'Third Party' Demonstrations and 'Objectivity'

If we sacrifice a relationship to an abstraction, we also sacrifice a context within which the abstraction can be made intelligible. If we keep doing this, the general intelligibility of the abstraction evaporates.

This is most obviously the case with religious belief. Someone who believes in god doesn't just disagree with a non-believer, but must regard their disbelief as being a kind of incompetence or bad faith. This posture mimics the one we might imagine we can take with someone who denies an obvious fact - we can't take their denial seriously, and begin to look for deliberate obfuscation or cognitive incompetence.

The trouble is that instead of this making us cautious about 'facts' it rather makes us too generous towards religious belief (as expressed, for instance, in a credo or a liturgy). Truth does not reside in the words themselves, but in the words employed within an interpretive context - in a real conversation. Such a conversation may be undermined - may become unintelligible - if one party finds the formulations of another impossible to understand. The only difference between a 'fact' and religious dogma here is that we tend not to disagree about brute facts. This doesn't give them any epistemological priority, in the sense that agreement about them can be used to adjudicate on the intelligibility of the conversation as a whole. That adjudication must, after all, also take place within some conversation ...

And this is the real problem with religious belief: it is understood to have exactly this kind of epistemological priority. It must be treated as true and must be subject to no semantic ambiguities.

It is an abstraction taken to be independent of any relationship.

We may become unintelligible to one another, we may even agree tentative hypotheses about the general conditions under which we would expect this to happen, but we cannot absolutely adjudicate on intelligibility independently of some conversation within which questions about this, and approaches to answering them, can be entertained.

God is not an answer to questions about hyperbolic doubt, because our hypotheses about gods are only intelligible in a language that we can actually use.