Wittgenstein on Religion

Wittgenstein seems to have regarded the history of philosophy as a great mistake.  It is great in the sense that it has involved a large number of very intelligent and deeply serious people developing some influential, memorable, and even beautiful ideas and ways of thinking about the world.  But what they have been trying to do is impossible, so they were bound to fail.  Consider modern philosophy.   Descartes showed that if you start from scratch and try to employ the method of doubt you get stuck in a circle.  Hume showed how limited human reason really is.   Kant showed how necessary it is to be able to distinguish between what lies beyond our understanding (noumena) and what lies within it (phenomena).  But we cannot understand what lies beyond our understanding, so we cannot understand noumena.  Nor can we understand the very concept of noumena or the distinction between noumena and phenomena.  So philosophical questions cannot be answered.  And a question that cannot, even in principle, be answered is not really a question at all.  It is nonsense.  This seems to be the implicit message of the Tractatus.

Since we cannot talk about things that transcend our understanding we cannot talk about God.  Or the soul or Heaven and Hell, etc.   That is, we cannot meaningfully assert propositions about them.  Does this mean that religion is all nonsense?  Not at all.  Religion is not an attempt to assert truths about the world.  It is a matter of performing certain rituals, reading certain texts, living by a certain code of ethics, attending certain ceremonies, and so on.  Behavior cannot be nonsense.  Only assertions can be.  So religion is beyond philosophical criticism or defense.

Problems:

1. Is this really all there is to religion?  Don't Catholics claim that logic can prove that God exists?  Don't some fundamentalists claim that science can prove that humanity was created rather than evolving?

Some Wittgensteinians dismiss such claims as confused or superstitious.  But Wittgenstein explicitly said that he was not in the business of putting forward controversial claims, and to dismiss such common religious beliefs as not genuinely religious is surely controversial.  Instead, I think, Wittgenstein would want to examine these claims in more detail, paying special attention to how their makers react to apparent proof that they are wrong, that the vast majority of competent logicians and scientists reject their view.  Any difference in attitude toward these claims (compared with the attitude toward other claims of a logical or scientific nature) will be brought out.  Once all the facts are out, though, Wittgenstein would leave everyone free to label beliefs as they like.  Philosophy would not label any belief superstitious, except perhaps paradigmatic cases like the belief that it is bad luck to walk under a ladder.

2. Another criticism is that Wittgenstein is too gentle on religion, that he rules out any rational criticism of religious beliefs. 

This criticism just seems wrong.  We are of course free to choose to worship or not as we please.  But we are also free to criticize.  We might even call this criticism 'philosophy'.  It just isn't what Wittgenstein calls philosophy, since it involves making controversial claims and could not be proven correct by the methods of, for instance, Kant.