GOD notebook during the First World War, ‘means to see that life has a meaning.’ But believing in God was not a matter of assenting to a doctrine The Gospels not provide a historical basis for faith Christianity is not based on a historical truth: rather, it offers us a (historical) narrative and says: now believe But not: believe this narrative with the belief appropriate to a historical narrative; rather, believe through thick and thin, which you can only as a result of a life Here you have a narrative; don’t take the same attitude as you take to other historical narratives Make quite a different place in your life for it (CV 32) Wittgenstein was most opposed to the idea that Christianity was reasonable, and that its reasonableness was established by a branch of philosophy called natural theology Philosophy, he thought, could not give any meaning to life; the best it could provide would be a form of wisdom But compared with the burning passion of faith, wisdom is only cold grey ash But though only faith, and not philosophy, can give meaning to life, that does not mean that philosophy has no rights within the terrain of faith Faith may involve talking nonsense, and philosophy may point out that it is nonsense Having in the Tractatus urged us to avoid nonsense by silence, Wittgenstein after his return to philosophy said, ‘Don’t be afraid of talking nonsense’ (CV 56) But he went on to add: ‘You must keep an eye on your nonsense.’ The logical positivists shared the view that religious language was nonsense; but they felt for it none of the paradoxical respect accorded it by Wittgenstein A J Ayer, in Language, Truth and Logic, offered a brisk proof that religious language was meaningless and that ‘God’ was not a genuine name A religious man, he tells us, would say that God was a transcendent being who could not be defined in terms of any empirical manifestations But in that case, ‘God’ was a metaphysical term: To say that ‘God exists’ is to make a metaphysical utterance which cannot be either true or false And by the same criterion, no sentence which purports to describe the nature of a transcendent god can possess any literal significance It is important not to confuse this view of religious assertions with the view that is adopted by atheists, or agnostics For it is characteristic of an agnostic to hold that the existence of a god is a possibility in which there is no good reason either to believe or disbelieve; and it is characteristic of an atheist to hold that it is at least probable that no god exists And our view that all utterances about the nature of 316