religious language Flashcards
Counter scholarship to Ayer
Hick argues for eschatological verification, which attacks Ayer’s premise that there is no logically possible way to verify claims about God.
In the eschaton, life after death, people will be in heaven and have a God-consciousness that is extremely high. Hick argues that this will be so high that it will constitute a verifiable change in a specific time and space.
However:
- Hick assumes that this celestial city, heaven, in which God-consciousness is empirically verifiable, exists, whilst it is equally probable that it doesn’t. If there is death, there would be no consciousness and therefore no logically possible way of verifying it.
But, this doesn’t take away from the fact that Hick has outlined a logically possible way of verifying statements about God.
- Yet, how are we to verify God’s attributes, omnis, which are infinite and therefore cannot be measured empirically.
This is still a problem.
But this, along with the entirety of Ayer’s argument, rests on the assumption that in order for something to be meaningful, one must completely understand it. This is false by counterexample. Swinburne uses an example which would go on to create Toy Story!
Alston
The assumption in religious language is that religious language should be treated somewhat specially in comparison to ordinary language.
For Alston however, we should use ordinary language at all times even when talking about religious language.
This means using univocal language, where words have one meaning only, and the same meaning in all situation. Thus, when we say “God is good”, we have the same definition of “goodness” as we say “man is good
Criticisms of William Alston
This is very quickly criticised. Whilst we are physical being, God is not, and therefore human descriptions cannot apply to God. Furthermore, God is transcendent, and therefore we cannot understand him and know what he is.
However, Alston advocated partial univocity. He accepted the fact that we are physical beings whereas God is not, but argued that two different things can possess the same feature but in different ways.
For example, if we say “God knows”, we mean “knows” in the human sense of knowing a fact. But, for Alston, this doesn’t prevent us from saying the psychological concept, “knows p”, about God. Alston was a functionalist and therefore argued that mental processes should be defined by their function and not their structure.
Therefore, God and human beings perform the same function of “knowing” when they “know X”, and therefore “know” can be used in the same. This is partial univocity because it only applies to functions.
Evaluation Ordinary Language
But – actions are still fundamentally different. When we say “God knows” the possibilities of functionalities of God’s “knows” is fundamentally different than the possibilities of functionalities of humans’ “knows”.
Say, we could say God “knows everything” or God “knows the past, present and future”, which make this inapplicable to humans. Although Alston might still maintain that the function of “knowing” is the same, this is a very weak argument as “knowing everything” is a different function of “knowing something” due to the act of “knowing” itself.
Sartre - Self
Sartre developed three modes of being: being in itself, being for itself, and being for others.
Being in itself refers to the realm of pure experience, such as the physical sensations we feel.
Being for itself refers to our conscious experience of ourselves, in which we are aware of our thoughts, emotions, and perceptions.
Being for others refers to how we present ourselves to others and how we are perceived by them.
Sartre believed that we can never fully act in absolute good faith because there is no true self that is entirely divorced from self-hood.
This means that our actions are always influenced by the perceptions of others.
However, Sartre did not deny that we can do things for ourselves and act in good faith. He simply argued that even when we do, our actions are still influenced by how we want to be perceived by others.
Lacan Theory
A differing explanation, specifically that of the Lacanian theory of the mirror stage points to the time in an infants development when they first perceive themselves in the mirror not purely as themselves, but as an object which other people also perceive, akin to everything else seen in the mirror. This leads to the creation of an imagined self, entirely apart from any true essence of a person, instead a fictitious element of an individuals anxiety surrounding their perception by other people. Given the paramount role of this mirror stage I find it impossible to support Locke’s idea that introspection is a purely individual affair.
Maimonedes
Religious Language is insufficient
Tillich
Tillich argues that religious language should be considered as symbols. Symbols point to another thing and idea, but have several characteristics which distinguish them from signs.
The open up “hidden depths of our own meaning”, cannot be produced intentionally, and grow old and die.
For example, the proposition “God is good” should be understood as a symbol for the implications of God’s benevolence on the world and on the meaning of life.
Criticisms of Tilich
However, there are many holes to Tillich’s argument. It is quite vague and an lead to equivocation.
For example, if “evil” grew to be a symbol for good, then we would be allowed to say “God is evil” when we symbolically meant to refer to God’s goodness.
However, this is a weak rebuttal as the reality of words or at least roots of words don’t change, and thus central linguistic meaning would still play a role and prevent from such instances occurring.
However, Tillich’s argument about symbols being unintentional can be disproven by counterexample: the LGBTQ flag is a symbol but was made completely intentionally.
However, this again can be rebutted because of how the real symbolism of the LGBTQ flag is achieved through participation and not through the actual intention of creating the symbol.
