The Cognitive Status of Religious Belief

Abstract

It will have surprised many, I suspect, to have seen Malcolm L. Diamond’s article on ‘Wisdom’s Gods.’¹ This is not the kind of topic one expects to be discussed in the philosophical theology of the eighties. And it is obvious that Diamond anticipated the possibilities of such a response for he attempts to persuade the reader that he has found a ‘fresh perspective’on Wisdom’s work that makes this ‘rehash’not only acceptable but necessary and important in the fight against positivism.² That fresh perspective derives from Dia-mond’s apparently recent ‘insight/discovery’that Wisdom’s ‘Gods’concerns the question of the cognitive status of ‘God-talk’and that cognitivity is a positivist issue.3