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Introduction

In the 20th century, some non-religious philosophers discovered a new approach to undermining religious belief. The typical method had been to criticise the arguments for God’s existence or to defend arguments against God’s existence. Philosophers like Ayer had become frustrated at the lack of progress. Neither side seemed capable of disproving the other.

Ayer’s new method is to deny that religious language actually manages to meet the requirements for counting as meaningful. If religious language is meaningless then it is neither true nor false. It simply fails to refer to reality in either a true or false way. If successful, this method would show that we don’t have to settle the debate over whether God’s existence is true or false. Whether religious language has meaning is a more foundational question which must first be answered. There is no sense in debating whether it is true or false that God exists if the word God cannot first be shown to be a meaningful term.

This topic is concerned with evaluating whether there is anything to Ayer’s method of denying the meaningfulness of religious language.

The debate turns on the complex philosophical question of what meaning actually is and how it functions. Language is something we are very familiar with. We know how to use it, often without thinking about it. When someone uses language and another person finds it meaningful, how does that actually work?

The distinction between cognitive & non-cognitive

When words come out of someone’s mouth, they are coming from, being triggered by or, most accurately said, ‘expressing’ a certain part of their mind. If you say “The table is made of wood”, that is expressing the part of the mind that contains beliefs. Philosophers call such language cognitive.

If you are in pain and say “ouch”, that word is not expressing the part of the mind which contains beliefs. Philosophers call that non-cognitive, to indicate that it expresses a non-belief. In this case, it would be an expression of a feeling of pain.

The debate is where religious language fits into this distinction. When a religious person says “God is exists”, it looks like they are expressing a cognitive belief, but some philosophers argue that it is really more of a non-cognitive feeling/attitude.

When a religious person uses religious language and says ‘God exists’, do they believe that God exists, or feel that God exists?

Logical positivism & Verificationism

Logical Positivism. Philosophers like Comte and Mill were impressed at the power of science and wanted to universally extend the use of the scientific method to all areas of intellectual inquiry. Comte coined the term positivism to refer to the use of empirical data and empirical generalisations with explanatory power. ‘Logical’ refers to language and Russell’s philosophical method of trying to impose precise clarity on language through analysis. Logical positivism is the extension of scientific positivism not just into intellectual practice but into all of language. They claim that only scientific language is meaningful as it alone can be shown through analysis to refer to reality.

Verificationism was invented by the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers that included A. J. Ayer. They attacked rationalism, which often happened to form the basis for religious belief. Ayer argued that the classic debates between empiricists and rationalists “are as unwarranted as they are unfruitful”. Empiricists claim that synthetic knowledge is gained a posteriori. However, rationalists/metaphysicians often claim that their premises are not based on their senses but derived from an a priori faculty of intellectual intuition which enables them to know about reality beyond sense experience.

Ayer thinks a stalemate exists because it is impossible for empiricists to disprove the possibility of a priori reason/thought knowing things beyond sense experience. Empiricism cannot tell us about anything beyond the empirical, including whether or not there is anything beyond it. In other words, claiming the invalidity of metaphysics is itself a metaphysical claim, which is self-contradictory. Wittgenstein summarised the problem that to show a limit to thinking requires being able to think on both sides of that limit.

Ayer thinks he can eliminate metaphysics in a different way. Not based on empirical claims, but on logic. Metaphysicians, like religious philosophers, fail to show how their statements have meaning.

The verification principle is how Ayer did this. It states:

“A sentence is factually significant [meaningful] if, and only if, we know how to verify the proposition it purports to express – that is, if we know what observations would lead us to accept the proposition as true or reject it as false.” – Ayer.

Analytic statements are also meaningful. If a claim cannot be verified by sense experience, then it cannot be shown to refer to reality/facts. Metaphysical language is meaningless because it cannot be verified in sense experience.

The idea is that words get their meaning by refering to things in our shared experience, or by being true by definition. If a word connects to the world, that connection should be verifiable. If someone uses language, such as the word ‘God’, but cannot show what this word refers to, then Ayer objects that he doesn’t know what the word means. If a statement cannot be shown to be about anything then we cannot grant it factual cognitive meaning.

For Ayer, language can only be meaningful if it is cognitive and analytic or verifiable.

