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I in effect recognize this in my discussion, in "Concerning Belief in God," of religious inquiry and of properly religious arguments for the reality of God, as distinct from both metaphysical and moral types of inquiry and the arguments for God's reality respectively proper to them (Doing Theology Today: 105). All properly religious arguments for God's reality, I say, are really only different ways of developing one such argument--"to the effect, namely, that we exist humanly at all only because of our at least implicit belief in God and that as a consequence, this belief must also be affirmed explicitly if our explicit understanding of ourselves is to be both complete and consistent." But, then, in the very same essay, the only reason I give for saying that "belief in God is also the proper object of philosophical as well as of metaphysical and moral inquiry" is that "while philosophy ... is more than metaphysics and morals taken simply as such, it essentially includes both of them and thus comprises within its own distinctive kind of inquiry the inquiries respectively distinctive of them" (106). Here, again, I clearly give the impression that existential assertions -- in this case, philosophical rather than religious assertions -- are, after all, not really distinct from properly metaphysical and properly moral assertions.

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Is there, as I have assumed, a logical type of existential assertions common to religion and philosophy alike that are is distinct from both metaphysical and moral assertions, and yet related to them by mutual implication -- existential assertions necessarily implying certain metaphysical and moral assertions, and metaphysical and moral assertions necessarily implying certain existential assertions? If there is, then there would appear to be no difficulty in redeeming the claim that the existential question is a type of question distinct from as well as closely related to the logically different types of question properly distinguished as metaphysical and moral. If, on the other hand, "existential assertions" should turn out to be a misleading way of referring to what I mean, viz., not a logically distinct type of assertions, properly so called, but rather another distinct use of language that is itself nonassertive, even though it is logically dependent on both metaphysical and moral assertions, even as they, in turn, validate it, or, at least, the possibility of it -- in that case, the existential "question" would be distinct, not because answers to it take the form of a distinct type of assertions, but because answers to it are not properly "assertions" at all.

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