Religious Language 1 Flashcards
Who were the Vienna Circle?
Influential group of philosophers who met in the 1920s and 30s
What was the aim of the Vienna Circle?
To reduce all knowledge to basic scientific and logical formulations
What is logical positivism?
The idea that anything outside of basic logical and scientific tenets is meaningless as it is unverifiable
Who was the founding member of the Vienna Circle and what happened to him?
Moritz Schlick, killed by a Nazi sympathiser in Vienna 1936
Give 3 challenges to the idea of religious language as analogical.
- An analogy is only as good as the 2 things being compared are similar and we cannot know God
- Assumes the existence of God
- Qualifiers undermine the fact that we don’t fully understand God
What did Ramsey call the inability to fully understand God and in what work?
- the mystery of faith
- Models and Mystery 1966
What are 3 purposes of analogical religious language?
- Consider the connection between humans and God
- Talk about God within the realm of human experience
- Illuminate teachings and traditions
What is the purpose of Ramsey’s models?
Disclose divine attributes
What is the purpose of Ramsey’s qualifiers?
Make sense of impossibility of describing God and help believers understand him
In what book did Ramsey write about qualifiers and disclosure and when?
‘Religious Language’ 1957
What did Ramsey believe about religious experience?
All experience is effectively a religious experience because all experience is a continual encounter between God and creation
What is a disclosure?
When something is made known where previously it was unknown, a realisation of something else going on
How do disclosures link to religious language?
Religious language that grows out of religious experiences becomes revelatory as experiences are disclosures
What are disclosure models?
The key terms used for God, such as Father or Shepherd
What are qualifiers?
Words/phrases added to terms to provide the with the quality of being greater than the normal reality (e.g. almighty)
What is Aquinas’ analogy of proportion?
The universe is inhabited by things which exist in a hierarchy with qualities in proportion to the hierarchy. Human qualities may be associated with God in proportion to his hierarchical superiority
What example illustrates the analogy of proportion?
Considering a fox to be intelligent is proportionally different from considering a human to be intelligent
What is Aquinas’ analogy of attribution?
We can speak of God in terms of human attributes because humans come from God and positive human attributes are divinely inspired - we can speak of God of causing these attributes
What example illustrates the analogy of attribution?
Saying food is healthy does not describe the food but what it causes
What did Aquinas believe is the function of language?
To develop increasing insight into the divine nature
What is univocal language?
Same term that means the same thing in every context
Why can’t univocal language describe God?
Because God is so abstract that any use of univocal words would be inadequate
What is equivocal language?
Same term can mean different things in different contexts
Why can equivocal language be considered meaningless?
Gives no knowable reference or understood context to explain it
What is an analogy?
Comparing something known to something unknown in order to explain it
Why can analogies be made about God?
Because God created humanity in his likeness
What is cognitive language?
Conveys knowledge and understanding gained through senses and experience which can be objectively verified
When is religious language cognitive? (2)
- when it refers to a statement believed to be true
- when it is a statement which purports tto be able to determine God’s empirically verifiable existence (e.g. cosmological argument)
What is non-cognitive language?
Emotions, attitudes, and opinions which cannot be held to objective scrutiny
When is religious language non-cognitive?
When claims are made about a believer’s attitude to the world based on their beliefs
Why is language limited in describing God in reference to experience?
All language is based on experience but no one has tangible experience and understanding of God
Which characteristics of God cannot be fully described in reference to experience? (2)
- infinite and timeless
- transcendence
In what sense is religious language not problematic?
In describing the physical such as objects or ritual
How is religious language unintelligible?
Describes divinities and teachings related to the afterlife or soul which cannot be related or understood
How is religious language unempirical?
It does not discuss ideas that possess an empirically knowable truth and is specific to individual communities
In what work did Hare and Mitchell discuss falsification?
Symposium of Theology and Falsification
How does R.M Hare challenge falsification?
Says the concept of meaningfulness comes from the impact of a belief on an individual, whether is can be falsified or not
What is Hare’s idea of a ‘blik’?
A term used to describe the point of view that someone may hold that will influence how they life their life
How does Mitchell challenge falsification?
Argues Flew fundamentally misunderstands religious believers when he argues they allow nothing to count against their beliefs - religious believers in fact just face challenges with their faith, seeing them as a test
What parable does Hare use to challenge falsification?
The university dons and the lunatic
What parable does Mitchell use to challenge falsification?
The partisan and the stranger
How does Swinburne challenge falsification?
There are many instances in which language is accepted as meaningful regardless of evidence
Which parable does Swinburne use to challenge falsification?
Toys in the Cupboard
What is the parable of the partisan and the stranger?
