Religious language Flashcards
Two types of language:
Cognitive- truth claims.
Non- cognitive- not facts, cannot be determined as true or false.
Context:
‘Logical Positivists’ met in the Vienna Circle to discuss issues arising in logic.
We always looked to God for understanding, thinks we should heave this to the past and bring science to forefront to understanding.
- Used empirical evidence as evidence.
AJ Ayer:
- Part of the Vienna Circle.
- Wrote ‘language, truth and logic’.
- Uses ideas of Wittgenstein.
- Statements are meaningful if they are analytic or synthetic.
- Analytical statements include tautologies- saying things like ‘the heat is warm’.
- Synthetic require additional information. When empirical evidence is found, you can say it is meaningful.
- Factually insignificant if not. (Verifiability theory).
Verifiability theory and religious language:
‘God created the world’, cannot be verified so meaningless.
Religious experiences are meaningless.
No way of ever verifying religion.
No ‘factual significance’.
‘devoted to the production of nonsense’.
Problems with verification:
- Swinburne- people accept ‘all ravens are black’, but we cannot fully prove this. Still meaningful.
- Saying that someone is sad is thus meaningless, quite cynical.
What other type of verification does Ayer produce?
‘Strong Verification’.
Statements that are exclusive to sense experience.
Essentially saying that history is meaningless.
Ayer realisation:
Realised that ‘strong verification’ had ‘no possible application’.
Further criticisms of verification:
- Verification principle itself is unverifiable.
- God is eschatologically verifiable, we CAN verify once we are dead.
- Religious experience could be ‘weak verification’. Some evidence.
Falsification principle:
Anthony Flew.
Article ‘Theology and Falsification’.
- Proposed it to the Symposium (group).
- What proves it wrong, not proves it right.
- Allibis, saying what someone wasn’t doing to prove what they were doing.
Flew example:
John Wisdom’s Parable of the Gardener from his article ‘Gods’.
- Find a clearing with a perfect garden, one says there must be a gardener.
- Other thinks there isn’t a gardener.
- Try to find the gardener.
- Gardener never comes, someone says it is invisible. Other says what’s the difference between a gardener that is invisible and doesn’t exist at all?
- Flew says this is indicative of religious believers behaving in the same way, constantly changing argument to explain God.
- We need to say that a statement must be falsifiable for it to be meaningful.
Flew quote:
Belief ‘dies a death of a thousand qualifications’.
- Original belief in God is diminished, have made too many qualifications.
- Statements of God are empty.
- Cannot falsify their statements, cling to original verification.
- Peter Vardy uses example of someone constantly going back to a bad boyfriend.
Responses to Flew:
- RM Hare agreed with Flew about religious language failing to make valuable truth claims.
- But does not think that religious statements should be cognitive, they are instead ‘bliks’, emotional expressions.
Non-cognitive, so cannot be criticised for being cognitive. - It’s an emotional response.
- So falsification is cognitive, religious statements are non-cognitive.
Bliks
- Lunatic and killer dons.
- No argument can dispute it.
- Ambiguous.
Flew response to Hare:
- Many religious believers do try to make their statements cognitive.
- Like the Resurrection of Jesus.
Basil Mitchell response to Flew:
- The Parable of the Partisan, help each other in war time.
- Have to make a commitment and have faith, even without empirical evidence to do so.
- Religious statements are cognitive even if people don’t have available facts to support.
