Religious Language Flashcards
A) Essay outline
- Introduction
- Univocal description
- Analogical description
- Similarities
- Differences
- Conclusion
A) Introduction
- Speak to and about God
- Five types, explore univocal and analogical
- Describe before compare and contrast
A) Paragraph 1
- Univocal gives words the same sense everyday and about God e.g. father
- Linguistically limited, “we have no other language by which we can express our adoration of him” Hume
- Impossible to understand God being beyond our limitations, unlike equivocal (words have totally other meaning)
A) Paragraph 2
•Analogical is Aquinas’ ‘via media’
•God is other, use non-cognitive language, understand and identify something more, like mythical language
•”Analogies are proportional similarities which also acknowledge dissimilar features” Burrell
•Attribution, Hick’s upward analogy e.g. dog’s loyalty
•Ramsey’s models and qualifiers, model is an analogy to express something of God. qualifier improves understanding e.g. God is infinitely good
Proportionality, God has all qualities infinitely and proportionally, only understand his nature not him
A) Paragraph 3
Similarities
•Language humans can understand, accessible
•Understand God’s nature, recognise characteristics
•Timeless meaning, unlike symbols and myth, myths reflecting old values judged by new values e.g. arranged marriage
A) Paragraph 3
Differences
•Univocal anthropomorphism “no name belongs to God in the same way it belongs to creatures” Aquinas
•Analogical must be only non-cognitive, impossible to understand ‘other’ meaning
•Like us, beyond our complete understanding
A) Conclusion
- Both attempt to discover and convey meaning, don’t contest if meaningful
- “A being whose essential attributes are non-empirical is not an intelligent notion at all” Logical Positivists
- Without meaning, has no use
B) Essay outline
- Verification Principle
- Falsification Principle
- Myth and symbol
- Via Negativa
- Conclusion
B) Paragraph 1
- Verification Principle, rel lang is meaningless as it’s non-cognitive so can’t be empirically proven
- Key flaw, defines itself as meaningless as it can’t be verified by sensory experiences
- Eschatological verification e.g. Hick’s Celestial City says something is verifiable if true, but not necessarily falsifiable if false
B) Paragraph 2
- Falsification Principle, meaningful if evidence makes it false
- Hare says rel lang has meaning as it influences people’s “blik”
- Flew says religion “dies the death of a thousand qualifications”, as in Wisdom’s Gardener Parable
- Christians argue they do engage with problems e.g. evil
B) Paragraph 3
- Myth and symbol are indispensable as they show other types of anti-realist lang can have non-cog meaning
- LP disagree, “a statement which cannot be conclusively verified… is simply devoid of any meaning” Waismann
B) Paragraph 4
- Via Negative, human language is dynamic but inadequate to describe ‘other’, so we join phrases saying what God is not to adequately learn of God
- Mystics believe the truth of God is found using the Apophatic Way
- Hick rephrases mystic Dionysus’ view “God is utterly… incapable of being conceptualised by the human mind”, which ultimately forces believers to use language to deny God’s existence
B) Conclusion
- Overall necessary, only if ‘in the game’, Wittgenstein’s LGT
- Empirical testing is unnecessary as all language is non-cog, so it is a category error deemed “a blunder that’s too big”