‘God’ is a metaphysical term according to Ayer, which means it is about something beyond the empirical world, so there can be no way to empirically verify it. Ayer concludes that he’s not even an atheist, since an atheist says they do not believe in God, but that is still to give the word meaning.

Whether the verification principle is overly restrictive

Strength: Verificationism fits with a scientific understanding of reality.

It restricts meaning to whatever we have, or can in principle have, scientific evidence for. The positivism of Comte and Mill claimed that the immense power and success of science shows it to be the only valid source of knowledge. It makes sense to then extend this to meaning, to clarify our language by uprooting whatever is unscientific.

Ayer’s theory was initially criticised for being overly restrictive of meaning. It would make all statements about history meaningless because they can’t be empirically verified.

Ayer responded by strengthening his theory with weak verification. We can weakly verify anything for which there is some evidence which provides probability for it being the case. E.g. Historical documents and archaeological findings can be verified, and on the basis of those we can weakly verify that there were certain civilisations in the past with certain histories to them.

Weakness: arguably weak verification opens the door to arguments for God, however.

The teleological argument attempts to infer God’s existence from experience of the world. That seems similar to weak verification. We can weakly verify complexity and purpose in the world and use that to verify God’s existence. So, Ayer seems to fail in his attempt to show that religious language is unverifiable and meaningless.

Whether religious language is eschatologically verifiable

Strength: Verificationism cuts through the stalemate in the debate over God’s existence.

Religious philosophers find it difficult to prove that God exists, but similarly atheistic philosophers find it difficult to prove that God does not exists. Ayer’s approach attempted to break this stalemate with a new approach. We shouldn’t even start debating metaphysical questions like whether God exists, since metaphysical terms like ‘God’ are unverifiable and so meaningless.

Weakness: Eschatological verification.

Hick argued that there is a way to verify God and religious language, because when we die, we’ll see God and then we’ll know. One strength of Hick’s approach is that he doesn’t need to actually undermine verificationism itself, only Ayer’s claim that religious language is unverifiable.

Hick illustrates this argument with the parable of the celestial city. Imagine there are two travellers, one representing a theist, the other an atheist. They are walking along a road, representing life. One thinks that a celestial city is at the end of the road, representing an afterlife and God, the other does not. Neither has reached the end of this road before. Hick finishes with this sentence:

“Yet, when they turn the last corner, it will be apparent that one of them has been right all the time and the other wrong.” – Hick.

The strength of Hick’s approach is its making use of Ayer’s claim that something must be verifiable in practice or principle. Ayer gave the example of mountains being on the dark side of the moon as something that was verifiable in principle. They had not seen the dark side of the moon in his time, but they knew that in principle it was possible to go there and look.

Hick is arguing that religious language is also verifiable in principle because we also know that in principle it is possible to die and ‘see’ God.

Whether the verification principle is coherent

Strength: Logical positivist theories like Verificationism are based a reasonable claim about meaning.

For a statement to be about reality it must refer to reality. Its reference must be at least in principle testable. If someone claims to be talking about reality but cannot show that they are referring to reality, then it seems valid to deny that their language has cognitive meaning.

Weakness: The verification principle is self-defeating

It states that to be meaningful a statement must be analytic or empirically verifiable. However, that means that in order for the verification principle itself to be meaningful, it must be analytic or empirically verifiable. It’s hard to see how it could be either, however.

This criticism was actually anticipated and discussed by the early verificationists themselves. Carnap was one of them who tried to defend the principle as analytic, but this appears to fail as it seems one could deny it without contradiction. There’s no obvious reason why it should be true by definition that a statement being meaningful means that it is either analytic or empirically verifiable.

The alternative is to take the verification principle empirically. The problem is, if we test through experience what kind of meaning people use, it isn’t restricted to analytic or empirical statements. We find metaphysical talk of e.g., the world of forms or God. So as an empirical statement the principle is simply false.

Overall, the verification principle seems self-defeating. It cannot pass its own test of meaningfulness.

Falsificationism

Karl Popper thought he had a better theory of empiricism than Verificationism. He was  impressed with Einstein’s prediction that Mercury would wobble in its orbit at a certain time in the future, because if that prediction was wrong, Einstein’s theory would be proved false. Popper was less impressed with Marxists and Freudians because they only looked for verifications of their theories without ever making falsifiable claims. He concluded that empiricism operates by falsification.

