Religious Language 2 Flashcards
Symbols and Signs
Symbols: become associated with the thing they represent
Signs: arbitrary representations of something
Tillich
Protestant Theologian
Argued religious language is symbolic and shouldn’t be taken as literal assertions
Symbols are exempt from empirical criticism: “You cannot kill a symbol by criticism in terms of scientific and historical research”
Symbolism opens up otherwise hidden levels of reality
Tillich’s understanding of symbols
Symbols are not signs- both of these point to something beyond themselves
Features of symbols:
-they point to something beyond themselves
-they participate in that to which they point
-they open up levels of reality which are otherwise closed to us
-they open up dimensions of the soul which correspond to those aspects of reality
If we were to describe a painting to someone, we could not evoke the same emotions in them as the painting itself would
Strengths of Tillich’s symbols
-provide a meaningful way of talking about God without saying anything to be taken literally
-symbols are more potent than signs, standing for, indicating and participating in that to which they point
-allow us to talk about God in new ways, for example as ‘mother’ as well as ‘father’ (Hick)
-can take many forms: myths, metaphors, etc
-more can be understood from the Bible if we accept that it uses symbolism
J.H. Randall
Supported Tillich
Religious symbols serve four functions:
-motivation: to fire up passions and emotions
-social: common understandings of symbols support social bonds
-communication: express religious faith better than language often can
-clarification and disclosure of experiences of the divine in the same way as a poet or artist can
Criticisms of Tillich’s symbols
John Hick: the idea of symbols ‘participating’ is unclear. Do flags really do anything other than indicate nationality
William Alston: “there is no point trying to determine whether the statement is true or false”
-since Tillich’s symbols are not literally true, they have no meaningful impact on us
Tillich gives no distinction between religious and non-religious language. I religious language still especially significant?
John Macquarrie on Symbols
“In a wide sense of the word a ‘symbol’ is anything which is presented as standing for something else”
symbols are used where words are not understood in their literal meaning but to more remote subject matter
Disagreed with Tillich: his use of ‘symbol’ is inconsistent with the English usage
-clouds are a ‘sign’ of rain, but also participate in rain
-some symbols hardly even relate to what they symbolise
-symbol and sign, then, are not distinct
2 ways in which symbols can work
Existential response:
symbols remind us of feelings (like loyalty and awe) and we can recognise that we should respond like this to God
Similarity of relation:
symbols can work in the same way as analogies
e.g. light is to the world as Christ is to us
Weaknesses of symbols generally
faith could become dependent on and crystallise into images and objects
symbolism could lead to religious symbols having only aesthetic or sentimental influence, rather than the spiritual power represented
people may fail to understand them
can lead to literalism where we think if we possess a symbol we have what it symbolises
may be interpreted differently by different groups
may become associated with negative things (for example, swastika)
Cognitivism and Non-Cognitivism
Cognitive language expresses facts and knowledge
Non-Cognitive language expresses things which we could never know: feelings, values, and metaphysical claims
Analogy
an attempt to explain the meaning of something by comparison with a mor familiar example
in religious language, compares religious ideas with normal ones
For example, William Paley’s watchmaker analogy
Aquinas and Analogy (general)
was concerned with the problem of how to explain God: he might be beyond description
we could not speak of God univocally or equivocally, so we need a way of describing him indirectly
therefore, we need to use analogy
to make an analogy, we need to accept that God is not just like us or anything earthly
using analogical language, we can describe God broadly to establish partial but justifiable knowledge
Analogy of Attribution
If God made the world, we can expect the world to reflect God in some way.
Aquinas used the analogy of a bull and its urine; the bull’s health is observable in its urine. We can make justified assumptions about God by looking at his world.
For example, God’s goodness is foremost, and it is reflected in the goodness of this world, except only to an extent
Analogy of Proper Proportion
John Hick develops Aquinas’ views. We have God’s properties (being made in his image Genesis 2) but in imperfect forms (lesser proportion).
Both dogs and humans can be faithful, but dog faithfulness is different to human faithfulness. Regardless, they are similar enough that we can recognise dogs as faithful: “a dim and imperfect likeness”
Metaphors which aren’t analogies fail: “God is a rock” is a loose comparison and is one of improper proportion.
