Religious Language

Language is about communication

Religious language is a means of communicating about religion

This can be within three contexts:

1. To describe and codify a personal religious experience

2. To communicate religious experience to others, and to explore and describe beliefs

3. The liturgy (formal acts of worship)

God Talk - keywords

Realists – those who believe that a statement is true if it corresponds to an actual state of affairs e.g.?

God Talk - keywords

Anti – realists – those who believe a statement is true if it fits in (coheres) with other true statements. Reality is separate from language.

e.g.?

God Talk - keywords

Equivocal- the same word is used with a different meaning or in a vague or ambiguous way. e.g?

God Talk - keywords

Univocal –the same word is used with exactly the same meaning

e.g?

God Talk - keywords

Empiricism –the view that knowledge is based on experience through the senses

e.g?

God Talk - keywords

Verification principal –the theory that sentences are only meaningful if they can be verified by the senses e.g?

God Talk - keywords

Falsification principal – the theory that sentences are only meaningful if some evidence can count against them

e.g?

God Talk - keywords

‘Blik’ – a word coined by R M Hare to mean a way of looking at the world

God Talk - keywords

Symbol– something that represents something else and evokes participation

e.g?

God Talk - keywords

Myth–a symbolic story that tries to explain a fundamental issue about the purpose of existence e.g?

God Talk - keywords

Language Games –a term used by Wittgenstein to refer to any particular context in which language is used.

To debate the validity of religious language may seem somewhat superficial

For many people it is perfectly natural for them to talk about God and they understand exactly what they, or others, mean when doing so.

There is an on-going debate concerning the phenomena of religious language, and the issues are far from resolved.

Can we talk about God in any meaningful way?

Does it make sense? How can human

language adequately be used to describe something non human – God?

How is language used ?

Religious Language 1:Verification, Falsification and

Language Games

Reminder– this multi-faceted problem of religious language has many angles

• How do we use human language about the transcendent, unlimited God?

• If we use other forms of language, how can they be meaningful or comprehensible?

• Should religious language be understandable to those outside the religious community?

Religious Language 1:Verification, Falsification and

Language Games

Reminder– this multi-faceted problem of religious language has many angles

• Are those outside the religious community entitled to evaluate religious language critically?

• What use do analogy, symbol, myth, metaphor and other non-cognitive forms language have?

• Does religious language depend on making factual assertions, or does is serve some other, non-factual, function?

• If believers make claims about God, His existence, nature, purposes and relationships with humans, then presumably they intend those claims, or assertions, to be meaningful, true and in some way verifiable.

• For the most part, believers’ claims are traditionally COGNITIVE

• i.e. they are intended to be factual assertions about an objective reality and as such can be proved true or false (verified or falsified): ‘God exists’, ‘God loves us’, ‘God will execute a final judgement’.

• Such claims are usually made on the understanding that the believer is not uttering “crypto-commands, expressions of wishes, disguised exclamations, concealed ethics, or anything but assertions.

(Anthony Flew, Theology and Falsification)

• NON-COGNITIVE language serves some other function

• It may be pictorial, express an emotion or other abstract or subjective feeling

• God is my rock• N-C language is of

value for debates about the nature of biblical material, e.g. Creation narrative

Verification Principle• “If we take in our

hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask, ‘Does it contain any abstract reasoning containing quantity or number?’ No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning, concerning matter of fact or existence? No

Verification Principle• Commit it to the

flames; for it can contain nothing but sophistry and delusion.”

David Hume,

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748

Verification Principle• Unless a statement is

analytical (its internal logic provides it with meaning) or synthetic (empirical evidence counts to show its truth) it is meaningless.

Verification Principle• Although believers

may take for granted the factual reliability of their statements the school of thought known as Logical Positivism (which originated in Vienna) was concerned to find a distinction between sense and non-sense

Verification Principle• The issue regarding

statements such as ‘God exists’ is not just a case of John disagreeing with Jane on a matter of objective reality but rather it became an issue of meaningfulness, i.e. it is non-sense.

• Truth and meaning were regarded as distinct concepts by the Logical Positivists since it is possible to make a meaningful statement that is not true, e.g. Elephants are red.

• This is meaningful since we can test it by sense experience although it is false because elephants are not red.

• The Logical Positivists established three criteria of meaningfulness:

1. Synthetic statements that could be checked by the use of sense experience, or empirical testing, e.g. the sky is blue

2. Mathematics: 2 + 2 = 4

3. Tautological, or analytic statements, e.g. all circles are round.

• The Verification Principle thus demanded that:

Only assertions that were in principle verifiable by observation or experience could convey factual information. Assertions that there could be no imaginable way of verifying must either be analytic or meaningless.

• Members of the Vienna Circle were essentially scientists and mathematicians and the world view which lay behind the principle was a scientific one.

• If a statement can only be meaningful by being tested the effect of this demand is that either something is scientific or it is capable of becoming a science.

• Statements about God cannot be subject to the verification that the Logical Positivists demanded.

• His physical and empirical presence cannot be confirmed existentially.

• Experience of God may be vividly real to the believer or to someone who becomes a believer through the experience

• But the LPs say that this experience is subjective

• It is not universally shared nor subject to scientific testing and there are no reliable grounds for establishing a way to verify such claims.

• Thus all religious language was considered meaningless.

Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) famously summarised one aspect of the debate concerning religious language by speaking of :

1. univocal,

2. equivocal and

3. analogous language.

He recognised that when speaking about God we naturally have to use human language to do so

We have nothing else available to us!

Yet when we speak about God he suggested that we cannot use terms which are univocal

i.e. they have the same meaning, as this would mean that if I were speaking about the 'hand of God' I would be saying God had a physical hand.

However, we are also not using terms which are equivocal i.e. they have a different meaning,

as this would mean no-one would understand anything about God and it would render God-talk meaningless.

What Aquinas claimed we are doing with religious language is using terms which are analogical

that we use them in a similar or related sense to others.

This would mean that if we were talking about the 'hand of God' we could make reference to human notions of giving someone a 'helping hand' (or other related ideas).

In developing this idea Aquinas distinguished the use of analogy in religious language in two ways:

1. Analogy of attribution

2. Analogy of proportionality

Analogy of

attribution:  This uses a term originally used of one thing for a second thing because there is a relationship between the two (E.g. The living God).

Analogy of proportionality:

This uses terms to refer to something proportionately to the kind of reality the thing possesses (E.g. God is love - we compare human examples of love to God's.

He says we understand what is meant by 'God is love' because we believe the latter's to be an infinitely greater expression of the former.

Although Aquinas' theory of analogy has been helpful it does not actually resolve what might be said to be the key issue concerning religious language.

This is the attempt to speak about something which lies beyond sense-based experience.

The problem is this:

Are we talking about that which exists beyond this physical realm, or that which resides solely within our own thoughts (a projection theory of religion)?