Religious Language

Question 1

Introduction to Religious Language

Answer 1

Language: the way we communicate concepts and make ourselves understood

Religious Language: concerned with speaking about God, the way people speak about what they believe and why they believe it, deals 	with God and other theological matters (like worship, practice etc), it uses language to make statements about God

Problem: how can we speak about God when human language is made of words, which relate to only this world and the things within it
	If God is so different from us, is there any way believers can speak of God so that what they say is both truthful and meaningful

Question 2

Agnostics on religious language

Answer 2

• God is someone we cannot know about nor speak about

• God is not available to reason

• God isn’t accessible to experiment and testing

• non of the human vocabulary can communicate anything about God

• So: no point discussing him or making claims about him

• Coppleston: tried to demonstrate these beliefs

Question 3

Theists on religious language

Answer 3

-have tried to communicate their understanding of God through language
• Islam: 99 names for Allah- including the merciful, the compassionate etc
• Hindu: ‘goal of all knowledge’ ‘supreme Lord of all being’ etc
• Jews: ‘creator’, ‘King of the universe’ etc
• Christians: ‘saviour’, ‘Prince of Peace’, ‘Good Shepherd’, ‘Lamb of God’

-theists as well as trying to express an idea about God, they try to communicate other aspects of belief which are outside everyday experience
e.g.
• beliefs about the afterlife
• state of enlightenment
• nature of the soul

-Every religion uses normal language to convey supernatural ideas

Question 4

(how religious language can be used) Truth claims

Answer 4

statements about what is or isn’t the case
• may be that because one belief is true, another is false
• for example: “the Bible is the word of God”

Question 5

(how religious language can be used) expressing feelings and emotions

Question 6

(how religious language can be used) Performatively

Answer 6

• words announce something is, has, or will be happening
• the words function as actions (we thank God by saying words of thanks)
• without words spoken at marriage ceremony, the marriage doesn’t take place

Question 7

(how religious language can be used) Prescriptively

Answer 7

encouraging and discouraging certain actions
• like laws of Exodus 20 (10 commandments)

Question 8

Cognitive/Realist

Answer 8

Factual statements that are either true or false

‘The cat is asleep on the chair’

Expressed facts/knowledge

Believed by those who use them to contan meaningful factual content eg: God exists or ‘Gof loves me’

Cognitive claims are sometimes referred to in the ‘correspondence theory of truth’ - which highlights a direct link between the language used and the concepts/objects to which it/refers

Question 9

Non-Cognitive/anti-realist

Answer 9

Non factual statements that are neither true nor false
Feelings,values or metaphysical claims

Can be used to understand in some other way perhaps as a symbol, metaphor or myth

Doesnt express facts/knowledge
It expresses a religious truth within a community to which it belongs

Eg: ‘Jesus is the lamb of God’ - truth for Xians but not to others outside
Non-conginitivst claims are sometimes referred to as the ‘coherency theory of truth’

A statement is true if it fits with other truth claims

Question 10

Equivocal and Univocal

Answer 10

Equivocal: Words that have more than one meaning
Eg: cricket or web
Supporters of via negatuva agree with this

Univocal: words that have only one meaning

Question 11

Via Negativa

Answer 11

When we try to speak of God in positive terms or suggest that he has attributes that can be recognised from the physical world we make statements that are inaccurate and damage our understanding
People who support the via negativa believe that it is better to accept the mysteries of God than to try and pin God down by using flawed concepts
We end up belittling God and imaging that our reason is capable of understanding divine mysteries

Question 12

Via Negativa as a way of speaking about God

Answer 12

• Some writers have argued that it is only possibel to speak about God properly using negative terms
• Need to talk about what God is not
• Apophatic way / via negativa (negative way)
• Involves speaking about God using only using negatives to emphasise the difference between God and humanity
• God is described as ‘immoral’ ‘invisible’ ‘inaccesible ‘timeless’ ‘incorporeal’ etc
• These description which try to give God positive attributes are misleading and should be avoided
• If we say God is like a fathe ‘shephard then we might give people the wrong idea, convey the impression that God has a body, is male or has faults
• ‘God is love’ makes people think of human love with flawless and jealousy and inconsistencies
• ‘God is good’ then we start thinking about our own goodness, it is the only goodness that we known and we imagine that God must possess a goodnes like ours - our own goodness is flawed and temporary

Question 13

Pseudo-Dionysuis the Acropagite

Answer 13

6th century Christian mystic

Argued that via negativa is the only way we can speak truthfully about God
God is beyond all human understanding and imagination

Theologian who wrote about religious experience and religious language used to express it

Wrote about the need for the soul to become unified with God by going beyond the realms of sense perception and rationality - entering obscurity
‘Cloud of unknowing’ from which God can be approached

Follower of Plato

Believed in the division between the physical body and the spiritual soul

Believed that the soul’s seach for God can be held back by the demands of the body & the mids desire for understanding

Ideas were influenced by the anonymous author of the book ‘The cloud of unknowing’ as well as Thomas Aquinas

Question 14

Pseudo-Dionysuis on Via Negativa

Answer 14

Believed it was counter productive to speak of God as though he could be encountered by the senses or as though we could reach God by reason

Need to recognise the limits of humanity for spiritual progress to be made

People who are genuinely seeking God should put away their need to haver the answers to everything

He thought they should stop tring to use logic and arguents

They should allow God to speak to them in stillness & accept that God remains a mystery

If they dont acept this then they will miss the point and end up with an idea of God that is too small

