Introduction
Kerk & Leven (“Church & Life”) is the leading weekly Catholic magazine in the Flemish region of Belgium. Since October 2025, on the invitation of the chief editor of the local edition of the parish of Olen, Cis Marinus, I have been writing a reflective article every two weeks from a philosophical and theological perspective, exploring Christianity in a scientific age.
18 February 2026
When Belief Becomes Speech: Religion as a Language Game
Without exaggeration, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) is one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century, best known for his groundbreaking work in logic and the foundations of mathematics. His Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, barely 90 pages long, marked a true turning point in philosophical and scientific thought. What has often remained underexposed, however, is that Wittgenstein was raised Catholic and remained deeply engaged with Christian themes throughout his life. Even if he was not a practicing believer, Christianity and religion clearly never let go of him.
He developed a highly fascinating framework for approaching the phenomenon of religion through language. He started from the observation that language, like a game, is governed by rules. In a game, rules determine what you may and may not do. In language, rules determine meaning. If we want to understand how words are used, we must look at the “language game” that gives those words their meaning. For Wittgenstein, religion can also be seen as a language game, albeit one with its own distinctive rules.
Why does this usually go unnoticed? Because language can be highly misleading on the surface. Wittgenstein compared this to the levers in the control cabin of a steam locomotive. At first glance, they all look the same (since they are operated by hand). One might therefore think they all do the same thing. In reality, each lever has a completely different function. One lever, for example, is a brake (the harder you pull, the stronger it brakes). Another one is a pump (which only works when moved back and forth), yet another one is a switch (with just two positions: on and off), and so on. Similarly, words and sentences may look or sound the same, but function entirely differently depending on the context, the language game, in which they are used.
Compare the following two sentences: “Mary goes to the kitchen” and “Mary goes to heaven”. The first is a descriptive statement about a movement in space-time. The second sentence is of a completely different order. On the surface, these statements look similar, but they belong to different language games: they are used differently and therefore mean something entirely different.
We can apply this to the word “believe.” If two plane spotters are discussing a departing aircraft and one says, “I believe that is a Boeing 737,” and the other disagrees, they are operating within the same language game. Here, “believe” means something like “to hold the opinion with a certain degree of certainty that…”. Not believing means “to question the other’s judgment.” Because they share the same language game, they can have a meaningful discussion.
A Christian who says she believes in the Last Judgment uses “believe” in a completely different way. Here it is not about holding an opinion with a certain degree of certainty. For a Christian, the Last Judgment is not an “event” one can debate about, whether or not it will happen or when. It is something entirely different: something that gives meaning to her entire life.
This becomes clearer when we consider the difference between someone who believes in the Last Judgment and someone who does not. It boils down to the difference between someone who interprets all events in her own life and in the lives of others in terms of “reward” and “punishment”, and someone who does not. For instance, when such a person falls ill, she might think: “What have I done to deserve this?” Such a person thinks very differently from someone who does not think in those terms.
The person who believes in the Last Judgment expresses, through that belief, the overarching framework that gives meaning to her entire life. When another person says, “I do not believe in the Last Judgment,” they are not responding from within that same framework. They are simply indicating that they do not accept the other’s framework, and that is something entirely different. They are not contradicting each other.
Wittgenstein extended this reasoning to the statement “God exists”. On the surface, this appears to be a factual statement, that is, a claim that could be verified through observation or experiment. One might say: on the surface, it looks as though “God exists” is a “move within the religious language game.” But that is not at all how the statement functions within that game.
What, then, is it? Within the religious language game, “God exists” is a statement that defines the language game: it determines its “grammar.” It is therefore not a factual claim at all. In fact, religious belief has nothing to do with facts. It is an emotional attitude toward the world, expressed in a “way of life.” It is about a “passionate commitment” to an overarching framework of meaning: committing oneself to live in accordance with that emotional relationship to the world.
Moreover, belief in a god whose existence could be empirically demonstrated would not be religious belief at all, but merely belief in the fact that a certain being or entity exists, similar to believing in the existence of an elementary particle that scientists are still searching for with a particle accelerator.
From this perspective, it becomes much clearer that religion is, first and foremost, a meaning-giving practice, a “way of life”. It is about “doing things together”: rituals through which we express commitment, connection, and meaning that cannot be fully captured in words. Religion and belief are not matters of factual truth, because that would reduce religion to a purely factual theory about the world, one that need not have any significance for one’s life. Just as the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 (after more than forty years of searching) plays no role in most people’s lives.
This insight can be liberating and can prevent many misunderstandings. Attempts to prove or disprove the sense or nonsense of religious belief by demonstrating whether God exists fail to grasp the core of religious faith. The famous medieval proofs of God’s existence by Thomas Aquinas or Anselm of Canterbury are therefore not proofs in the strict sense at all. Yet they remain highly valuable: they show that belief in God is reasonable for someone steeped in the philosophy of Aristotle (the intellectual framework of the Middle Ages), or they can be seen as an expression of pure joy in God’s existence.
Faith, then, is not about proving a hypothesis. For a believer, God is not the endpoint of a long logical argument, but precisely the opposite: faith is a starting point that precedes everything else.
Originally published as: van Biezen, A. (2026). Wanneer geloven spreken wordt: religie als taalspel. In Kerk & Leven, edition 0485, 18 February 2026, p. 4.
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