A claim/belief is falsifiable if we can imagine what could prove it false, i.e., if it is incompatible with some conceivable state of affairs.

Antony Flew’s application of Falsificationism to religious language

Flew doesn’t say religious language is ‘meaningless’ in the same way the logical positivists did. He’s not trying to say anything categorical about meaning in general.

Flew only intends to explain what is required for making an ‘assertion’, i.e., in making a claim about reality. He then argues that religious language fails to meet those requirements.

“to assert that such and such is the case is necessarily equivalent to denying that such and such is not the case” – Flew.

Asserting ‘X’ is the same as denying ‘not X’. Assertions about the way reality is entail a denial that reality is not some other way. E.g. if I assert that a chair is blue, I deny that the chair is red.

Claims about reality are therefore falsifiable. They could be false, because what they denied could be true instead of what they asserted.

A claim that couldn’t be false entails no denial about the way reality is. But if a claim doesn’t deny anything about the way reality is, then it doesn’t assert anything about the way reality is either.

Falsifiability is thus a test of whether a claim asserts anything.

Flew then applies this to religious belief. Religious people can’t say what could prove their belief in God false. So, they are not actually asserting anything about the way things are (since there is no entailed claim about the way things are not).

Flew accepts that religious language has all sorts of meanings, however he insists that it ‘intends’ to contain, or at least presuppose, claims about reality.

This means he takes religious language to expresses beliefs, making it cognitive. However, Flew seems to be adding that to fully count as cognitively meaningful, a statement must also be falsifiable.

So religious language is a failed attempt at cognitive meaning. It is a failed attempt to say something about the way reality is.

Here’s a simpler way to understand this:

• All our beliefs about reality could be false (empiricism is true)
• So, a belief that cannot be imagined to be false, cannot be about reality.
• Religious belief cannot be imagined to be false.
• Therefore, religious language fails to express beliefs about reality.

The parable of the gardener. Flew illustrated his account of belief in God through analogy to belief in a gardener. Two people are walking and see a clearing in a forest. One claims there is a gardener who tends to it, so the other suggest waiting and seeing if that is true. After a while, the believer says that actually, they are an invisible gardener, so they set up barbed wire fences and so on to try and detect this invisible gardener, at which point the believer then says actually, it’s a non-physical gardener.

At this point the unbeliever gets frustrated and asks Flew’s crucial question: “But what remains of your original assertion?”. The religious person claims to believe in a God, but in order to protect that belief from empirical testing they continually add qualifications to the belief, saying it’s ‘not this’ and ‘not that’, etc. Well eventually, it’s going to be nothing, is Flew’s point, causing the concept of God to ‘die a death of a thousand qualifications’.

Flew ends with the question: what is the difference between a world in which this gardener (God) exists, and a world in which it doesn’t? If belief in God is consistent with any possible discovery about reality, then its existence surely can make no difference to reality. It cannot be about reality. Religious language therefore ‘fails to assert’ anything. It is unfalsifiable and thus meaningless.

Whether religious language is falsifiable

Strength: The parable of the gardener strengthens Flew’s Falsificationism.

Even if religious belief does appear falsifiable, in cases where that belief were ever actually tested, they would simply edit their belief rather than admit they were wrong. This highlights

This illustrates the ‘God the gaps’ phenomenon. Throughout history many beliefs have been claimed about God which science has over time shown false, such as the genesis creation story. Rather than accept the falsity of the belief, Christians have edited their belief.

So Flew can conclude that even if religious believers say something could disprove their belief, we are justified in thinking that a mere pretence.

Weakness: Religious belief is actually falsifiable.

St Paul claimed that if Jesus did not rise from the dead then faith is ‘pointless’ (1 Corinthians 15:14). This means that Christianity could be proven false if we find evidence that Jesus did not rise from the dead, such as finding Jesus’ body. This suggests Flew is incorrect to think religious language is always unfalsifiable as there are at least some believers whose belief is incompatible with some logically possible state of affairs. Paul’s religious language passes Flew’s test of falsification and so would be meaningful.

Antony Flew vs Basil Mitchell

Strength of Falsificationism: a good test of rationality

Falsificationism seems like a perfect test of whether a person’s belief is about reality or not. If someone seems like they are just holding onto a belief because of faith without any reason or evidence, you can ask them what it could possibly take for them to change their mind. A person with a rational belief based on evidence will be able to answer that question.

