Critics of religion like Richard Dawkins often depict religion as a second-rate science. According to Dawkins, God is a “hypothesis” which is outcompeted by rival scientific explanations. But might this conception of religion be radically mistaken? In this article, philosopher John Cottingham draws on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language to argue that any understanding and evaluation of religious discourse must be sensitive to the form of life in which it is embedded. As such, religious claims are not defective scientific claims, but rather entirely distinct ways of seeing the world.

The first quarter of the twenty-first century has seen some serious damage to the cause of religious belief. Some of the damage has been self-inflicted, but a significant element relates to the attacks mounted by prominent scientists and philosophers. That formidable critic of religious belief, Richard Dawkins, has tended to portray religious thought as if it were primarily aimed at advancing rival explanations to those offered by modern science. On this picture, the “God hypothesis,” as Dawkins calls it (The God Delusion, 2006), is supposed to provide a quasi-scientific explanation for the workings of the cosmos.

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“In a religious discourse,” Wittgenstein maintained, “we use such expressions as I believe that so and so will happen differently from the way in which we use them in science.”

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Putting the matter this way perfectly sets things up for the atheist to declare God redundant. Thus the highly influential philosopher Daniel Dennett has argued (in his Intuition Pumps, 2013) that the purely natural mechanisms and processes uncovered by science – the workmanlike “cranes” that do the explanatory lifting – are incomparably more rigorous and intellectually satisfying than the “skyhooks” of the theologians, which supposedly attempt to short-circuit all the hard work of empirical scientific research by appealing to miraculous solutions from on high.