Religious Language

Question 1

What does the Via Negativa try to explain?

Answer 1

Since we cannot meaningfully say what God is, all we can meaningfully say is what God is not.
Negative language is meant to show us that God is beyond anything we could ever say.

Question 2

Who proposed the Via Negativa?

Answer 2

Psuedo Dionysius.

Question 3

What is a strength of the Via Negativa?

Answer 3

The Via Negative approach avoids anthropomorphising (describing God in human terms) by ensuring that we do not apply any concept we cannot truly understand to God.

Question 4

What is a Weakness to the Via Negativa?

Answer 4

The bible describes God in positive terms, suggesting that Via Positiva language is valid.
The Via Negativa approach fails as it goes against the Bible.

Question 5

What is Aquinas’ theory of analogy?

Answer 5

Although we cannot say what God is, we can say what God is like through using analogical language about God.
For example, ‘God is loving’ is replaced with, ‘God has the quality of love that is like human love but greater’.

Question 6

Why does univocal language fail?

Answer 6

We aren’t the same as God.

Question 7

Why does equivocal language fail?

Answer 7

We aren’t totally different to God, eg, in the Bible there is reference to humanity being made in the image of God.

Question 8

What does analogy provide?

Answer 8

A middle ground between both equivocal and univocal language, we are analogous to God, therefore whatever Gods qualities are, are like humanities qualities.
Analogy communicates the meaning of something by comparing it to something else, whilst respecting that God is beyond the human understanding.

Question 9

What is a weakness to Aquinas’ theory of analogy?

Answer 9

Could it be possible that the bad qualities of human nature can also be accounted for the qualities within God?

Question 10

What is the defence to Aquinas theory of analogy, suggesting bad qualities are not reflected to God?

Answer 10

As a Catholic scholar, there is a great emphasis on the bad human qualities being derived from original sin, referring in Genesis to Adam and Eve’s prelapsarian state, before the corruption of human nature.

Question 11

What does Tillich suggest about symbolic language?

Answer 11

Religious language is not literal, it doesn’t try to say what God is,
instead it is symbolic.

Question 12

Why could it be argued that Tillich’s argument of symbolic language is meaningful?

Answer 12

When a religious person hears language such as ‘God be with you’, their mind feels connected to God in that moment.
The crucifix is a symbol of Jesus’ sacrifice. It has symbolic meaning.

Question 13

What is God a symbol for?

Answer 13

‘The ground of being’.

Question 14

What is religion a symbol for?

Answer 14

‘Ultimate concern’.

Question 15

How is Tillich’s argument non cognitive?

Answer 15

The phrase ‘God exists’ is rather a feeling or attitude.

Question 16

What is logical positivism?

Answer 16

Positivism: Use of empirical data and generalisations.
Logical: imposition of precise clarity on language through analysis.

Question 17

What is the main thought of logical positivism?

Answer 17

Only scientific language is meaningful as it alone can be shown through analysis to refer to reality.

Question 18

What is verificationism?

Answer 18

Verificationism fits with the scientific understanding of reality.
Invented by Logical Positivists of the Vienna Circle who had attacked rationalism, the basis of religious beliefs.
They believed that synthetic knowledge is gained a posteriori, through empiricism.

Question 19

What do Metaphysicians believe?

Answer 19

Derived from an a posteriori faculty of intellectual intuition enabling knowledge beyond sense or experience.
Yet, this fails to show their statements to have meaning.

Question 20

What is the verification principle?

Answer 20

Analytic statements are meaningful, if a claim can not be verified through sense or experience then it cannot be shown to exist in reality or facts.
Therefore, claiming that metaphysical language such as religious language is meaningless.

Question 21

Why according to the verification principle is religious language meaningless?

Answer 21

Language can only be meaningful is it connects to the world and is verifiable.
The word ‘God’ is therefore meaningless as it cannot be shown to what it exactly refers to.

Question 22

Why is ‘God’ a metaphysical term to Ayer?

Answer 22

It references something beyond the empirical world, and cannot be empirically verified.
It could be argued that since Atheist’s claim to not believe in God, meaning is attached to the word.

Question 23

What does ‘eschatologically verifiable’ mean?

Answer 23

Eschatological verification describes a process whereby a proposition can be verified after death.

Question 24

Why do atheistic philosophers find it difficult to prove God doesn’t exist?

