Religious Language

Question 1

Realist and anti realist views about god

Answer 1

Realist view - words have objective meanings

Anti-realist view - words have subjective meanings

Question 2

Verification principle

Answer 2

The verification principle, as proposed by A. J. Ayer, states that something cannot be held to be true until it can be scientifically verified. If something cannot be experienced through the senses, it cannot be verified - so Ayer would argue that God cannot be verified analytically or synthetically - so surely religious language is meaningless?

Question 3

What’s kieths criticism of verification principles

Answer 3

Keith Ward attacks this point, saying that just because we can’t verify God, it doesn’t mean he isn’t verifiable:
“If I were God I could verify my own existence.”
However, this relies heavily on the assumption of God in the first place

Question 4

Hicks eschatological verification

Answer 4

John Hick argued that we can verify the afterlife in principle. Referring to heaven as the Celestial City, Hick argued that once we reach the Celestial City, we can verify the afterlife.
However, if heaven doesn’t exist in reality, how can it be verified at all?
Relies on the assumption of the afterlife

Question 5

Main criticism of verification principle

Answer 5

It cannot verify itself - or even prove that it exists. How can we take the theory seriously when the theory doesn’t apply to the theory itself? (if that makes sense)
Richard Holder gives an example of polar bears to illustrate his criticism. He argues that the verification principle would state that all polar bears are white, therefore non-white objects cannot be polar bears. Verification logic suggests that a brown chimpanzee, for example, proves that all polar bears are white. He calls this ridiculous and illogical

Question 6

What’s hares blicks

Answer 6

In a more significant attack on the falsification principle, R. M. Hare proposed his concept of bliks. According to Hare, a blik is simply how you view something.

He uses the example of a student who thinks his teacher will kill him but has no evidence. Just because there is no evidence to support his claim, it doesn’t mean that his blik - his attitude - is meaningless.

Bliks are non-rational and cannot be falsified because they are groundless (aka they are based on no rational or reasonable grounds). Yet Hare argues that even though they can’t be falsified, they are still meaningful to those who believe in them.

John Hick took Hare’s view and applied it directly to religion. He said that there are sane and insane bliks, but one cannot distinguish between the two. The judgement that religion is insane is merely based on a whim.

Question 7

Basils objection on the view they are groundless blicks

Answer 7

However, Basil Mitchell objects to the view that religious claims are groundless bliks, and states that it is grounded on valid reasoning. He says that just because God may seem like a resistance leader who occasionally appears to help the enemy (aka allows suffering), the power of faith is stronger than the evidence against God - so religious language is meaningful

Question 8

Wittgenstein language game

Answer 8

Wittgenstein did philosophy before it was
mainstream
Wittgenstein, an anti-realist, comes into his own category. He argued that language creates imagery, and so may be meaningful in his picture theory of meaning. Certain words are associated with certain images, and these images help us understand language itself.

He said:

“Don’t ask for the meaning, ask for the use.”

We all use words differently - considering Wittgenstein is an anti-realist, we have to remember that he believes words have subjective meanings. Certain words are only of use to certain groups who understand the purpose of the word. For example, in the Christian group, the word God is meaningful because it means something to them - it is coherent to them. This comes under Wittgenstein’s coherence theory of truth - that something has meaning if it is coherent to you

Question 9

What’s the difference between cognitive and non cognitive language

Answer 9

When words come out of someone’s mouth, they are coming from, being triggered by or, most accurately said, ‘expressing’ a certain part of their mind. If you say “The table is made of wood”, that is expressing the part of the mind that contains beliefs. Philosophers call such language cognitive.

If you are in pain and say “ouch”, that word is not expressing the part of the mind which contains beliefs. Philosophers call that non-cognitive, to indicate that it is a non-belief. In this case, it would be an expression of a feeling of pain.

The debate is where religious language fits into this distinction. When a religious person says “God is exists”, it looks like they are expressing a cognitive belief, but some philosophers argue that it is really more of a non-cognitive feeling/attitude.

When a religious person uses religious language and says ‘God exists’, do they believe that God exists, or feel that God exists?