Criticisms of Analogy
in the “image and likeness” of God is challenged by evolution
is the evil in the world also an analogy of God?
Swinburne: claims we can speak of God and humans as ‘good’ univocally, although humans possess goodness in a different way. The fundamental quality is the same, just God’s is perfect and ours is not.
Blackstone on Aquinas
Aquinas is unhelpful
we have to translate analogies to univocal language before they mean anything
leaves us uncertain; we know something, but in no detail
Stephen Evans
There is nothing wrong with accepting that God is mysterious and that our knowledge of him is limited, as long as we understand enough to worship
Ramsey
distinguished between models and qualifiers
Models: reference our own experience to understand God, such as ‘righteous’ or ‘loving’
Qualifiers: establish the difference between us and God, such as ‘everlasting’ or ‘perfectly’
these allow us to anchor ideas about God in our experience while conveying proportional difference
Stanislaw Lem on analogy
in his novel, ‘Solaris’ a planet is discovered and it can only be described using analogy
“Transposed into any human language, the values and meanings involved lose all substance; they cannot be brought intact through the barrier”
Anselm and religious language
“God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived”
it is in God’s nature to be unimaginable
‘Theology and Falsification’ 1955
• Anthony Flew claims that statements need to be falsifiable rather than verifiable
• began by referring to John Wisdom’s paper ‘Gods’, in which two explorers come to a jungle clearing which one of them maintains must be kept by a gardener
• they fail to find a gardener
• religious claims such as ‘God loves us’ or ‘God has a plan’ are like this; in response to challenges, the claims are qualified by saying something like ‘God’s love is not like human love’ or ‘God is invisible, intangible and totally insensible’
• religious believers refuse to accept that they are wrong
Falsification Principle
• aimed to escape the limitations of the verification principle by suggesting there is no possible state of affairs that could lead a religious statement to be proven false (which is the problem with religious statements
• claims that religious believers make about the nature and activity of God die a “death by a thousand qualifications” (Popper)
• For Flew, if a statement is to have meaning,it has to assert something and deny the opposite of that assertion
E.g. If I say I am standing on a mountain, I am ruling out that I am not standing on a mountain
• Flew argues that when theists talk about God and his attributes they refuse to rule out any state of affairs- they cling to the original assertion
• a claim which cannot be falsified is meaningless
John Wisdom’s parable of the gardener quote
“what remains of your original assertion? Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or no gardener at all?”
Karl Popper
(‘The Philosophy of Science’): “in so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable”
• claimed that science is more concerned with falsification of the hypothesis rather than verification
• religious believers do not give the condition which would count against their claim
• this influenced Flew
• was famously critical of Freudian Psychology as it cannot be disproved, not a valid theory at all
Flew Quotes (mjfqb)
• “what would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you to disprove the love of, or existence of God”
• “it often seems to people who are note religious as if there was no conceivable event…the occurrence of which would be admitted by sophisticated religious people to be a sufficient reason for conceding…God does not really love us men”
Swinburne on Falsification
(Cited in Davies 2000)
• “There are plenty of examples of statements which some people judge to be factual which are not apparently confirmable”
• (The Coherence of Theism 1977) we do not need to be able to specify what would count against an assertion in order to make it meaningful
• we cannot specify what counts against scientific theories about the beginning of the universe
• we have to allow that something could count against the nature of God even if we cannot specify
R.M. Hare on Falsification
(Cited in Hick 1964): “[bliks] are ways of regarding the world which are in principle neither verifiable nor falsifiable”
(New Essays in Philosophical Theology)
Anti-realist
• analogy of lunatic who thinks uni dons want to murder him- no one can persuade him otherwise, his blik is unfalsifiable
• there are wrong bliks and right bliks, the lunatic’s is wrong, though not meaningless
• blik=unfalsifiable conviction
• we all use bliks, unfalsifiable ways of understand the world
• bliks can have meaning
• religious utterances are not assertions, but bliks, so they are meaningful
• Flew’s mistake is seeing theological claims as scientific statements