Answer 24

They believe that we shouldn’t begin to debate metaphysical questions such as the existence of God, as metaphysical terms like ‘God’ are unverifiable and so meaningless.

Question 25

What is Hick’s eschatological argument?

Answer 25

There is a way to verify God and religious language, when we die, we’ll see God and then we’ll know.

Question 26

What is Hick’s analogy of The Celestial City?

Answer 26

There are two travellers, one representing a theirts, the other representing an atheist. They are walking along a road, representing life. One thinks that he Celestial City is at the end of the road, representing an afterlife and God, the other does not. Neither had reached the end.

Question 27

What quote does Hick use when describing The Celestial City?

Answer 27

“Yet, when they turn the last corner, it will be apparent that one had been right all the time, and the other wrong”.

Question 28

Why does claiming something as eschatologically verifiable fail?

Answer 28

In principle we know it is possible to die and see God.
It is possible God exists as well as the afterlife, but not enough for us to justifiably claim that is is verifiable in principle.
The example of The Celestial City only shows it as possibly verifiable, rather than verifiable in principle.

Question 29

What are restrictions to the verification principle?

Answer 29

It would make all statements about history meaningless because they cannot be empirically verified.
To counter this, archaeological findings and historical documents would be weakly verified.

Question 30

How does the teleological argument fail to provide meaning to God?

Answer 30

If we see evidence of complexity, which supports a belief in God, we are yet to verify God in principle.

Question 31

What does the verification principle succeed in?

Answer 31

Successful through showing that religious language is meaningless, providing a criteria for meaning to eliminate metaphysical statements.

Question 32

What does the verification principle fail in?

Answer 32

Fails through the idea of something to have meaning is a metaphysical term in itself.
The verification principle fails its own test of meaningfulness as it is neither analytic or empirically verifiable.

Question 33

What does Ayer claim the verification principle to be?

Answer 33

It is a methodological stipulation, a tool which enables us to figure out whether a statement has empirical meaning.
Yet, this only shows that if we accept empiricism, we will find the results of a non empirical approach meaningless.

Question 34

What did Karl Popper believe about empiricism?

Answer 34

Empiricism can only operate through falsification, and therefore the falsification principle.

Question 35

What was Antony Flew’s believe about falsification?

Answer 35

Falsification intends to explain what is required for making assertions, it is argued that religious language fails the requirements.

Question 36

What is the falsification principle to Popper?

Answer 36

A claim/belief is falsifiable if we can imagine what could prove it false, i.e., if it is incompatible with some conceivable state of affairs.
Claims about reality are therefore falsifiable. They could be false, because what they denied could be true instead of what they asserted.

Question 37

What is Flew’s parable of the gardener?

Answer 37

Two people are walking and see a clearing in a forest. One claims there is a gardener who tends to it, so the other suggest waiting and seeing if that is true. After a while, the believer says that actually, they are an invisible gardener, so they set up barbed wire fences and so on to try and detect this invisible gardener, at which point the believer then says actually, it’s a non-physical gardener.

Question 38

Why does the religious person in the parable of the gardener fail?

Answer 38

If a religious person claims to believe in a God, in order to protect that belief from empirical testing they continually add qualifications to the belief, saying it’s ‘not this’ and ‘not that’. Eventually, it’s going to be nothing, is Flew’s point, causing the concept of God to ‘die a death of a thousand qualifications’.

Question 39

How is the parable of the gardener successful?

Answer 39

Even if religious belief does appear falsifiable, in cases where that belief were ever actually tested, they would simply edit their belief rather than admit they were wrong.

Question 40

How does the parable of the gardener highlight the ‘God gaps phenomenon’?

Answer 40

Throughout history many beliefs have been claimed about God which science has over time shown false, such as the genesis creation story. Rather than accept the falsity of the belief, Christians have edited their belief.

Question 41

How does Flew’s belief falsification fail to falsify atheism?

Answer 41

Atheists believe there isn’t sufficient evidence to justify belief in God. The issue is, they cannot say what could prove that belief false.
Falsifiability doesn’t seem a valid test for distinguishing between meaningful and meaningless language regarding religion.

Question 42

Why does Mitchell believe religion to be meaningful?

Answer 42

Religious belief actually is based on the rational weighing of evidence so that religious language is cognitively meaningful.
People have evidence for God in the form of their relationship with God, experience of God or experience of the effect of religion on their lives. They also recognise that there is evidence against God’s existence in the form of evil.

