way of proving that the existence of a god, such as the
God of Christianity, Is even probable. Yet this also is easily
shown. For if the existence of such a god were probable,
then the proposition that he existed would be an empirical
hypothesis. And in that case it would be possible to deduce
from it, and other empirical hypotheses, certain experi-
ential propositions which were not deduclblc from those
other hypotheses alone. But in fact this is not possible. It
is sometimes claimed,, indeed, that the existence of a cer-
tain sort of regularity in nature constitutes sufficient evi-
dence for the existence of a god. But if the sentence ‘God
exists’ entails no more than that certain types of pheno-
mena occur in certain sequences, then to assert the exis-
tence of a god will be simply equivalent to asserting that
there is the requisite regularity in nature; and no religious
man would admit that this was all he intended to assert
in asserting the existence of a god. He would say that in
talking about God he was talking about a transcendent
being who might be known through certain empirical
manifestations, but certainly could not be denned in terms
of those manifestations. But in that case the term ‘god’ is
a metaphysical term. And if ‘god’ is a metaphysical term,
then it cannot be even probable that a god exists- For to
say that ‘God exists’ is to make a metaphysical utterance
which cannot be either true or false. And by the same cri-
terion, no sentence which purports to describe the nature
of a transcendent god can possess any literal significance.

It is important not to confuse this view of religious as-
sertions with the view that is adopted by atheists, or ag-
nostics.* For it is characteristic of an agnostic to hold that
the existence of a god is a possibility in which there is
no good reason either to- believe or disbelieve; and” it is
characteristic of an atheist to hold that it is at least prob-
able that no god exists. And our view that all utterances
about the nature of God are nonsensical, so far from be-
ing identical with, or even lending any support to, either
of these familiar contentions, as actually incompatible
with them. For if the assertion that there is a god is non-
sensical then the atheist’s assertion that there is no god is
equally nonsensical, since it is only a significant proposi-
tion that can be significantly contradicted. As for the
agnostic, although he refrains from saying either that
there is or that there is not a god, he does not deny that
the question whether a transcendent god exists is a genuine
question. He docs not deny that the two sentences ‘There
is a transcendent god’ and ‘There is no transcendent god’
express propositions one of which is actually true and the
other false. All he says is that we have no means of telling
which of them is true, and therefore ought not to commit
ourselves to either. But we have seen that the sentences in
question do not express propositions at all. And this means
that agnosticism also is ruled out.

Thus we offer the theist the same comfort as we gave
to the moralist. His assertions Cannot possibly be valid,
but they cannot be invalid either. As he says nothing at
all about the world, he cannot justly be accused of saying
anything false, or anything for which he has insufficient
grounds. It is only when the theist claims that in asserting
the existence of a transcendent god he is expressing a
genuine proposition that we are entitled to disagree with
him.

It is to be remarked that in cases where deities are iden-
tified with natural objects, assertions concerning them
may be allowed to be significant, Jf, for example, a man
tells me that the occurrence of thunder is alone both necessary and sufficient to establish the truth of the proposition that Jehovah is angry, 1 may conclude that, in his
usage of words, the sentence ‘Jehovah is angry’ is equiva-
lent to ‘It Is thundering.’ But in sophisticated religions,
though they may he to some extent based on men’s awe of
natural processes which they cannot sufficiently understand,
the ‘person’ who is supposed to control the empirical
world is not himself located in it; he is held to be superior
to the empirical world, and so outside it; and he is en-
dowed with super-empirical attributes. But the notion of a
person whose essential attributes are non-empirical is not
an intelligible notion at all. We may have a word which is
used as if it named this ‘person’, but, unless the sentences
in which It occurs express propositions which are empiri-
cally verifiable, it cannot be said to symbolize anything.
And this is the case with Tegard to the word ‘god’, in the
usage in which it is intended to refer to a transcendent
object. The mere existence of the noun is enough to foster
the illusion that there is a real, or at any rate a possible
entity corresponding to it. ft is only when we inquire what
God’s attributes are that we discover that ‘God’, in thts
usage, is not a genuine name.

It is common to find belief in a transcendent god con-
joined with belief in an after-life. But, in the form which
it usually takes, the content of this belief is not a genuine
hypothesis. To say that men do not ever die, or that the
state of death is merely a state of prolonged insensibility,
is indeed to express a significant proposition, though all
the available evidence goes to show that it is false. But to
say that there is something imperceptible inside a man,
which is his soul or his real self, and that it goes on living
after he is dead, is to make a metaphysical assertion which
has no more factual content than the assertion that there
Is a transcendent god.

It is worth mentioning that, according to the account
which we have given of religious assertions, there is no
logical ground lor antagonism between religion and na-
tural science. As far as the question of truth or falsehood
is concerned, there is no opposition between the natural
scientist and the theist who believes in a transcendent
god. For since the religious utterances of the theist are not
genuine propositions at all they cannot stand in any logi-
cal relation to the propositions of science. Such antagon-
ism as there is between religion and science appears to
consist in the fact that science takes away one of the mo-
tives which make men religious. For it is acknowledged
that one of the ultimate sources of religious feeling lies in
the inability of men to determine their own destiny; and
science tends to destroy the feeling of awe with which
men regard an alien world, by making them believe that
they can understand and anticipate the course of natural
phenomena, and even to some extent control St. The fact
that it has recently become fashionable for physicists
themselves to be sympathetic towards religion is a point
in favour of this hypothesis. For this sympathy towards-
religion marks the physicists’ own lack of confidence in
the validity of their hypothese.