religious language

Question 1

distinction between cognitivism and non-cognitivism

Answer 1

• cognitivism claims that religious language expresses beliefs, they can be true or false, they don’t have to claim that this is all religious language does, but they argue this is how it is meaningful
• non-cognitivism claims that religious language does not express beliefs, but some other non-cognitive mental state, religious claims do not try and understand the world, they express an attitude towards the world

Question 2

verificationism: Ayer

Answer 2

p1. the verification principle; all meaningful claims are either analytic or empirically verifyable
p2. God exists is not analytic
p3. God exists is not empirically verifyable
c1. therefore, god exists is not meaningful
- because most religious language relies on this claim that God exists, most religious language is therefore meaningless

Question 3

falsification

Answer 3

• a claim is falsifiable if it is logically incompatible with some empirical observations
• a claim is only meaningful if it rules out some possible experience
• it is not meaningful if there are no circumstances that would ever cause you to question it

Question 4

eschatological verificationism

Answer 4

p1. a verifiable claim tells us what our experience would be under certain conditions
p2. we can’t have a certain experience of God in life
p3. it is possible we have a certain experience of God at the end of time
p4. the claim ‘god exists’ could be verified under these conditions
c1. therefore the claim can be verified under certain conditions
c2. therefore the claim is meaningful

Question 5

Hick on Ayers verificationism

Answer 5

agnosticism: a certainty/reluctance to concluded about the existence of God
- if you accept argument’s that god doesn’t exist, you must’ve considered at some point that God exists, you must treat evidence for God existing in the same way that it doesn’t

Question 6

issues with eschatological verificationism

Answer 6

• However, if there is no afterlife, we won’t know.
  If death is annihilation there won’t be a moment of realisation of that.
• so Hick has only shown that religious language is possibly verifiable in principle, but not actually verifiable in principle.

Question 7

flews falsification principle: premise

Answer 7

p1. for a truth claim to be meaningful, there must be some possible state of affairs it denies or rules out
c1. to meaningfully assert a claim, someone must accept that it rules out some possible state of affairs
p2. the occurrence of a state of affairs that a claim rules out demonstrates that the claim is false
c2. to meaningfully assert a claim, someone must be willing to withdraw it if the state of affairs it rules out were to occur
p3. religious believers refuse to specify which state of affairs would lead them to withdraw the claim that ‘God exists’
c3. when religious believers say God exists, they do not rule out any state of affairs
c4. the claim that God exists, when made by religious believers, is meaningless

Question 8

the parable of the gardener: flew

Answer 8

• Flew uses the parable of the gardener to illustrate why unfalsifiable language is meaningless.
• Imagine someone claimed a gardener existed, but every time that was tested, they diluted the original concept to avoid the possibility of it being proven false (by saying it’s not visible, not tangible, etc).
• Flew claims that the consequence is that the original claim is diluted into saying nothing about reality at all.
• The gardener is an analogy for God, the concept of which has died a ‘death of a thousand qualifications’.
• There is ultimately no difference between a reality in which the gardener exists and one in which it doesn’t.
• So, unfalsifiable language, like religious language, clearly cannot actually be about reality.

Question 9

Mitchells response to flew: the partisan

Answer 9

• disagrees with Flews claim that an assertion is only meaningful if we are willing to withdraw it as false in light of certain experiences
• You are in a war, your country has been occupied by an enemy
• You meet a stranger who claims to be leader of the resistance
• You trust this man
• But the stranger acts ambiguously, sometimes doing things that appear to support the enemy rather than your own side
• Yet you continue to believe the stranger is on your side despite this and trust that he has
• In this analogy, the stranger represents God and his ambiguous actions represent the problem of evil.
• Mitchell is arguing that we can accept that the existence of evil counts as evidence against the statement “God exists” (and so it is falsifiable) without having to withdraw from belief in this statement.

Question 10

hare’s response to flew

Answer 10

• parable of the lunatic
• states that a claim which has no justification and no way of being proved wrong is not meaningless if it still has a profound effect on the attitude and life of the person making the claim
• calls this a blik
• two people can have the same experiences but different bliks, who is right cannot therefore be decided by empirical evidence

Question 11

blik

Answer 11

• an attitude to or view of the world that is not held or withdrawn on the basis of empirical evidence