(This is a preliminary text.)
Religious persons must be able to attribute meaning to their expressions,
i.e. describe what they are talking about, if they want to be regarded as
reasonable. It is here an important demand, that to describe e.g. the
expression “god”, they must do that by means of a hyponym, i.e. genus et
differentiam.
However, the religious people can describe neither the genus nor the
hyponym. Moreover, it must be mentioned that expressions as “something” or
“being” are not usable hyponyms, as they tell us nothing.
It must also be pointed out that it is not sufficient to use terms for
experiences as a hyponym. For when you have experiences, what exists are just
your experiences. So here, the genus is “experience” - and nothing else.
This is described in the subsection “Religious explanations” in Treatise No
5
Someone may assert to have evidence of the truth of the sentence “God
exists” and express this evidence with the sentence “I have felt God’s nearness”.
In that case, however, the only thing that can be said to be present or have
been present is a feeling of a certain sort, viz. the very feeling referred to
however it might have been, but not an existence of anything else. For that
reason, the sentence cannot be an apt description of the feeling in question.
The experience referred to cannot give meaning to a new concept of a god
either, as the discussed sentence presupposes that the meaning of this putative
concept has been clarified, i.e. to which kind of entity the sign sequence
“god” possibly might refer. The semantic meaning of a sentence simply must be
clarified in order to ex-press anything.
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The atheists’ sentence “There is no god”, presupposes that in principle
this sentence could be true, but that it just hap-pens not to be the case. This
gives religion an appearance of reasonableness.
In other words, the atheists do not understand the religious peoples'
fault, but commit it themselves.
