Religious Language Flashcards
AJ Ayer Verification Principle
A statement only has meaning if it is either empirically verifiable or an analytic truth
Ayer argues that statements like ‘God answers my prayers’ and ‘God exists’ are not analytic truths and they are not empirically verifiable
AJ Ayer Verification Principle : Self Defeating
Ayer’s claim that ‘a statement is only meaningful if it is analytic or empirically verifiable’ is itself neither an analytic truth or empirically verifiable
Therefore (according to its own criteria) the verification principle is meaningless
Hick’s Eschatological Verification
A statement can be verified after death or at the end of time
Hick argues that many religious claims are about things beyond the limits of human life
He argues that such religious claims are falsifiable because it is possible to verify them after we die
What is the Parable of the Celestial City?
Two men are travelling together along a road.
One of them believes that it leads to the Celestial City + the other that it leads nowhere
The parable points to the possibility of Eschatological Verification - whereby in the next life our belief will be proved true or false
Wittgenstein Language Games
The meaning of words is in their use
The function the words perform is agreed upon by the particular society / group using them
He argued that language use is like playing a game with rules - within our groups we have agreed rules about how words are used
Different settings and situations have their own language games
AJ Ayer Language Games Critique
AJ Ayer argued that it reduced talk of God to the same level as witches and wizards if all language games are equal
Hare Blick Theory
Religious statements are not things that can be shown to be true or false
Instead they are someone’s view of the world - Hare calls these attitudes Blicks
Parable of the Lunatic
A paranoid student who thinks University lecturers are trying to kill him
No amount of evidence or reassurance will convince the student that their Blick is false
Religious language is meaningful to the person so much so that if effects their behaviour e.g praying
Hare Blick Critique
Allows Irrationality and Subjectivity
