Without Answers

Rush Rhees's "Without Answers" (1969) presents a sustained critique of conventional philosophical approaches to religious questions, arguing that attempts to prove or disprove God's existence fundamentally misunderstand the nature of religious belief. Drawing heavily from his mentor Ludwig Wittgenstein's later philosophy, Rhees contends that religious language operates according to its own internal logic, irreducible to empirical or metaphysical propositions.

The collection systematically challenges the assumption that religious statements function as theoretical claims about reality. Where traditional philosophy of religion seeks to establish whether propositions like "God exists" are true or false, Rhees argues this approach imposes an alien grammatical structure onto religious discourse. He maintains that religious believers do not typically understand their faith as a hypothesis requiring verification, but rather as a fundamental orientation toward existence that shapes their entire conceptual framework.

Rhees particularly targets both natural theology and its atheistic counterparts, arguing that each side of the traditional debate shares the same category mistake. When philosophers attempt to demonstrate God's existence through cosmological or teleological arguments, or when skeptics demand empirical evidence for religious claims, both parties treat God as an entity whose existence could be established through the same methods used for investigating natural phenomena. This approach, Rhees suggests, evacuates religious language of its distinctive meaning and reduces faith to a poorly supported scientific theory.

The essays explore how religious concepts gain their significance through their role in believers' lives rather than through correspondence to metaphysical facts. Prayer, worship, and moral struggle cannot be understood as responses to factual claims but must be grasped as practices that partly constitute what believers mean by "God." This perspective does not defend religious belief against skeptical attack so much as it attempts to dissolve the framework within which such attacks make sense.

Rhees's work significantly influenced subsequent discussions about the grammar of religious belief, particularly in Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion. His arguments anticipate later critiques of evidentialism and contribute to broader debates about the autonomy of religious discourse. While some critics charge that his approach insulates religion from rational criticism, others view it as a sophisticated account of how religious language actually functions in human life, beyond the reductive frameworks of both apologetics and skeptical philosophy.