Question 43

How does Swinburne criticise logical positivism?

Answer 43

If we understand the words in a sentence and the significance of their combination, then it is meaningful to us. We may not currently know how to verify or falsify God, but so long as the concept can be understood it is meaningful.

Question 44

What is a weakness to Swinburne’s argument against logical positivism?

Answer 44

Swinburne’s argument fails. He is confusing understanding with cognitive meaning. There is a sense in which we can understand such ideas, but it is not a cognitive factual sense. We cannot understand unfalsifiable/unverifiable claims as being factually significant.

Question 45

What is Hare’s non-cognitive ‘Bliks’?

Answer 45

Hare argues that religious language does not express an attempt to describe reality but is instead a non-cognitive expression of a person’s ‘Blik’, meaning their personal feelings and attitude. The expression of attitudes is not an attempt to describe the world, therefore they cannot be true or false.

Question 46

Why does Hare’s argument of ‘Bliks’ fail?

Answer 46

when a religious person says ‘God exists,’ for Hare they are really expressing their attitude rather than actually claiming that there objectively exists a God. Many religious people would claim however, that they really do mean that ‘there objectively exists a God’, irrespective of their attitude.

Question 47

How does Aquinas counter Hare?

Answer 47

Aquinas wrote many long books attempting to prove the seemingly cognitive belief in God true. So arguably Hare fails to capture the true meaning of religious language

Question 48

What is a summary of Wittgenstein’s language games?

Answer 48

This claimed that words get their meaning by connecting to the social reality, not the physical reality.
Game is meant in a very broad sense, a social practice governed by rules.

Question 49

How do religious people play the religious language game?

Answer 49

Uprooting a word from the religious language game and try to analyse it within the context of the scientific language game is to misunderstand how meaning works. It’s no surprise to Wittgenstein that Ayer and Flew find religious language meaningless, since they are not religious and so are not a participant in the religious language game.

Question 50

How do religious language games differ to scientific language games?

Answer 50

Wittgenstein argued that the scientific language game can be about reality, since it is about evidence, experience and reason, whereas the religious language game is about faith and social communities, conventions & emotions.

Question 51

What is Wittgensteinian fideism?

Answer 51

Fideism is the view that faith alone can gain knowledge of God, not reason. It is a totally separate language game to science which is a matter of a posteriori reason. This has a long tradition within Christian theology.

Question 52

Why do religious people reject Wittgensteinian fideism

Answer 52

That think they really do mean that there objectively exists a God. They would claim that religious language is cognitive. It expresses beliefs about reality, not merely participation in a social game.

Question 53

How does Natural theology oppose fideism?

Answer 53

Aquinas wrote 5 inductive proofs of God’s existence on the basis of empirical observation. It’s hard to deny that they express cognitive belief in God. Aquinas clearly believed in his proofs cognitively. Analogical religious language is cognitive. So ‘God’s goodness is analogous to ours but proportionally greater’ is objectively true. This looks like an attempt to describe reality, not participate in language game.

Question 54

How does Wittgensteinian fideism fail?

Answer 54

Religious language cannot be completely reduced to expression of adherence to a form of life. It expresses cognitive belief. We could say religious belief is false or unverifiable or meaningless, but we cannot justifiably say there is only non-cognitive feeling but no actual religious belief.

Question 55

What is Aquinas’ analogy of attribution?

Answer 55

We can attribute qualities to the creator of a thing that are analogous to those of its creation. Aquinas used the illustration of seeing that the urine of a Bull is healthy, from which we can conclude that the Bull has an analogous quality of health, even if we can’t see the Bull. Similarly, humans have qualities like power, love and knowledge, so we can conclude (and therefore meaningfully say) that our creator also has qualities of power, love and knowledge that are analogous to our own.

Question 56

What is Aquinas’ analogy of proportion?

Answer 56

Different beings have a quality like life to different degrees of proportion depending on their being. God is the greatest being and thus has qualities to a greater degree of proportion than humans. Thus we can now add to our statement that God has qualities analogous to ours that he has them in greater proportion.

Question 57

What is Ramey’s qualifiers?

Answer 57

We use models to express our ideas and concepts of God then apply qualifiers to show that God is different to us proportionately, the qualifier points us in the right direction of understanding God.