Question 10

Verification background

Answer 10

Verificationism was invented by the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers, the most famous of which was A. J. Ayer. They believed that metaphysical claims (a priori reasoning about reality beyond empirical investigation), including religious language, is meaningless.

Question 11

Ayer on empiricist and rationalist

Answer 11

Ayer argued that the classic debates between empiricists and rationalists “are as unwarranted as they are unfruitful”. The empiricists claim that knowledge must be derived a posteriori from sense experience. However, rationalists/metaphysicians often claim that their premises are not based on their senses but derived from an a priori faculty of intellectual intuition which enables them to know about reality beyond sense experien

Question 12

Ayer on empirical thought

Answer 12

Ayer claims that it is impossible for an empiricist to prove that a priori reason/thought cannot know things beyond a posteriori reason, because empirical thought cannot tell us about anything beyond empirical thought, including whether or not there anything beyond it. In other words, the problem with denying metaphysics is that it requires a metaphysical claim to do so.

Question 13

Ayer and elimination of empiricism

Answer 13

So, Ayer concludes that the elimination of metaphysics should not be based on empirical claims, but on logic. It cannot be attacked by factually criticising its method of a priori intuition. Ayer claims instead he can eliminate metaphysics not by suggesting a factual limit to empirical thought but by accusing the metaphysician of disobeying the rules governing the significant (meaningful) use of language. So, Ayer thinks he can avoid the question of whether there really is in fact a faculty of intuition by claiming that metaphysical language is meaningless.

Question 14

Ayer and verification principle

Answer 14

The verification principle is how Ayer did this. It states: “A sentence if factually significant (meaningful) if, and only if, we know how to verify the proposition it purports to express – that is, if we know what observations would lead us to accept the proposition as true or reject it as false.” If a claim cannot be verified by sense experience, then it is not factually significant and only has a non-cognitive emotional significance. This allows Ayer to avoid having to make the metaphysical claim that metaphysics is impossible. Instead, he can say that metaphysical utterances are meaningless because they cannot be verified in sense experience.

Question 15

The term god to Ayer

Answer 15

‘God’ is a metaphysical term according to Ayer, which means it is about something beyond the empirical world, so there can be no way to empirically verify it.

Question 16

Ayers response to history cannot be verified

Answer 16

Overly restrictive: Ayer’s theory was criticised for being overly restrictive of meaning. Wouldn’t History be considered meaningless because it can’t be empirically verified?

Ayer’s response was to come up with weak verification. We can weakly verify anything for which there is some evidence which provides probability for it being the case. E.g. Historical documents and archaeological findings can be verified, and on the basis of those we can weakly verify that there were certain civilisations in the past with certain histories to them.

Question 17

Ayer and religious statements being indicative statements

Answer 17

Arguably Ayer has opened the door to religious belief here, however. For example, the teleological argument attempts to infer God’s existence from experience of the world.

Ayer initially argued for weak verification, but later decided it ‘allows meaning to any indicative statement’. So, he developed:

Direct verification – a statement that is verifiable by observation. E.g. ‘I see a key’ is directly verifiable and so has factual meaning.
Indirect verification – when things we have directly verified support a statement which we haven’t directly verified but know how to verify, we can be said to have indirect verification for it. E.g. ‘This key is made of iron’.

Question 18

Eschatological verification and it’s. Weakness in criticising the verification principle

Answer 18

Eschatological verification. Hick argued that there is a way to verify God and religious language, because when we die, we’ll see God and then we’ll know. Parable of the celestial city.

However, we can’t be sure that there really is a celestial city at the end of the road – that there is an afterlife where we can experience and verify God. It’s only a possibility. So arguably Hick only shows that religious language is ‘possibly’ verifiable, he hasn’t shown that it is verifiable in principle.

Question 19

Verification itself isn’t verifiable

Answer 19

It states that to be meaningful a statement must be analytic or empirically verifiable. However, that means that in order for the verification principle itself to be meaningful, it must be analytic or empirically verifiable. If we try to take the verification principle empirically then it would be an empirical claim that if we investigate what kind of meaning people use then we will see that it is either analytic or empirical. But that appears to be false since empirical evidence shows that people have meant something else by meaning throughout history e.g. Plato found it meaningful to talk of the world of forms and theologians find it meaningful to talk of God, both of which involve unempirical metaphysical terms.

