“Bridging Faith and Knowledge through Wittgenstein’s On Certainty”

Abstract

This paper argues that faith and knowledge are not mutually exclusive spheres of inquiry, but overlapping in a sense that faith is a viaduct of knowledge. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s On Certainty is the major material in consideration to argue this case.

Wittgenstein’s religious inclination is examined in the first section to set some conditions on the possibility of interpretation laid out in this article. So this reading is in no way conclusive about the seminal material being considered. But in the second section, knowledge, belief, doubt and certainty are briefly discussed to ground the notion of religious convictions as hinge beliefs. The third section is an intentional derailment from the exposition of On Certainty in the mode of interpretation being suggested. It is about a personal academic experience wherein it is argued that, if the discussion in the second section is at least plausible, academic thinking needs not to be leaning towards the mutual exclusion of faith and knowledge. It is however premised on the necessity of faith as a hinge belief in the Wittgensteinian sense. It seems then that a religious world-picture driven by faith may not be separated from the one driven by science, which is a secular world-picture.