Paul -

You’re right: I didn’t fully appreciate or engage your “logical grammar” position about science vis-Ã -vis religion. Science has nothing valid to say about whether criminal trials ought to be decided on the basis of reasonable doubt, or whether televised instant replay ought to overrule the decision of a football referee (sorry for the American examples – I know next to nothing about rugby and absolutely nothing about juridical procedures in other countries). As you point out, these are “grammatical” concerns internal to the practices in question. For a particular religion’s god to decree what rules shall be enforced within that religion is presumably his/her right as the “gamemaster.”

The question is whether the gamemaster’s rules apply to everyone, including those who don’t even think they’re playing the game. If not, then there’s no worries: not everyone becomes a football enthusiast; not everyone takes up the law or a life of crime; not everyone goes to church. If a religion claims universal sovereignty – its God created the universe, upholds a specific universal morality, will conduct a last judgment, will assign people to their eternal stations, etc. – then the game becomes The Game, no longer controlled by the religious hobbyists. Does the gamemaster’s dominion extend even to those of us who aren’t playing? How do we know that the gamemaster even exists, or that he’s not an imposter? What rules of evidence apply when theism, and Christianity in particular, asserts itself as a “metanarrative” and a “totalizing discourse”? Scientists might reasonably want a say in this discussion before they’re prepared to accede.

It would, on the other hand, be interesting if postmodern Christianity were to declare itself a kind of tribal religion, relevant only to those who want to play the game. How likely is that to happen, do you think?

Briefly on Wittgenstein. My faith that the earth won’t disappear under my feet: is it empirical or a built-in kind of intrinsic sanity? Acting as if the earth is solid offers adaptive benefits to both predators (who persist in pursuit across the terrain) and prey (who persist in trying to escape). Genetic selection thus supports the “stability of matter” hypothesis at a primitive level of brain function. There are probably particular kinds of creatures who thrive in unstable physical environments – tidal basins, geothermally active regions, etc. – because they instinctively don’t rely overmuch on stability. The same can probably be said of expectations regarding stability of food supplies; e.g, koalas who expect eucalyptus trees always to be around for browsing. So the rigidity and flexibility of responsiveness to unstable environments is mostly hardwired, but that wiring resulted from generations of empirical experience across the gene pool.