Realism and Anti-Realism about God

The theories of religious language raised a question they could not settle: when a believer says "God exists," is she asserting a fact — claiming that there really is, mind-independently, such a being — or doing something else: expressing an attitude, committing to a way of life, participating in a practice? Religious realism holds the former; religious anti-realism (or non-realism) holds that religious statements, though meaningful and important, are not in the business of describing a mind-independent supernatural reality. The dispute decides what is even at issue in the existence debate: for the realist, the arguments and the problem of evil concern a genuine fact; for the non-realist, they largely miss the point of religion.

This page distinguishes cognitivism from non-cognitivism and realism from anti-realism, surveys the main anti-realist positions (expressivism, instrumentalism, fictionalism, Cupitt's non-realism, Dewey's naturalistic religion), and weighs the objection that anti-realism changes the subject.

Two distinctions

Two orthogonal distinctions structure the debate and are often conflated:

• Cognitivism vs. non-cognitivism — about meaning. Cognitivism: religious sentences express propositions that are truth-apt (capable of being true or false), genuine assertions. Non-cognitivism: religious sentences are not truth-apt — they do something other than state facts (express emotion, prescribe action, voice a commitment), so the question "is it true?" does not properly arise (compare emotivism in metaethics: "stealing is wrong" = "boo to stealing!").
• Realism vs. anti-realism — about truth-makers. Among cognitivists (who agree religious claims are truth-apt), realists hold that what makes "God exists" true (if it is) is a mind-independent reality — God exists whether or not anyone believes it, just as electrons do. Anti-realists hold that, insofar as religious claims are "true," their truth is constituted by something mind-dependent — human practice, the religious community, the believer's form of life — not by a supernatural entity "out there."

The positions:

Note that atheism and religious anti-realism differ sharply: the atheist is a realist who thinks the (truth-apt, mind-independent) claim "God exists" is false; the anti-realist thinks the question "is there really such a being?" is the wrong question to ask of religious language.

Varieties of religious anti-realism

• Expressivism / non-cognitivism. Religious utterances express attitudes, commitments, or "bliks" (Hare) rather than state facts. "God is love" voices a stance toward the world, not a description of a being. This is the most deflationary reading and slides naturally out of the Wittgensteinian view of religious language as a practice with its own grammar.
• Wittgensteinian non-realism (often associated with D.Z. Phillips, who resisted the label). Religious belief is a form of life with its own internal "grammar"; "God exists" has its sense within the practice of worship and is not a hypothesis about an extra object assessable from outside. To ask whether God really exists, in the realist's external sense, is to misunderstand the grammar — to play the wrong language-game. Phillips insisted this was not reductive (he denied he was saying God is "merely" a human projection), but critics read it as a sophisticated non-realism: the "reality" of God is the reality of the practice and the love it expresses.
• Instrumentalism / pragmatism — Dewey. John Dewey (A Common Faith, 1934) detaches "the religious" from "religion" and from the supernatural. "God," for Dewey, can be reinterpreted as the unity of ideal ends that move us to action — the active relation between the ideal and the actual — not a supernatural being. Religious experience is a quality of natural experience (the consummatory, the devoted), and faith is loyalty to ideals, not assent to metaphysical claims. This is a naturalistic religion without a mind-independent God.
• Non-realism — Don Cupitt. Don Cupitt (Taking Leave of God, 1980; the "Sea of Faith" movement) explicitly advocates theological non-realism: God is not an objective being but a unifying symbol of our highest spiritual ideals and values, a regulative ideal internal to the religious life. To "believe in God" is to commit oneself to the religious way of life and its values, not to assert a cosmic fact. Cupitt embraces what Phillips resisted: God is a human creation, and that is enough.
• Fictionalism. A position from the philosophy of mathematics and metaethics applied to religion: religious claims are truth-apt and taken literally false (there is no God), yet it is valuable to accept and immerse oneself in the religious "fiction" — to participate in its practices, narratives, and consolations — without believing it true, as one is moved by a novel. The religious fictionalist engages with religion while withholding belief in its metaphysics. (A real option for those who find religion valuable but its claims incredible.)

The motivations for anti-realism

Why give up mind-independent realism? Several pressures push in this direction:

• The semantic difficulties. If literal God-talk is incoherent and all positive predication is symbol or metaphor (Tillich's "being-itself"), it is a short step to denying there is a determinate fact being asserted.
• The problem of evil and hiddenness. A non-realist God — a symbol of ideals — is immune to these arguments, which target a real, mind-independent omnipotent agent. Anti-realism dissolves the atheological case (at the cost of conceding what it sought to defend).
• The critiques of religion. If Feuerbach is right that "God" is the projected human essence, one may accept the analysis and re-purpose it: yes, God is a human projection — and a valuable one to live by (Cupitt's move). Anti-realism turns the debunking critique into a program.
• Religious diversity. If religions are practices/forms of life rather than competing factual hypotheses, their apparent contradictions dissolve — each is "true" within its own life, none false (a non-realist gloss on pluralism).

The objection: changing the subject

The standing objection to all forms of religious anti-realism is that they change the subject — they describe something other than what the historical religious traditions, and ordinary believers, mean and intend:

• Believers overwhelmingly take themselves to be asserting that God really, objectively exists — that the universe was actually created, that there is a being who hears prayer, that one will really survive death. The realism is not incidental; it is what is prayed to, trusted, worshipped. A "God" who is only a symbol of human ideals is not the God of Abraham, of the creeds, or of the worshipper on her knees.
• Anti-realism can look like atheism with the vocabulary retained — the substance of naturalism dressed in religious clothing. The non-realist "keeps the music while denying the words"; the critic asks why, if there is no God, one should not simply say so rather than redefine "God" into a value one already holds (the "why bother?" objection).
• The realist presses a dilemma: either religious claims are factual (then realism is right, and the question is whether they are true — back to the arguments and evil) or they are not (then anti-realism is, in substance, a form of unbelief that has changed the meaning of the words). Either way, anti-realism does not provide a third thing the tradition was after.

The anti-realist replies that the realist's God — an invisible super-object whose existence the arguments probe like a scientific hypothesis — is itself a distortion (a modern, post-Enlightenment misreading), and that the deepest religious thinkers (the mystics, the apophatic tradition, the via negativa) already denied that God is "a being among beings." On this telling, non-realism recovers an older, truer understanding rather than abandoning religion. The dispute thus loops back to religious language and to what the tradition "really" meant — a contested historical and interpretive question with no neutral arbiter.

Where realism and anti-realism sit

The realism/anti-realism question determines what the entire field is about. For the realist — the default of classical theism and of ordinary belief — "God exists" asserts a mind-independent fact, and the arguments for and against God, the problem of evil, and the epistemology of belief all concern whether that fact obtains. For the anti-realist — expressivist, Wittgensteinian, Deweyan, Cupittian, or fictionalist — religious language does something other than describe a supernatural reality, and the existence debate is misconceived; the cost is the changing-the-subject objection, the charge that what survives is no longer the God of worship but a human ideal in religious dress. The choice is downstream of the philosophy of religious language (whether God-talk is assertoric) and upstream of everything else: a non-realist has dissolved rather than answered the problem of evil and the diversity problem, while a realist must face them. These notes, like the tradition they survey, proceed on the realist assumption — that the question "is there a God?" is a real question with a real answer — while registering that the assumption is itself one of the things philosophy of religion puts in question.