Question 20

What’s Ayers response to critic of verification

Answer 20

Ayer responds by admitting that the verification principle cannot be a factual statement about the meaning of factual statements and claims instead that it is a methodological stipulation, a tool which the logical positivist adopts for methodological purposes. It is a tool which enables us to figure out whether a statement has empirical meaning.

Question 21

The tools of empiricism do not disapprove rationalism

Answer 21

The tools of empiricism do not disprove rationalism: this appears to reduce the verification principle into a tool one might use if you already agree with empiricism. A priori metaphysical statements are now only meaningless to this particular empirical tool, rather than categorically meaningless. In that case, Ayer has not shown that the non-empirical approach leads to meaningless metaphysical statements, only that they are meaningless from the perspective of the tools of empiricism. This no longer shows that we have to accept empiricism to avoid saying meaningless things, only that if we accept empiricism, we will find the results of a non-empirical approach meaningless.

Question 22

Karl popper and falsification

Answer 22

Karl Popper thought he could capture empiricism better than verificationism could. Popper was impressed with Einstein who claimed Mercury would wobble in its orbit at a certain time in the future because if that prediction was wrong, Einstein’s theory would be falsified. Popper was less impressed with Marxists and Freudians because they only looked for verifications of their views without ever admitting a way they could be falsified. True empiricism operates by falsification, not verification, Popper concluded. Furthermore, Popper thought verficationism couldn’t capture empirical generalisations, which he illustrated with the claim ‘all swans are white’. To verify that would require knowing that at no point in time nor at any place in the universe did a non-white swan ever exist. However, the claim is falsifiable because we can say what would prove it wrong; seeing a non-white swan.

Question 23

Beliefs of reality could be falsifiable

Answer 23

The key idea is that scientific knowledge is only ever our current best explanation of the available evidence; all scientific knowledge could be false, it never attains absolute certainty. In general, all our beliefs about reality could be wrong. You might think it is certain that the Sun exists, for example, but you could be in the matrix, dreaming, or in an alien reality TV show. You can’t know anything about reality for certain. Empiricists tend to accept this.

The important consequence of this is that all our beliefs about reality could be wrong. Therefore, if there is a belief that is unfalsifiable – that we can’t imagine how it could be wrong – then it cannot be about reality. This means that we can test whether a belief is about reality by asking whether we can imagine how it could be false.

Question 24

Falsifiable doesn’t mean false

Answer 24

It’s important to see that falsifiable doesn’t mean false. Consider Popper’s example of Einstein again. When Einstein made his theory, he predicted Mercury would wobble in its orbit. It was easy to imagine what evidence, were we to discover it, would prove Einstein’s theory wrong: if we observed Mercury and it didn’t wobble at the time predicted. Just because we can imagine what evidence, were we to discover it, would make a belief false – doesn’t mean the belief is false. It would only be false if we actually discovered that evidence

Question 25

Anthony few and religious language

Answer 25

Anthony Flew applied this to religious language. He claimed that because religious people can’t say what logically possible state of affairs is incompatible with their claim that God exists (in other words, because they can’t say what would prove them wrong), they are not actually asserting anything about the way things are (since there is no entailed claim about the way things are not). Therefore Flew considers religious language meaningless.

Question 26

What’s the parable of the garden and it’s relation to religious claims flew

Answer 26

Flew illustrated his approach using belief in a gardener as an analogy for belief in God. Two people are walking and see a garden. One claims there is a gardener who tends to it, so the other suggest waiting and seeing if that is true. After a while, the other says ‘actually, they are an invisible gardener’, so they set up barbed wire fences and so on to try and detect this invisible gardener, at which point they then say ‘actually, it’s a non-physical gardener’.

At this point the other person gets annoyed an asks what is for Flew the crucial question: “But what remains of your original assertion”. The religious person claims to believe in a God, but in order to protect that belief from empirical testing they continually add qualifications to the belief, saying it’s ‘not this’ and ‘not that’, etc. Well eventually, it’s going to be nothing, is Flew’s point, causing the concept of God to ‘die a death of a thousand qualifications’

Question 27

Flews big questions

Answer 27

Flew ends with the question – what is the difference between a world in which this gardener (God) exists, and a world in which it doesn’t exist. If belief in God is consistent with any possible discovery about reality, then its existence surely can make no difference to reality. It cannot be about reality. Flew claims Religious language therefore ‘fails to assert’ anything. It is unfalsifiable and so meaningless.