Question 15

Moses Maimonides

Answer 15

(1135-1204)
• Jewish thinker
• Supporter of via negativa
• Explained his belief that the attributes of God could be expressed in negative terms
• People come to an understanding of what God is not and therefore move closer to appreciating what God is

Question 16

Moses Maimonides on Via Negativa

Question 17

Brian Davies criticising Moses Maimonides

Answer 17

“only saying what something is not gives no indication of what it actually is, and if one can only say what God is not, one cannot understand him at all” (An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion 1986)
• also, to find out what something is via process of elimination requires understanding what the options are; we don’t know our options with regards to what God is

Question 18

Via Negativa in Buddhism

Answer 18

(Saddharmapundarika): “the world as it really is: it is not born, it dies not; there is no decease or rebirth, no samsara or nirvana”

Question 19

Advantages of Via Negativa

Answer 19

• recognises that we have to go beyond our normal everyday experiences in order to experience God. It doesn’t place a limit on God by describing him in earthly terms
• conveys the essential otherness and mystery of God and underlying belief that god is not like us
• unlike analogy and symbol, it is not dependent on interpretation, can meant he same thing to different cultures and generations

Question 20

Disadvantages of Via Negativa

Answer 20

• if we speak of God only negatively, then it is still not very easy for the person who has no experience of God to know what we mean
• because God is beyond our experience, he cannot be reached by process of elimination
• Anthony Flew (‘Theology and Falsification’: if we say that God is not this and not that, we come closer to understanding God as being nothing than as being anything definite
• if the scripture comes from God, then it can be understood as making positive claims about God

Question 21

Peter Cole on Via Negativa

Answer 21

“…by denying all descriptions of God, you get insight and experience of God rather than unbelief and scepticism”

Question 22

Don Cypitt on Via Negativa

Answer 22

“I try to show the restless iconoclastic character of belief in God, which continually strives after intelligible content, and yet must by its own inner dialect always negate any proposed specific content”

Question 23

The problem with meaning

Answer 23

• If we are to speak of God we can only do it if we speak of God in a meaningful way

• Religious claim the divine is difficult to explain because of limited use of language

• Isaiah ‘woe is me a man of unclean lips’

• God is transcendent

• Opposite point has been recognised - If God cannot be described then there is little scope for belief

If this and all religious language is giberish we can forget about other relgious truths

Question 24

Types of meaning

Answer 24

-denotation: words stand for something/literal in meaning, like a label

-connotation: the associations carried by a word, or what it means metaphorically

Question 25

The Vienna Circle

Answer 25

1930s famous group of philosophers
• influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s picture of theory language (a statement is meaningful if it can be defined or pictured in the real world)
• followed David Hume (a sceptic)
• derived a radical new theory of language which was called ‘the verification principle’

Question 26

Logical positivism

Answer 26

• followed thinking of Compte (1889-1951) they believed that theological interpretations of events and experiences belonged in the past when God was used as an explanation for anything science couldn’t yet explain

• Compte had said that the theological era was replaced by the metaphysical- concepts from philosophy were used as a replacement for God to fill gaps in knowledge

• there was also the ‘positivist age’ where it was seen that the only useful form of evidence for investigation was that available to the sense and could be tested in a scientific way

• Compte then held the view that a theological way of looking at reality was outdated

• they took up this idea- that empirical evidence was the key to understanding what was and what was not meaningful

Question 27

The Verification Principle

Answer 27

it has meaning only if there is a situation in which observations verify it as true

logical positivists applied maths and science principles to all language statements as they have to be based on experience
however: if it can be theoretically verified, it passes the criteria of meaningfulness 

• claimed that the only assertions that were verifiable by observation or experience could convey factual information (synthetic statements or empirical propositions). Facts about the world can either be true or false and, because they can be tested and prove true or false, they are meaningful.

• assertions that there could be no imaginable way of verifying must either be analytic/logical proposition (true by definition and cannot be false- necessarily true) or they are meaningless

• something that cannot be verifiable yet, although has a theoretical means of being verified, would be meaningful

-So, to be meaningful a statement must be: analytical, mathematical, synthetical

Question 28

Implications of Logical Positivism and the Verification Principle for religious language

Answer 28

• statements about God aren’t analytically true or verifiable, so they are meaningless
• all statements that express unverifiable opinions or emotions are rendered meaningless, as are ethical statements (Ayer and emotivism)
• general laws of science which are assumed to be true cannot be absolutely verified
• the dates of historical events cannot be verified because nobody alive had sense experience of it

Question 29

Weak Verification Principle

Answer 29

proposed by Ayer
• if it is possible to know what would, in principle, verify a statement, then it is meaningful.
• religious language statements still do not fit into this category since they ultimately refer to a transcendent being which isn’t verifiable in principle
• instead of checking every bit of knowledge with our logic or senses he suggested that we might know things by setting up sensible standards for evidence- eye witness accounts, multiple sources etc
• later admitted that it allowed for any statement to be verifiable in principle

Question 30

Magee on the Verification Principle (1997)

Answer 30

“people began to realise that this glittering new scalpel was, in one operation after another, killing the patient”

Question 31

Criticisms of Verification Principle

Answer 31

• problem with whether we could verify or falsify the verification principle itself

• seemed to fail its own test

• was meant to be based on modern science, but it would reject statements such as ‘atoms exist’ or ‘forces exist’

• Kieth Ward: God’s existence can be verified in principle, since God himself can verify it

• John Hick: eschatological verification would verify belief about the afterlife

• many religious claims are historical in nature and if other statements weer allowed by virtue of being verifiable in principle, then statements such as ‘Jesus rose from the dead’ would also be meaningful