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In the article, he suggests that Richard Dawkins mistook religion for a second-rate and out-of-date kind of science.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.
Speaking of the scientific worldview advanced by Dawkins, or by philosophers such as the late Daniel Dennett, Cottingham claims that “the typical goals of the religious quest, such as those related to the purification of the self and the search to align oneself with the good, seem orthogonal to the explanatory goals of science.” That’s his point of entry.
There are two key lines of argument in his case: 1) that religion is not an attempt to explain the world as a scientist might; and 2) that religion is about the quest of the self in the search for virtue and transcendence.
He draws on Wittgenstein’s observation that religious language points to a ‘form of life’ rather than a set of scientific claims about the world. He then suggests that such religious language and the ‘form of life’ it embodies should be exempt from scientific cross-examination.
The problem with this approach is threefold. Firstly, it ignores the fact that religions make all kinds of claims about what is allegedly true in the world of space and time.
Secondly, it ignores the fact that religious believers – and especially the patriarchs of monotheistic religions – have long attempted to censor or suppress scientific inquiry where it impinged on religious claims.
Thirdly, the mystical or ethical goals which Cottingham attributes to religion can demonstrably be pursued in non-dogmatic ways that are orthogonal to ‘revealed’ or dogmatic religion.
Cottingham argues that modern (analytical) philosophy and scientific methods are too impersonal and ‘cold’ to deal meaningfully with the full, emotional range of human experience, and that religion does so address this experience. What we need, he argues, is an epistemology which embraces such experience. He claims:
“…philosophy’s traditional task was concerned not just with definitions and narrow conceptual analysis, but with the grand synoptic task of articulating a worldview that tries to do justice to all aspects of reality. But it is vital that the resulting outlook should never become too abstract, or too detached from its subject matter; it always needs to be sensitive to all the rich and manifold aspects of our human experience.”
But he makes this claim far too easy for himself. To begin with, if we are to evaluate his claim, one might ask: How are we to do so? Surely, to suggest that we must do so on the emotional lines he advocates is simply a circular argument.
Yet, once we set out to establish on the basis of reason and evidence whether his claim is warranted, we are already giving priority to a methodology at odds with that which he encourages us to embrace.
Cottingham cites the work of Iain McGilchrist – notably, The Master and the Emissary – in arguing that the left brain and the right brain process reality differently and that the emotional and intuitive right brain needs to be heeded more. Possibly – although, good neuroscience shows the brain to be a good deal more complex than this dichotomy allows. Even so, the argument itself points to cognitive neuroscience, not religious ‘revelation’ as its basis, thus undermining Cottingham’s primary argument.
To take a perfectly commonplace example from the earliest books of the Bible, which are foundational to all three of the Abrahamic religions, the story of creation and the fall, or an anthropomorphic deity creating man out of clay and Eve out of Adam’s rib, might, perhaps, appeal to the imaginations of a subset of human beings. But unless it is recognised as a fable, rather than a truth of revelation or an event in history, it directly clashes with what scientific inquiry has firmly established as the evolutionary and protracted pathway by which humankind emerged. Radically, and importantly, there was no such creation and no such fall. Nor was woman formed out of a rib of man.
Cottingham and apologists like him try to have it both ways. They want to claim a special cognitive status for religious beliefs and practices, but they offer no clear pathway through such practices for ascertaining truth from falsehood, insight from delusion, mystical dreaming from harsh dogmatism. This simply won’t do.
At the very least, any such apologist needs to explain which religious ‘forms of life’ he or she is seeking to shield from rigorous cross-examination and why. Then they need to account for: why any of those forms of life are a better and truer alternative to practices grounded in scientific reality as regards the cosmos and the biological world; and empirical evidence as regards the healthiness and utility of any given set of practices, such as prayer, sacrifices, sexual renunciation, genital mutilation, fervid homilies or rites of initiation.
Cottingham’s argument is patently one of special pleading. Religion has lost ground for transparent reasons. It can’t be buttressed with such arguments as he attempts.
Published 8 May 2025.
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