• “Whilst the lunatic may have an insane ‘blik’ and we may have a sane ‘blik’, we both have a ‘blik’. For the lunatic to have a wrong ‘blik’ there must be a right ‘blik’”
• However, Flew responds by pointing out that Christians making theological claims mean that God really did something, meaning that the claim is testable so not merely a blik. Basing a theology on blik would be silly
Peter Donovan on Falsification
(Religious language) “the use of language within religious behaviour is generally not the argumentative fact claiming kind”
• outlines several ways in which religious language may have meaning without making propositional statements: commands, expressions, questions etc
• performative words like “the Lord be with you” are meaningful, falsification doesn’t apply
• religious language is not always about
truth claims
C.S. Evans on Falsification
“an assertion which does not rule out anything but rather is compatible with any conceivable state of affairs does not appear to assert anything either” (Philosophy of Religion)
• Hare’s view is not coherent
• Hare talks about bliks being right/wrong, sane/insane without explaining how this might be
• we do not know how we may judge them as right or wrong when they are unfalsifiable
Paul Tillich and Falsification
• religious language is not cognitive but symbolic
• symbols are not factual claims so they cannot be criticised in the same way as facts
• symbols cannot be verifiable or falsifiable
• symbols need not be meaningless even if they are unverifiable
• effective/ineffective way of drawing religious believers to the ‘power of being’
R.B. Braithwaite on Falsification
• religious language is not necessarily about making propositions
• religious statements are non-cognitive so they can still be meaningfyl
• could be moral imperatives
• they impact someone’s life, so they have meaning
• However: people who make religious truth claims often mean exactly what they say
Blaise Mitchell on Falsification
disagreed with Flew’s analysis
Realist
• religious believers are not blind to the problems of faith- they recognise that certain evidence can count against belief in God but they do not allow it to count decisively against faith
• Parable of the partisan and the stranger
• theological utterances are not assertions but have meaning to those who make them
• statements like ‘It is God’s will’ would be thoughtless and insane if the believer “blandly dismisses [what he witnesses] as of no consequence” for his belief
• adds that the believer “…experiences in himself the full force of the conflict”, putting what he sees into a wider context of the whole of his doctrine, agreeing with Flew that religious utterances are not ‘bliks’ but assertions.
• unlike Flew, though, Mitchell sees these assertions as explanations, not as an assertion “so eroded by qualifications that it was no longer a qualification at all” (Flew)
Mitchell’s ways of treating an assertion
-e.g. ‘God loves humanity’
1. as provisional hypotheses (to be discarded if experience goes against them)
- as vacuous formulae (perhaps out of a desire for reassurance) to which experience makes no difference and which make no difference to life
- as significant articles of faith
• “The Christian is precluded by his faith from taking up the first attitude: he is in constant danger, as Flew has observed, of slipping into the second. But he need not, and, if he does, it is a failure in faith as well as in logic”
• Flew’s response: “if relentlessly pursued [the theologian] will have t resort to the avoiding action of qualification. And there lies that death by a thousand qualifications which would be a ‘failure in faith and logic’”
Mitchell’s Partisan and the Stranger
• in an occupied country during war, a resistance member meets a stranger who himself claims to be a partisan and is in command of the resistance
• the partisan is convinced by what the stranger says and so trusts the stranger
• they never meet like this again, but sometimes the stranger is seen helping members of the resistance and sometimes he is seen in police uniform apprehending patriots
• the partisan continues to insist that the stranger is on his side
• the partisan is asked “what would he have to do for you to admit that you were wrong and that he is not on our side?’ But the partisan refuses to answer. He will not consent to put the Stranger on the test”
Swinburne’s toy cupboard
response to falsification in ‘The Coherence of Theism’ (1977)
• some existential statements cannot be falsified, though this doesn’t stop them being meaningful
• “Some of the toys which to all appearances stay in the toy cupboard while people are asleep and no one is watching, actually get up and dance in the middle of the night and then go back to the cupboard leaving no traces of their activity”
• this cannot be verified or falsified, but can be understood so is meaningful
• Hare agrees, that the falsification principle could apply to factual statements, but not to existential statements
