Religion as a way of seeing the world

By Paul Monk

In March this year, John Cottingham, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading and an Honorary Fellow at St John’s College, Oxford University, wrote a column for an online magazine, IAI, under the title ‘Wittgenstein vs Dawkins: Is God a scientific hypothesis’.

In the article, he suggests that Richard Dawkins mistook religion for a second-rate and out-of-date kind of science. In reality, Cottingham argues, religious claims are not defective science if we follow the reasoning of Ludwig Wittgenstein on language and meaning. Instead, they constitute an entirely distinct way of seeing the world.

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