Question 28

Flew falsification principle cannot itself be falsified

Answer 28

The falsification principle cannot be falsified and is therefore meaningless.

Popper responded to this criticism by claiming that falsificationism was not a criterion of meaning, just a method of distinguishing the empirical from the non-empirical.

Since Flew used falsificationism as a criterion of meaning, however, it seems he makes falsificationism vulnerable to the same criticism verificationism had.

Question 29

St. Paul’s response to flew

Answer 29

St Paul claimed that if Jesus’ body were discovered then belief and faith in Christianity would be pointless. This suggests Flew is incorrect to think religious language is always unfalsifiable as there are at least some believers whose belief is incompatible with some logically possible state of affairs. That would show that Paul’s religious language would pass Flew’s test of falsification and so would be meaningful

Question 30

Extension to St. Paul

Answer 30

The parable of the gardener suggests, however, that if we did discover Jesus’ body, Christians including St Paul might make some excuse as to why it’s actually not a valid test after all. For example, Christians might be tempted to think that the body is a fake put there by the devil. Tempting though that is, it underlines Flew’s point that there really is no way to falsify belief in God.

Question 31

Mitchell’s argument against flew

Answer 31

Basil Mitchell argued against flew’s conclusions with the parable of the partisan. Mitchell is not happy with Flew’s characterisation of religious belief as irrationally blind to any evidence which goes against it. Mitchell argued that rather than need to say what would prove them wrong, religious belief can be said to be connected to empirical reality if it allows empirical evidence to count against it, like the problem of evil

Question 32

What’s Mitchell’s example soldier in war

Answer 32

Mitchell imagines the example of a soldier fighting for the resistance against the government in a civil war. One day someone comes to them and claims to be the leader of the resistance, on their side, but a double agent pretending to be on the other side. The soldier decides to have faith in this person, even when they see them fighting for the government. This is analogous to faith in God, despite the counter evidence of the problem of evil. Mitchell’s point is that religious people do allow empirical evidence to count against their belief, they simply judge overall to retain faith. Their belief is connected to empirical reality as a consequence however, and can therefore be said to be cognitively meaningful according to Mitchell.

Question 33

Why is Mitchell’s argument insufficient

Answer 33

Arguably Mitchell’s criteria for falsifiability are insufficient. Merely allowing evidence to count against your belief doesn’t make it falsifiable. Only being able to say what would prove it wrong, not merely count against it, makes something falsifiable. Explaining what evidence runs against your belief is not sufficient to explain what evidence could disprove your belief.

Question 34

Brief description of hares blicks

Answer 34

R. M. Hare disagreed with veriticationism and falsificationism and instead argued for non-cognitivism. Hare argued that religious language doesn’t get its meaning from attempting to describe the world, but from expressing ‘attitudes’ – which he called a Blick. The expression of attitudes is not an attempt to describe the world, therefore they cannot be true or false.

Question 35

How did hare illustrate this

Answer 35

Hare illustrated this with the example of a paranoid student who thought his professors were trying to kill him. Even when shown the evidence that they were not trying to kill him, by meeting them and seeing they were nice people, the student did not change their mind. Hare argued this shows that what we say about the world is really an expression of our Blick rather than an attempt to describe the world. If it were an attempt to describe the world, the meaning could be changed by that description being shown to be false. Because the meaning in the students mind was not changed by contrary evidence, Hare concluded that meaning must be connected to a non-cognitive attitude or Blick. Hare concluded that since Bliks affect our beliefs and behaviour, they are meaningful.

Question 36

What are blicks essentially

Answer 36

Blicks might look like beliefs about the world, but ultimately they are rooted in attitudes brought to the world and thus we should understand their true meaning to be as an expression of non-cognitive attitude.

