Religious language Flashcards
What is religious language?
Religious language is concerned with speaking about God. It is the way people speak about what they believe and why they believe it and it encompasses worship, practice, morality, dogma and doctrine. Religious language includes words that are:
- unique in the description of God such as omnipotent.
- descriptions of religious belief.
- religious technical terms, such as sin or grace.
- Eveyday terms that are given a religious meaning, such as ‘love’ and ‘goodness’.
Why is religious language difficult?
Religious language is difficult because our words are not adequate to speak about a transcendent God who is above and beyond all human experience. We want to speak about God but we do not have the words to do so properly. Throughout the ages, scholars have attempted to find ways of making human language work effectively when applied to God, but this has been very difficult to do. It has often resulted in misunderstandings, obscurity and confusion, leading some scholars to suggest that it may be impossible to speak about God at all. What follows is an examination of the mine approaches taken by scholars in their attempts to make religious language meaningful.
What is cognitive language?
Cognitive language deals with factual statements that can be proved to be either true or false. These can be either empirically provable, such as the Queen is the Head of State or statements that as far as believers are concerned, certain meaningful factual content, such as God exists, or God loves me. In Theology and Falisification, Anthony Flew described cognitive language as consisting of crypto commands, expressions of wishes, disguised ejaculations, concealed ethics, or anything else but assertions.
What is non-cognitive language?
Non-cognitive language deals with statements that are not to be taken factually, but are to be understood in other ways - for example as symbols, metaphors, myths or moral commands. These are statements that express a religious truth within the religious community in which it belongs - for example, Jesus is the Lamb of God is a truth for Christians, but may not be even meaningful to someone outside that community. In other words, there is no objective universal truth - the truth or falsify of a statement depends upon its context.
What is the verification and falsification debate?
Can religious language ever be meaningful? Some argue that it is not because it does not deal with factually verifiable assertions. Others claom that it is meaningful because it can be verified, at least to the believer’s satisfaction. The verification and falsification debate, is therefore crucial to an understanding of religious language.
What is the verification principle?
The verification principle stemmed from the movement known as Logical Positivism and in particular, from a group of philsophers in the 1920s known as the Vienna circle. They applied the principles of science and mathematics to language and argued that, like knowledge, language had to be based on experience, For a statement to be considered meaningful it had to be considered meaningful it had to be verifiable by our sense experiences - touch, smell, taste hearing or sight. This is the basis of empirical testing. A statement must meet one or more of the following criteria to be deemed to be meaningful.
What are analytic statements?
These are true by definition. These are a priori statements that are true because they contain their own verification. Thus, ‘a spinster is an unmarried woman’ is neccessarily true because by definition, a spinster is unmarried.
What are mathematical statements?
A. J. Ayer observed that apparent inconsistencies in mathematical calculations would be discovered to be the product of human error rather than a genuine difference in the facts of the case. For example, if 5 + 5 were suddenly found to equal 9, a recalculation would quickly demonstrate that an error of addition had been made.
What are synthetic statements?
These are statements that can be verified or falsified by subjecting them to empirical testing. They are a posteriori statements which cover claims that can be verified or falsified through observation and are therefore contingently true or false. For instance, ‘Dogs bark’ is verifiably true in the same way that ‘all swans are green’ can be proved to be false. Both statements are therefore meaningful. Theoretical statements such as there is life on other planets are also meaningful, since they may be verified or falsified at some time in the future - we know the means of their verification even if it has not yet been possible to carry it out.
What did the Vienna Circle conclude?
The Vienna Circle concluded that religious statements were meaningless, on the basis that they do not satisfy any of these criteria, because religious language claims are subjective and cannot therefore be empirically tested and verified.
What did Ayer observe?
A. J . Ayer observed that since the existence of God cannot be rationally demonstrated, it is not even probable since the term ‘god’ is a metaphysical term referring to a transcendent being which cannot therefore have any literal significance. Interestingly, he observed that the same had therefore be the case for atheistic and agnostic statements, since any statement which includes the term god is meaningless. Ayer argued that, since claims about God’s existence cannot be contradicted, they are not significant propositions - they are neither true or false, but cannot be valid.
What else was Ayer was concerned with?
Ayer was not simply concerned with not talking about God, but also with all other religious language, including talk of an after life, which cannot be verified either. Talk of a soul he dismissed as meaningless since it is a metaphysical assertion to say that there is something imperceptible inside a man, which is his soul or his real self, and that it goes on living after he is dead.
What did Ayer dismissed it?
Talk of religious experience was also soundly dismissed by Ayer as being talk of experience which cannot be validated empirically.
What are the criticisms of the verification principle?
- Statements that express unverifiable opionions or emotions.
- Ethical and moral statements such as do not kill are regarded as meaningless.
- The laws of science cannot be absolutely verified.
- Historical statements are regarded by meaningless because they cannot be verified by sense experience.
- The verification principle itself cannot be verified.
What did Ayer propose?
Ayer proposed a strong and weak form of the verification principle. A strong verification occurs when there is no doubt that a statement is true. Weal verification occurs where there is not absolute certainty, but where there is a strong likelihood of truth because of the evidence.
