Religious Language Flashcards
What are the first steps to the normalisation of secular lang?
- success of science
- Humes fork
- wittgenstein - the only meaningful lang is abt empirical reality ‘facts’
(Logical Positivism)
What is Ayer’s verification principle?
Aka Logical positivism
- Analytic statements
+
- empirically verifiable statements
are cognitive and meaningful
What is Ayer’s view on God talk?
- cant verify emperically
- not analytically true
Therefore, is meaningless
What are the strengths + weaknesses of the V.P?
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1. scientific
2. forces believers to clarify how they use religious lang.
- love, beauty and pleasure are meaningless according to the VP
- Dogmatically says the material is all there is
- the Vp isn’t empirically or analytically true, and therefore is a self defeating theory.
What is Hick’s eschatological/celestial city verification?
- 2 travellers
-One thinks it leads to the celestial city (CC).
One doesn’t - they will only find out when they reach the destination where they would see either a CC or nothing.
- same with God talk
- we can only verify after death
- Epistemic distance = deliberate mystery to allow us complete free will.
What are the strenghts and weaknesses of the Hick’s eschant…. verification?
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1. presents belief as reasonable and meaningful
2. pascals wager
3. aligns with the evidence of past life experiences
4. life is full of maybe’s awaiting verification anyways
- Some don’t believe in life after death
- Freud would say that the believer is deluded
- Hick says these are BLIK’s
What is flew’s falsification principle?
Meaningful statements all have the ability to be falsified (be proven false).
If something is true, it may be the case in all scenarios or just 1, but if something can be proven false, it is always false.
What is Flew’s invisible gardener parable?
- explorers find some land with plants
- they conclude that there must be a gardener to tend the plants
- they wait and see nothing
- the believer says he must be invisible and they set a barbed wire and dogs
- they find nothing and the believer says he must be untraceable and invisible
- the believer says even the weeds are there fore a reason as they are good for you as they make you more philosophical.
- he doesn’t turn up cause of hide and seek (epistemic distance)
Basically, Flew says that god talk is meaningless and there is no evidence either way.
What are the strengths and weaknesses of Religious Lang?
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1. Makes believers take challenges to their beliefs seriously
2. makes it inconvenient to hold on blind faith
- most of life is unverifiable, but that doesn’t make it unmeaningful
- God talk can be falsified through the arguments for the existence of God and the problem of evil.
- its an abductive argument at the end of the day, cause its unfalsifiable either way.
What is Hare’s critique of the falsification principle + His example?
- agrees that religious statements are non cognitive, but are still meaningful.
(BLIK) - deeply held and potentially life-changing belief that can’t be verified or falsified.
E.g. Paranoid student is convinced all his teachers want to kill him and even when the teachers are nice, he justifies it by saying its a trap.
NOTHING can falsify a belief, but it is still meaningful.
What are the strengths and weaknesses of Hare’s BLIK’s?
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1. rescues all types of language from the cognitive obsessions of the VP.
- Respects the power of beliefs that are influential in our lives
- Makes religious statements sound like helpful fantasies or fairy tales.
- Both theism and atheism are BLIK’s so there is no conclusive evaluation.
What are Wittgenstein’s Language Games?
- The only meaningful lang is that which can be verified through scientific fact and empirical reality.
- All land doesn’t point to some objective fact, instead is context bound in it’s meaning - lang games.
- The rules of one game don’t apply to another (the rules of science don’t apply to religion and visa versa).
What are the rules and application of Wittgenstein’s Language Games ?
Rules of the Game:
- Communities of usage - words don’t have intrinsic value but depend on the context (which community uses it). Different community = different context and meaning.
- Language doesn’t paint a picture, but works as a tool:
- doesn’t refer to facts in the real world, rather are used to construct social reality.
- We shouldn’t look at the meaning of the word, rather the context. - Language and behaviour:
- every language game has a corresponding social behaviour and we shouldn’t judge the morality of it, rather understand how it is used in its community.
Application:…………….
- The word God doesn’t refer to an object out there
- when does a community of believers use it? (in all cases tbh)
- how is the word used and what function does it have? (evokes courage, gratitude and hope).
- Different religion or culture = different language game
- Somebody outside of those communities can only understand when and how the word is used and not judge whether it is justified.
What are the strengths and weaknesses of Wittgenstein’s lang games?
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1. Non judgemental and respects all lang games
2. respects the context and community of that word
3. frees religious lang from much uninformed critique and encourages us to accept the word or belief in its own terms.
4. Gives value to all religions
- Makes rational debate between communities impossible
- Words have consequences no matter what Wittgenstein says
- He misunderstands believers, as they don’t think they are in a lang game, rather they are stating facts and true claims about God.
- You need complete knowledge of both sides to make an informed decision.
What is the Apophatic way of God talk?
via negativa
- Plato - “the good exists beyond the senses”
- God is beyond comprehension and language and therefore we can only understand Him by saying what he is not.
- if we talk abt Him, then we are limiting Him to our experiences and concepts (anthropomorphising).
- Ramanujacharya’s neti neti