Question 37

Criticism of hare

Answer 37

Although Hare saves religious language from being disregarded as a meaningless failed attempt to describe the world, nonetheless he only does so by sacrificing the ability of the meaning of religious language to have any factual content. So when a religious person says ‘God exists,’ for Hare they are really expressing their attitude rather than actually claiming that there objectively exists a God. Many religious people would claim however, that they really do mean that ‘there objectively exists a God’, irrespective of their attitude. Aquinas wrote many long books attempting to prove the seemingly cognitive belief in God true. So arguably Hare fails to capture the true meaning of religious language

Question 38

Defence for hare

Answer 38

Hare could respond that although many religious people may indeed feel like they are making factual claims about reality, their conception of reality is really just an aspect of their Blick. Saying God exists therefore really serves to add psychological force and grandeur to what is actually just their attitude.

Question 39

Wittgenstein two theories

Answer 39

The first theory is called the picture theory of meaning where Wittgenstein argued that words get their meaning by connecting to the world. More specifically, the logic of our language somehow connects to the logic of reality. Our words ‘picture’ reality by connecting to its logic.

Question 40

Wittgenstein repudiated his theory

Answer 40

Wittgenstein later in his life repudiated the idea that words got their meaning by connecting to the world and instead argued they got their meaning by connecting to social reality. A language game exists when multiple people communicate. Wittgenstein called it a ‘game’ because he argued that language games consisted of rules. In each social situation the people participating in it act in a certain way because they have internalised and are following a certain set of rules which govern behaviour including speech. Therefore, the meaning of their speech will be connected to those rules i.e to the social situation. There can be as many different language games as there can be different types of social interaction, I.e potentially unlimited. Nonetheless, they will all be differentiated by the set of rules which constitute them. The meaning of a word is not found by looking for what it refers to but by seeing how it is used.

Question 41

Wittgenstein on Ayer

Answer 41

Religious people play the religious language game. Scientists play the scientific language game. For Wittgenstein, to uproot a word from the religious language game and try to analyse it within the context of the scientific language game is to misunderstand how meaning works. Words get their meaning from the language game in which they are spoken. So it’s no surprise to Wittgenstein that Ayer finds religious language meaningless, since Ayer is not religious and therefore isn’t a participant in the religious language game as he doesn’t know the rules of it.

Question 42

Why we can’t know the rules of the game

Answer 42

When Wittgenstein remarks that we have to ‘know’ the rules of a game to play it, he doesn’t necessarily mean consciously. For perhaps most of human social interaction we are following rules that we have unconsciously internalised. For that reason it can be very hard to say exactly what the rules of the religious language game are, as opposed to the scientific language game which is more cognitively formalised.

Question 43

Language game leading to theological ant realism

Answer 43

Language games leads to theological anti-realism. Wittgenstein fails to capture religious meaning. If Wittgenstein is right, it means that when a religious person says ‘God exists’ they aren’t actually claiming that in a scientific sense that there objectively exists a God. Really, they are just speaking in a certain way based on how they have learned to speak by internalising a set of behavioural rules developed in a culture over centuries. However, most religious people would object that they really do mean that there objectively exists a God. This point is most salient when considering the works of Aquinas who attempted to argue for the existence of God. Aquinas believes the proposition ‘God’s goodness is analogous to ours’ to be cognitively and objectively true. He doesn’t think he’s just following a social convention in saying so.

Question 44

Defence Wittgenstein

Answer 44

It’s true that religious people claim to be describing reality when they say God exists, however perhaps their word ‘reality’ is informed by their religious language game and is different to the word ‘reality’ as used in the scientific language game. So when religious people like Aquinas say ‘God exists in reality’, the word ‘reality’ is actually not referring to the scientific conception of reality.

Question 45

What’s Aquinas theory of analogy

Answer 45

Aquinas agreed with the Via Negativa to an extent since he thought humans were fundamentally unable to know God in his essential nature. However he thought we could go a bit further than only talking about God negatively – he argued we can talk about God meaningfully in positive terms by analogy. An analogy is an attempt to explain the meaning of something which is difficult to understand by using a comparison with something familiar and easier to understand. Aquinas rejected univocal and equivocal language when talking about God.

