By Schubert Ogden
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4. But this still leaves open the question of the mode of reasoning, or way of taking account of things that must somehow be taken account of within which religious utterances are either true or false. The answer to this question can be given only by rightly locating the religious mode of reasoning, or way of taking account of reality, relative to the metaphysical mode of reasoning, on the one hand, and the moral mode of reasoning, on the other. (I can't see my way clear to doing this rightly here. The essential point is that, while the religious mode of reasoning overlaps, and hence necessarily presupposes both the metaphysical and the moral modes, religious utterances nevertheless are neither properly metaphysical nor properly moral. This means, among other things, that religious utterances as such as distinct from the metaphysical and moral assertions they necessarily implyclaim to be expressions of the authentic self-understanding whose possibility is implied both by a true metaphysics and a just morality. Thus, while they make or imply claims about self, others, and the whole, they do so only as authorizing -giving and demanding- the self-understanding that they also express. So far as the religious mode of reasoning as such is concerned, then, "God" in its proper theistic, as distinct from its broader, religious, meaning refers to the universal individual as authorizing a self-understanding of radical trust and radical loyalty. To affirm, accordingly, "I believe in God," is to affirm not only that one in fact does believe in God but also that one in principle ought to believe in God even if one does not in fact do so, because God gives and demands just such faith. By comparison, then, with the way in which metaphysics takes account of God, one could say, quite understandably, religious utterances have to do with the meaning-of-God-for-us, not with the being-of-Godin-itself. But this would neither imply the illegitimacy in principle of metaphysical talk about God (on the ground that it mistakenly tries to overcome the systematic ambiguity of IIreal,.' etc.) nor collapse the crucial distinction between what is believed and what is worthy of belief. It would simply make clear the important difference between religion and metaphysics. And so, too, one could show, with the no less important difference between the religious mode of reasoning and the moral.
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