This paper argues that there is an important continuity between
Wittgenstein’s early remarks on religion and his later treatment of the theme
as it appears in his lectures in the 1930s and in his personal diary notes at
that time. This continuity pertains to three features. First, the early and
later Wittgenstein share a critical stance on methodological naturalism, that
is, the view that the method of philosophy is relevantly similar to that of the
natural science. Importantly, religion figures as one of Wittgenstein’s examples
of the limits of the factual language of natural sciences. Second, both the
early and the later Wittgenstein connect religion to the problem of seeing one’s
life as meaningful while denying the possibility of establishing any
objectively understood meaning of life. Third, both evoke the idea of different
types of judgments, the conditions of which are independent of each other.
Although religious faith is not grounded in factual knowledge and cannot be justified
by appeal to empirical evidence or conceptual argumentation, it is not
groundless either. Rather, in accordance with Kant who claims that faith may
have a nontheoretical justification, Wittgenstein shows that religious faith
may result from a personal experience of one’s life as a meaningful whole.