Question 46

What’s the difference between univocal and equivocal language

Answer 46

Univocal: statements that mean the same thing for God and humans (e.g. God’s love and my love – love means the same thing)
Equivocal: statement that mean different for God and humans (e.g. God is wise and I am wise)

Question 47

Why can’t we speak of god univocally

Answer 47

We cannot interpret God univocally because we are anthropomorphising him, how could words describing us apply to a transcendent infinite being? We cannot interpret God equivocally because it leaves us unable to understand what our words mean when applied to God since we don’t know God. That would leave religious language meaningless

So, it’s wrong to say we are completely the same as God, but it’s also wrong to say we’re completely different. The middle ground Aquinas finds is to say we are ‘like’ God – Analogous to God.

Question 48

Why was an analogy the best solution

Answer 48

Aquinas thought through analogy (explaining something complex by comparing it to something simple/brain and computers), we can talk about God meaningfully. Religious language attempts to describe the attributes or qualities of God. Aquinas believed there were 3 types of analogy that could allow religious language to be meaningful.

Question 49

What’s the analogy of attribution

Answer 49

We can attribute qualities to the creator of a thing that are analogous to those of its creation. Aquinas used the example of seeing that the urine of a Bull is healthy, from which we can conclude that the Bull is has an analogous quality of health, even if we can’t see the Bull. Similarly, we humans have qualities like power, love and knowledge, so we can conclude that our creator (God) also has qualities of power, love and knowledge that are analogous to ours. We cannot say what these qualities of God actually are but we can know and therefore meaningfully say this minimal statement; that they are ‘like’ – analogous – to ours.

Question 50

What’s the analogy of proportion

Answer 50

A being has a quality in a degree relative to its being. Consider this example: A virus has life, plants have life, humans have life, God has life. This illustrates that different being have a quality like life to different degrees of proportion depending on their being. God is the greatest being and thus has qualities to a greater degree of proportion than humans. Thus we can now add to our statement that God has qualities analogous to ours that he has them in greater proportion. So God’s love/knowledge/power is like ours but proportionally greater.

Question 51

What’s proper proportion

Answer 51

Proper Proportion:

Humans possess the same qualities like those of God (goodness/wisdom/love)
Because we were created in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:26)
But, because we are inferior, we possess the qualities in lesser proportion

Question 52

What’s Tillich theory of religious language

Answer 52

Paul Tillich thought that religious language could be meaningful by being symbolic and that most religious language was symbolic. Consider what happens when a Christian looks at a crucifix. It means something to them. A crucifix is not a word, but it still inspires meaning in the mind of a person who sees it. Tillich thinks religious language functions like that. When a person hears religious language, e.g. “God be with you”, the effect on their mind is just like the effect of seeing a crucifix. The meaning they feel is a result of the words functioning symbolically.

Question 53

What’s Tillich distinction between a sign and a symbol

Answer 53

Tillich makes a clear distinction between: words as signs v words as symbols. What is the difference from a sign saying Fiji, and the Flag? A sign attaches a label, but the symbol participates in it what it points to (e.g. the cross is a powerful symbol because it represents Christianity and points to the death of Jesus). There are four things that symbols do which make give them symbolic meaning, for Tillich, which is called theory of participation.

Question 54

Four things vip the participants theory

Answer 54

Pointing to something beyond itself. The crucifix ‘points’ to Christianity, religious language ‘points’ to religion or God.
Participation: symbolic language participates in what it points to. The crucifix is part of Christianity, it doesn’t just point to it.
Reality: To be symbolic has to reveal a deeper meaning, they open up spiritual levels of reality that are otherwise closed to us.
Soul: Symbols open up the levels of dimensions of the soul that correspond to those levels of reality.

Question 55

Tillich symbolic language as poetry

Answer 55

Tillich thought that the language of faith was symbolic language. He thought symbolic language was like a poetry or a piece of art – it can offer a new view of life or a new meaning to life, but is hard to explain to people who haven’t experienced it, or not heard the poetry or seen the piece of art. Tillich thought that religious language is a symbolic way of pointing towards the ultimate reality The vision of God which he called the ‘ground of being’.