Weakness: Basil Mitchell’s response to Flew

Mitchell argued that religious belief actually is based on the rational weighing of evidence so that religious language is cognitively meaningful.

Mitchell first accepted that Flew was right about some religious people who merely have blind faith. Their religious belief is irrationally blind to counter-evidence. However, Mitchell claims that most religious people are not like that. In the majority case, people have evidence for God in the form of their relationship with God, experience of God or experience of the effect of religion on their lives. They also recognise that there is evidence against God’s existence in the form of evil. If a person weighs the evidence for God greater than the evidence against, they will be a believer. So, religious belief can be and often is empirical. It is based on the rational weighing of evidence.

Mitchell imagines an illustrative parable. A soldier is fighting for the resistance against the government in a civil war. One day someone comes to them and claims to be the leader of the resistance. They stay up all night talking and the stranger leaves a strong impression on the soldier. As a result, the soldier decides to have faith in this person, even when they see them fighting for the government.

This is analogous to the way Christians have an initial experience/relationship with God which justifies their faith. They then do recognise that evil is evidence against God. Sometimes people will deal with terrible evil that outweighs the strength of the evidence they had for God. Then, they will stop believing in God. So, their belief was falsifiable. However, Mitchell insists that the level or amount of evil required to falsify a person’s religious belief cannot always be known “in advance”. It depends on too many particular things – e.g.:

“it will depend on the nature of the impression created by the stranger in the first place … on the manner in which he takes the stranger’s behaviour.” – Mitchell

Each individual Christian will have their own limit regarding the amount of evil that would cause them to abandon their belief. Often, this limit will not be known in advance. Nonetheless, there is a limit, and therefore religious language for the most part is falsifiable. So, Flew is wrong to think that for belief to be rational the believer must be able to say in advance what could falsify it, what level of evil could falsify their faith. Sometimes beliefs are rationally inferred from evidence and yet their falsification is not immediately obvious.

Swinburne’s critique of logical positivism

Argument for & strength of Falsif/verificationism: For a belief to be about reality, we must know how it could be true or false.

“we know the meaning of the statement if we know the conditions under which the statement is true or false”. M. Schlick, founder of logical positivism.

A cognitive belief about reality is factual, i.e., it concerns facts. Facts can be either true or false. This is the argument for logical positivism. Knowing the truth-requirements of a fact seem to be essential to knowing that fact. So, a fact is only meaningfully understood when it is known how it could be true or false.

For a statement to be about reality (cognitive), there must be a way to verify (Ayer) or falsify (Flew) it. If a person doesn’t know how their belief could be true or false, their belief isn’t actually connected to reality and thus is not factual, i.e., it is cognitively meaningless.

Weakness: Swinburne attacks this claim.

“Surely we understand a factual claim if we understand the words which occur in the sentence which expresses it, and if they are combined in a grammatical pattern of which we understand the significance.” – Swinburne

Swinburne seems to have a more scientific criteria for meaning. If we understand the words in a sentence and the significance of their combination, then it is meaningful to us. We don’t have to know how to test it through experience.

Swinburne created an illustrates of this. We know what toys are and what it would mean for them to come alive when no one was watching. We currently have no way to test whether that truly happens, nor can we even imagine such a test in principle. Yet, it is meaningful because we understand the concepts involved.

Similarly, we may not currently know how to verify or falsify God, but so long as the concept can be understood it is meaningful.

Swinburne’s point is strengthened by the fact that science often operates using his criteria, not Ayer’s or Flew’s. Physicists use their current knowledge & concepts to create theoretical mathematical models such as inflation theory (how the big bang started), dark matter or string theory. We currently don’t know how to verify or falsify those theories. Nonetheless, they are still meaningful to these scientists.

Such theories are constructed mentally through theorizing on the basis of the information about the world.

Hare’s non-cognitive ‘Bliks’ vs Ayer & Flew

Strength: Ayer’s verificationism & Flew’s Falsificationism is based on a reasonable claim.

Namely, that for a word to have meaning that we can all agree on it must surely refer to a thing in the world that we can all in principle test (through verif/falsification). If someone is talking about something that does not refer to anything in public experience then we can’t know what they are talking about and it seems valid to call that meaningless.

Weakness: Hare’s non-cognitivism.

