Ryle coined “category mistake” to attack the idea of an immaterial mind. Isn’t it ironic to use his term to defend an immaterial God and moral facts? A critic could say the category mistake is yours.

The irony is real; Ryle would not have been sympathetic, and his university example was deflationary by design. But a concept can be correct even if its author applied it in a direction one rejects, and only the concept is used here. The critic’s counter-charge is fair and is the actual debate: are moral facts a real category, or a category mistake? That question is taken up in the Relativism and Atheism cases. What is claimed here is narrower: that science can’t test it, so it isn’t real is itself a category mistake if there are non-physical categories, which is the question rather than the answer.