Question 56

How does Tillich side step the issue of subject and objective worlds

Answer 56

He side-steps the issue of human inability to understand God and the resulting problem for our meaningfully talking about God by suggesting that religious language is symbolic which points to God, participates in God, opens up spiritual levels of reality which connect to dimensions of our soul. Essentially religious language functions as a kind of religious experience which connects human minds to God without their needing to fully understand God. Religious language is meaningful insofar as it participates in the being of God.

Question 57

Critic from falsification verification

Answer 57

Verificationism/Falsificationism would argue that symbolic language is meaningless.

Question 58

Critic from Aquinas

Answer 58

Aquinas argued that religious language functions analogically, which means he would not accept that it functions symbolically. If Aquinas is correct then Tillich must be wrong.

Question 59

William Aston on religion requiring objective facts

Answer 59

William Alston argues that, for symbolic language, “there is no point trying to determine whether the statement is true or false. For Alston, an objective factual content is required for religious language because religion is concerned with objective factual things such as our salvation and whether we will go to heaven or hell. In that case, religious language cannot merely be symbolic.

Question 60

Tillich response to William Aston

Answer 60

Tillich’s theory arguably does successfully capture what is arguably the feature of religious meaning which is most important to religious believers – spiritual experience. When a Christian looks at a crucifix or prays, there are deep spiritual feelings and experiences which can be the most significant and meaningful thing to them. Tillich’s theory is successful then in understanding that religious language is usually about that sort of meaning, rather than simply reporting cold hard facts.

Question 61

Tillich on his theory not being subjective

Answer 61

Tillich doesn’t think his theory makes religious language completely subjective. He says:

“The term ‘ultimate concern’ united the subjective and the objective side of the act of faith.”

“In terms like ultimate, unconditional, infinite, absolute, the difference between subjectivity and objectivity is overcome. The ultimate of the act of faith and the ultimate that is meant in the act of faith are one and the same.”

Question 62

tillichs experience of the ultimate be subjective and conditioned ?

Answer 62

However, this attempt to argue that symbols have more than merely subjective meaning makes Tillich vulnerable to criticisms which focus on the difficulty of a symbol being more than merely subjective. For example, how could Tillich possibly know that symbols have a meaning beyond our subjectivity? Couldn’t his experience of the ‘ultimate’ and ‘unconditioned’ just be part of his subjective mind, rather than something which somehow goes beyond the subjective/objective distinction, as he tries to argue it does? Spiritual experiences where a person loses their sense of subjective self are possible, but they are still just happening inside subjective experience. Tillich’s theory can be criticised like religious experiences – as purely subjective.

Additionally, symbols only mean something to someone educated and raised in a certain historical and cultural context, which is also suggestive of their subjectivity

Finally, Symbolic language is changeable and prone to mistakes, stale through overuse, lost meanings over time. Tillich tries to counter this, arguing we can rediscover the questions Christian symbols are an answer to, that are understandable in our time, but that is still arguably subjective.

Question 63

what is rendals argument of symbols being of subjective and noncongnitive nature and how is it better then that of tillich

Answer 63

Randall has his own theory of symbolic language. Whereas Tillich seems to think that symbols have at least some non-subjective features whereby they connect our souls to the spiritual levels of reality, the ‘ultimate’ and God, Randall views symbols as completely non-cognitive and thus completely subjective. Tillich is stuck with the perhaps impossible difficulty of explaining how he could possibly know that symbolic language has the spiritual power he thinks it does. Arguably by accepting that symbols are completely subjective and don’t have some mysterious power extending beyond our subjective minds, Randall’s theory is more successful while still retaining the strengths of Tillich’s, that it accurately captures most religious meaning in the lives and experiences of Christians.

Randall makes an analogy between the power of music, art and poetry to affect us, arguing that religious language functions similarly.

For Randall, symbols should not be understood as symbolising some external thing, they should be understood by what they do; by their “function”. Randall argues that symbols do four things:

Arouse emotions and motivate action
Stimulate cooperative action, bind community together
Communicate aspects of experience that cannot be expressed with literal language.
Evoke, foster and clarify human experience of the divine.