R. M. Hare disagreed with Verificationism and Falsificationism, arguing that those theories had failed to truly understand how religious language functioned. They saw religious language as an expression of belief that attempts to describe reality. Since it is unverifiable or unfalsifiable, it fails to describe reality and is thus meaningless. Hare argues that if religious language was not an attempt to describe reality then it isn’t actually making a statement at all and so it wouldn’t make sense to get to the stage of calling it unverifiable or unfalsifiable.

Hare argues that religious language does not express an attempt to describe reality but is instead a non-cognitive expression of a person’s ‘Blik’, meaning their personal feelings and attitude. The expression of attitudes is not an attempt to describe the world, therefore they cannot be true or false. Hare thinks that since Bliks affect our beliefs and behaviour, they are meaningful.

Hare illustrated his theory with the example of a paranoid student who thought his professors were trying to kill him. Even when shown the evidence that they were not trying to kill him, by meeting them and seeing they were nice people, the student did not change their mind.

This shows that what seem like rational beliefs attempting to describe reality can sometimes really be an expression of an irrational Blik. If it were rational, the meaning could be changed by that description being shown to be false. Hare concluded that the student’s belief must be rooted in a non-cognitive attitude or Blik. Religious language functions similar to this. It may appear to be cognitive on the surface, but it is actually non-cognitive.

Hume’s argument for non-cognitivism

Strength of the non-cognitive approach: Hume’s psychology

Hare was influenced by Hume’s psychological argument for non-cognitivism. The cognitive part of our mind is controlled or enslaved by our non-cognitive feelings.

Psychology after Freud accepted this premise to a degree. We are often unaware of the way in which our supposedly reasoned judgements/beliefs are actually controlled by our unconscious socially conditioned feelings/attitudes. When we have a strong emotion, our mind creates a reason that justifies believing it and acting on it. This is called rationalisation. The human mind is more like a lawyer than a scientist.

This explains why people refuse to accept or evidence which goes against their deeply held beliefs, such as with Hare’s paranoid student and also religious belief. Religious language has an appearance of cognitive meaning but is actually expressing the emotions/attitudes (Blik) their belief is rooted in.

Weakness: Hume’s theory of human psychology is controversial.

Kant famously rejected it, arguing that humans were capable of putting their emotions aside and acting out of purely rational motives.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt thinks Hume was closer to the truth than Kant, but still think that Hume went a bit too far by saying that reason was always a slave to the emotions.

Religious belief clearly involves strong emotions and attitudes, but arguably it is still based on reason in some ways. For example, Flew actually changed his mind about God and became religious after being convinced by a modern version of the design argument. This suggests that although religious language might often be rooted in non-cognitive attitudes, nonetheless reason can affect our cognitive attitudes. Hume is wrong to say that reason is just a slave of the emotions. It often is, but nonetheless our reason can control our emotions to some degree, especially long term.

So, Hare is wrong to say that religious language can only be rooted in non-cognitive emotions.

Language Games

Wittgenstein advanced two significantly different theories of meaning in his life. The first was quite similar to verificationism and was called the picture theory of meaning. Words get their meaning by connecting to the world similarly to how a picture represents reality. The logic of our language somehow reflects the logic of reality.

Later in his life Wittgenstein significantly changed his mind and developed the theory of language games. This claimed that words get their meaning by connecting to the social reality, not the physical reality.

Our social reality is composed of different types of social interaction, which Wittgenstein described as different ‘games’ that we play. Game is meant in a very broad sense, a social practice governed by rules.

Throughout life, we are inducted into various social roles/games and we learn, consciously or unconsciously, what behaviour is considered socially correct in that context, i.e., follows the rules. Wittgenstein’s crucial insight was to recognise that words are a type of behaviour.

Think about the different ways people behave and speak when in an interview, talking with friends or with family. Imagine if we started talking in an interview like we do when talking with friends. That would be strange in that context. Meaning is therefore contextual. It depends on the social context, the ‘language game’ in which we are speaking. The meaning of language depends on how it is used in a particular social game, not on its reference to physical reality. The meaning of a word is not found by looking for what it refers to but by seeing how it is used.

“Don’t look for the meanings; look for the use”. – Wittgenstein.

There can be as many different language games as there can be different types of social interaction, I.e potentially unlimited. They are differentiated by the rules which constitute them.

