Religious language Flashcards
Hick’s ideas
-Religious language claims are cognitive and factual.
-Eschatological verification
-Parable of the Celestial City
-The truth will be verified after death, meaning religious statements are verifiable and therefore meaningful.
-“In order to say something which may possibly be true, we must say something which may possibly be false” -Hick
Hare’s ideas
-Bliks are interpretations of the world that are non-falsifiable. They are meaningful because they are deeply held and life-changing.
-Religious language is non-cognitive and non-falsifiable
-Parable of the Lunatic
-Explains why there are different ‘factual claims’ in the different religions.
-FLEW rejected - “if Hare’s religion really is a blik, then surely he is not a Christian at all”.
-Flew insists Christians do intend their assertions to be factually significant, but they are non-falsifiable and therefore meaningless.
Aquinas’ ideas
-Analogy can be used to describe God
-There are two types of analogy:
Analogy of attribution= God is the cause of all good things in humans.
Analogy of proportion= The good qualities in humans are equal to God’s qualities.
-Rejected use of univocal and equivocal language.
Wittgenstein’s ideas
-Language games
-Purpose of language is to picture the world, so every statement must correspond to some info about the world.
-“The world is all that is the case” (Wittgenstein)
-Meaning of a statement is not defined by its verification/falsification, but instead how it is USED.
-Vienna Circle took up his ideas
What are language games?
-Wittgenstein
-Language has meaning within a particular social context, each context being governed by rules in the same way that different games have rules.
-The meaning of a statement is not defined by the steps you take to verify or falsify it, but by the context in which is occurs.
-USE and CONTEXT govern meaning
Tillich’s ideas
-God is ‘Being-itself’
-Symbols pount to a reality beyond themselves and ‘participate’ in the power to which they point.
-Uses symbolic language to talk about God.
-Symbols can’t be produced intentionally, they grow out of the human subconscious.
-“Man’s ultimate concern must be expressed symbolically, because symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate”.
-An experience of God is an experience of life itself.
Ayer’s ideas
-Verification principle
-A statement is only meaningful if it is analytic (true by definition), or empirically verifiable.
What is Hume’s fork?
-Kant’s critique of Hume
-Attempts to prove that reason alone can tell us something about the world.
-Both prongs of the fork (ideas + experiences) are useful.
-Necessary statements are necessarily true in all cases, meanwhile contingent statements are conditional and depend on more info.
Hume’s ideas
-2 classes of knowledge: rational and empirical.
-Only empirical knowledge can tell us something useful about the world.
-“All objects of human reason or inquiry fall naturally into 2 kinds, namely relations of ideas and matters of fact”. (Hume).
What is via negativa?
-Used by Aquinas
-Defining what something is by stating what it is not.
-Reduces the possibilities of what something is not in order to gain and understanding of what it could be.
-“The ultimate in human knowledge of God: to know what we do not know” (Aquinas).
Define cognitivism
Language must make factual assertions that can either be proven to be true, or are by definition true.
Define non-cognitivism
Makes claims that cannot be verified but instead are intended to be interpreted as non-literal modes of expression.
-E.g symbols
What is kataphatic theology
-Uses positive terms to describe God.
-As opposed to apophatic theology which uses negative terms.
What is logical positivism?
-Meaningful statements must either be empirically verifiable or derived from direct observations.
-Rejects metaphysical or unverifiable claims.
Flew’s ideas
Falsification principle
-Something can be counted as scientific, only if it is possible that there could be evidence to falsify it.
-Parable of the Gardener: illustrates how religious believes limit God’s existence by making him smaller to counter every claim about him, to the point where there is no difference between whether God exists or doesn’t.
-Religious statements ‘die the death of a thousand qualifications’ because they refuse to accept that there may be evidence against there claim.
