"Playing-God" -- and Grice

--- by J. L. Speranza
------ for the Grice Circle

IN a hyperlink to comment in "Owen Barfield", teapot, this blog, J quotes from Russell's point about the celestial teapot that rotates around the sun between the Earth and Mars. Russell compares this with the belief in the existence of God -- for Russell goes on to expand that the teapot is too minuscule to be perceived but that anyone who denies this is a heathen.

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Grice was sometimes interested in claims about god, existence, and so on.

Early enough, when devising his "Grand Plan" for the 1967 William James lectures at Harvard he wrote, on the plane -- the notes survive in the Grice collection at Berkeley --,

"use God as an explanatory device".

Quite the opposite way from Dawkins.

Flew died recently and his infamous claim to eternity is to have disbelieved in God! (In the faculty of philosophy, to 'air' your religious beliefs is considered totally ill-mannered). Flew was very serious, qua atheist, as to why he disbelieved in God -- his point is slightly Popperian, etc. -- I am interested because if one reads "personal influences" of Flew: he cares to list just two: Grice and Mabbott. Nothing 'straordinary 'baht that: they were his two tutors at St. John's, Oxford.

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Grice's 'playing God' via using "God" as explanatory device -- what he calls the 'genitorial programme' and which I prefer to call, apres him, 'pirotology' or 'pirotologica', is just yet another version of the 'ideal-observer' theory.

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Come to grits, Chapman is perhaps too dogmatic in her bio of Grice when she claims that (words to the effect) Grice lost his faith in God when he was 14 and never again recovered it! How can you be so blunt! (I mean, I love Chapman!).