Religious people play the religious language game. Scientists play the scientific language game. Uprooting a word from the religious language game and try to analyse it within the context of the scientific language game is to misunderstand how meaning works. Words get their meaning from the language game in which they are spoken. So it’s no surprise to Wittgenstein that Ayer and Flew find religious language meaningless, since they are not religious and so are not a participant in the religious language game.

When Wittgenstein remarks that we have to ‘know’ the rules of a game to play it, he doesn’t necessarily mean consciously. For perhaps most of human social interaction we are following rules that we have unconsciously internalised. For that reason it can be very hard to say exactly what the rules of the religious language game are, as opposed to the scientific language game which is more cognitively formalised.

Wittgenstein argued that the scientific language game can be about reality, since it is about evidence, experience and reason, whereas the religious language game is about faith and social communities, conventions & emotions.

Wittgensteinian fideism vs natural theology

Strength: Wittgenstein’s theory captures and explains the disconnect between religious and scientific meaning in a way that accords with important strands of Christian theology.

Fideism is the view that faith alone can gain knowledge of God, not reason. Wittgenstein has inspired a view called Wittgensteinian fideism, though it’s not clear to what degree Wittgenstein held it himself. On this view, religion is purely a matter of faith. It is a totally separate language game to science which is a matter of a posteriori reason. This has a long tradition within Christian theology.

Tertullian (3^rd century) asked “what has Athens to do with Jerusalem”, implying that the philosophical reasoning of the ancient Greeks has nothing to do with Christian faith.

As Pascal put it, the “God of the philosophers” that philosophers argue about is not “the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob”. These days, Fideism tends to be a protestant approach.

Religion and science having nothing to do with each other does explain why scientific evidence can neither prove nor disprove religious belief. Viewing them as separate forms of life does make sense of their apparent disconnect.

Weakness: Language games leads to theological anti-realism

Wittgenstein’s theory suggests that when a religious person says ‘God exists’ they aren’t actually claiming that God exists in objective reality in a scientific sense. Really, they are just expressing their participation in a certain form of life. They are speaking in a certain way due to internalising a set of behavioural rules developed in a culture over time.

The problem is, most religious people would reject that. That think they really do mean that there objectively exists a God. They would claim that religious language is cognitive. It expresses beliefs about reality, not merely participation in a social game.

The view that reason plays a role in religious belief is called natural theology and it is opposed to Fideism.

Aquinas wrote 5 inductive proofs of God’s existence on the basis of empirical observation. Even if they fail logically, it’s hard to deny that they express cognitive belief in God. Aquinas clearly believed in his proofs cognitively. Aquinas’ natural theology holds that analogical religious language is cognitive. So ‘God’s goodness is analogous to ours but proportionally greater’ is objectively true. This looks like an attempt to describe reality, not participate in language game.

Building on Aquinas’ 5^th way, modern scientists & philosophers like Swinburne & Polkinghorne created the anthropic fine-tuning argument. Science cannot explain why the laws of nature are so fine-tuned for human life. God’s design is the best explanation of that. So, Wittgenstein seems wrong for thinking that scientific meaning is radically distinct from religious meaning.

Language games, conversion & interfaith dialogue

Strength: language games does seem to accurately capture the way that social life works.

It makes eminent sense to think of different types of social interaction as different games and that what differentiates them is their rules. Each social context has rules governing what is acceptable and not acceptable. These rules will be constantly changing as society changes. Nonetheless, it still seems that what people say depends on the particular language game they are speaking in.

This also explains different religions as different language games or ‘forms of life’.

Weakness: there are elements of religious differences that Wittgenstein struggles to explain.

Wittgenstein claims one can only understand a language game by knowing the rules. So to understand religious language one would have to be a member of that religion. However, it’s hard to explain how people manage to convert to a religion, then. It’s also hard to explain how inter-faith dialogue is possible. If we simply cannot understand the words involved in a language game we are not part of, then such things seem impossible, yet they clearly happen.

furthermore, dividing up human social life into different language games seems very messy. Wittgenstein’s characterisation of language games is imprecise. For example, the ‘religious’ language game can be divided into different religions. Those can often be sub-divided, such as into the ‘Catholic’ language game. Further still, the way the congregation of one Catholic church speak to each other might be different to another, perhaps due to the language game of the village/town they live in. It looks like language games actually overlap and connect in all sorts of ways which ultimately seem impossible to calculate or characterise.