- Partisan in an occupied country meets a stranger
- Stranger says he is in command of the resistance and the partisan must have faith in him
- The stranger is seen working for the occupier but the partisan retains faith
- The partisan does not allow anything to count against his faith, although he allows his belief to be challenged
- While faith may be challenged, it is not meaningless
What is the parable of the Toys in the Cupboard?
Although there may be no one to see the toys come alive in the cupboard, the idea is still meaningful
What is the parable of the Celestial City?
- 2 men are travelling on a road
- A believes the road leads to a celestial city whereas B believes it leads to nowhere
- A believes challenges are tests and highs are rewards whereas B sees the challenges and highs as how they are, aimless and unavoidable
- This demonstrates that views on life may be different but God may be verified in the afterlife
What is the parable of the lunatic and the university dons?
- A lunatic is convinced all dons want to murder him
- Despite meeting many of them, he remains suspicious in the face of evidence
- There is nothing the dons can do that will count against his theory
- The lunatic exhibits a disordered blik
What is the falsification principle?
The idea that, for something to be meaningful there must exist evidence against it
What do falsification and verification seek to say about religious language?
That is is cognitive and essentially meaningless
What is Popper’s falsification principle?
If a principle is robustly scientific then one should know how to disprove it
What is Flew’s falsification principle?
Religious statements cannot be falsified and are therefore meaningless - the existence of theodicies shows religious believers discounting the evidence of challenges to God’s existence, making belief non-verifiable
What are 3 criticisms of verification?
- Self-defeating, not itself logically or empirically obvious
- Initially did not take into account verification in principle, discounting historical statements
- Eschatological verification
What is Hick’s eschatological verification?
The idea that the Christian God may be verifies in the future, if not immediately so in practice
What is verification in practice?
Statements whose truth can be determined by observation or experiment in the present
What is verification in principle?
Allows verification in theory - e.g. historical statements
Why does verification in principle still not allow for religious statements?
We do not know in principle what sense experience would count in its favour
What is weak verification?
When some statements are not conclusively verifiable but still provides meaning
What is strong verification?
Verification that is conclusive
How did Ayer’s arguments on verification develop?
Moved from focussing on what observation claims can suggest to how they can help verify a statement
Which 4 kinds of statement are open to empirical evidence?
- Tautological
- Mathematical
- Synthetic
- Analytic
What is the verification principle?
We know the meaning of a statement if we know the logical and empirical conditions to verify it
What did Ayer set out in ‘Language, Truth and Logic’ in regard to religious language?
Criteria for language to be meaningful and attacks metaphysics as essentially meaningless
How did Ayer develop the verification principle?
Differentiated between practice and principle and strong and weak
Logical positivism - The Vienna Circle
‘the task of philosophy lies in the clarification - through the method of logical analysis’
Verification - Ayer
‘a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if he know how to verify the proposition which it purports to express’
Weak verification - Ayer
‘it is verifiable, in the weak sense, if it is possible for experience to render it possible’
Eschatological verification - Hick
‘their opposed interpretations of the road constituted genuinely rival assertions, though assertions whose assertion-status has the peculiar characteristic of being guaranteed retrospectively by a future crux’
Equivocal language - Aquinas
‘there is a certain mode of likeness of things to God […] names are not said of God in a purely equivocal way’
Attribution - Aquinas
‘if when we say ‘God is good’ we mean nothing more than ‘God is and is the cause of goodness’
Language - Ramsey
‘let us never talk as if we had privileged access to the diaries of God’s private life, of expert insight into his descriptive psychology’
Non-cognitive language - Hume
‘does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning the matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion’
Problems of religious language can be solved:
- Analogy
- Eschatological verification
- Parables
Problems of religious language can’t be solved:
- Flaws of analogy
- Logical positivism
- Falsification
Religious language is exclusive:
- Reflects ancient tradition
- Language Games
- Individual to communities
Religious language is not exclusive:
- Archetypes
- Braithwaite - morality in language is shared
- Non-cognitive can be shared
Arguments on the meaningfulness of religious language are persuasive:
- Non-cognitive
- Blik
- Analogy
Arguments on the meaningfulness of religious language are not persuasive:
- Logical positivism
- No correspondence with reality
- Challenges to analogy
Non-cognitive interpretations are good in addressing religious language:
- Expresses an attitude
- Means of communication
- Blik
Non-cognitive interpretations are not good in addressing religious language:
- Can’t make assertions about reality
- Logical positivism
- Challenges to analogy
Logical positivism provides valid criterion:
- Verification
- Available evidence
- Principled verification
Logical positivism does not provide valid criterion:
- Cannot be verified
- Historical statements
- Doesn’t recognise importance of emotions
Challenges to logical positivism convince non-religious people:
- Verification challenges
- Dismisses emotion
- Blik
Challenges to logical positivism convince non-religious people:
- Based in science
- Free from non-rational thought
- Metaphysical is meaningless
