Noted without comment

From an interview with Howard Wettstein, in the book Talking God: Philosophers on Belief by Gary Gutting (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017), pp. 58-59:

Gary Gutting: “You say you’re a [religious] naturalist and deny that there are any sujpernatural beings, yet you’re a practicing Jew and deny that you’re an atheist. What’s going on here? What’s a God that’s not a supernatural being?”

Howard Wettstein: “Let’s begin with a distinction between participation in a [religious] practice and the activity of theorizing, philosophically and otherwise, about the practice. Even an advanced and creative mathemetician need not have views about, say, the metaphysical status of numbers. Richard Feynman, the great physicist, is rumored to have said that he lived among the numbers, that he was intimate with them. However, he had no views about their metaphysical status; he was highly skeptical about philosophers’ inquiries into such things. He had trouble, or so I imagine, understanding what was at stake in the question of whether the concept of existence had application to such abstractions. Feynman had no worries about whether he was really thinking about numbers. But ‘existence’ was another thing.

“It is this distinction between participation and theorizing that seems to me relevant to religious life.”

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