Question 64

Rendals issue of non cognitivism and non factual nature of religion which arises due to his argument

Answer 64

Non-cognitivism is non-traditional. However, Randall is then left with the issue that non-cognitive religious language cannot express factual objective true statements. Randall doesn’t think that is an issue because he thinks religion is about human experience since he, like Tillich, is influenced by existentialism. Traditional theologians would not accept that fundamental starting point however, they would argue that religion actually is about much more than human experience, it is about reality and therefore religious language must be cognitive.

Question 65

what is existentialism

Answer 65

a philosophical theory or approach which emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will.

Question 66

non traditional view of how religion is experienced and its nature is not wrong

Answer 66

perience, it is about reality and therefore religious language must be cognitive.

Non-traditional doesn’t mean wrong! Randall and Tillich are part of a protestant movement in theology which was influenced by Schleiermacher to think that religion is primarily about human experience, whereas doctrines, dogmas and beliefs are secondary in importance. Tillich thinks religious meaning is not purely subjective, whereas Randall thinks it is.

Conclude that it is therefore the religious meaning in human experience that is most important for a theory of religious language to capture.

Question 67

Whats apophatic theology

Answer 67

Apophatic theology, also known as negative theology, is a form of theological thinking and religious practice which attempts to approach God, the Divine, by negation, to speak only in terms of what may not be said about the perfect goodness that is God.

Question 68

what does pseudo dionysus say

Answer 68

Apophatic theology, also known as negative theology, is a form of theological thinking and religious practice which attempts to approach God, the Divine, by negation, to speak only in terms of what may not be said about the perfect goodness that is God.

Question 69

Quote from pseudo dionysus

Answer 69

The more we climb, the more language falters, and when we have moved to the top of our ascent, language will turn silent completely, since we will be near to One which is indescribable

Question 70

argument from bible against apophatic theology

Answer 70

The Bible describes God in positive terms. “I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God.” (Exodus 20:5). God himself describes himself in positive terms.

Question 71

pseudo and maimodenies response to bible describing God in positive terms

Answer 71

Pseudo-Dionysus would respond that the Bible is limited by being written in human language.

Maimodenies responds that the Bible was written in limited human language and thus requires careful interpretation. He argues we should interpret such passages as referring to God’s actions rather than his nature. For example, when the Bible describes God as jealous or refers to him having an “eye”, this simply refers to God’s jealous actions or actions that involve intellectual understanding.

Question 72

whats maimodenies argument - with analogy

Answer 72

Maimodenies also argued for the via negative because humans cannot know God in his essential nature and therefore cannot speak about what God is. Maimodenies used the illustration of a ship. By describing what a ship is not, we get closer to describing what a ship is.

Question 73

how does the ship analogy fail

Answer 73

The ship analogy fails: Arguably we only get closer to describing what a ship is because we already know what it is. If we describe everything a ship is not, this leaves a ship shaped hole in our description. However describing everything that God is not does not leave a God shaped hole in our description. So we don’t get closer to describing what God is by saying what he is not.

Question 74

Via negativa avoids anthropomorphising god

Answer 74

However: If we say that God is not human or physical or earthly then we do at least avoid anthropomorphasising God which gets us closer to describing God than if we were left with our confused via positiva view.

Question 75

Via negativa allows you to know god ; knowing god by knowing nothing

Answer 75

Pseudo-Dionysys: Knowing God by knowing nothing. Pseudo-Dionysys argues that we may not get closer to understanding what God is through the via negative – that is impossible – however we can get closer to God in another important sense. Pseudo-Dionysus claims that knowledge of God can result from fully engaging with the Via Negativa approach. You can only know God when you fully realise that God is beyond your ability to know and you stop trying.

Question 76

moses example

Answer 76

He illustrates this with the example of Moses ascending Mount Sinai to receive the ten commandments from God. He describes Moses as plunging into the ‘darkness of unknowing’, ‘renouncing all that the mind may conceive’.

Question 77

breaking free of your normal self

Answer 77

This means realising the inadequacy of our ability to understand God and breaking free of the attempt to do so. The result is breaking free of your normal self and its vain grasping for knowledge, such that you are not yourself but nor are you someone else. This causes an ‘inactivity of all knowledge’ which leads one to be “supremely united to the completely unknown”. By this, one “knows beyond the mind by knowing nothing”. This is not knowledge in the sense of the mind grasping God; that is impossible.