Religious Laungage Flashcards
How is the use of language as a concept for God a limitation?
When using physical terms to define God we attribute God with worldly existence, however we cannot use such terms as god is above and beyond our existence.
Metaphysics also cannot be used to talk about god as famously put by Hume it is not good enough.
What Is the challenge to religious texts and pronouncements as unintelligible.
Once religious language goes on to describe divinity that are worshiped in temples and teachings related to an afterlife, suddenly what is being communicated is neither understandable or relatable.
What is the challenge to religious language as a not shared bas of experience.
Language is inherently problematic on the basis that ; it not communicating ideas that can be agreed upon by all possessing empirically knowable truth.
Our language is experience based and there is no common shared universal experience of God.
What Cognitive and Non Cognitive language.
Cognitive language - language that is empirically justified and based, cognitive language can be verified and falsified.
Non Cognitive language - Language that is not falsifiable and verifiable as it is not based on empirically sound information.
What is Logical Positivism?
Logical Positivism - A philosophical movement that grew as a group of philosophers known as the Vienna circle,
and their task was the reduction of knowledge to basic scientific and logical formulations.
1. Anything outside of basic logical ad scientific tethers, is dismissed as meaningless as they are unverifiable.
2. What remains are tautological (self explanatory) statements and statements, that could be verified by observations from sense experience.
What is verification? And what limitation did I suggest that verification had in terms of logical positivism.
To verify something is the show something to be true and authenticated by some form of testimonial evidence The logical positivists view scientific knowledge as a paradigm of knowledge since it had proved successful and resulted in agreed knowledge.
Tautological statements mathematical statements synthetic statements analytic statements are all statements that are considered to be empirically evident.
What is falsification?
an alternative view of being able to verify a statement in order to render it meaningful the concept the falsification took almost an opposite view. the concept of falsification stated that for something be meaningful there had to be evidence which account against the statement if this was possible than what was spoken about clearly had an empirical meaningful bases to it.
Most of religion is unfalsifiable as they do not allow any argument against it furthermore language such as talking about a deity is unfalsifiable and non-cognitive.
What are the criticisms of verification.
1 “the meaning of a statement is its method of verification” this statement in itself is not a logical obvious no supported by empirical evidence thus the statement is not verifiable a self-defeating principle is not the bedrock upon which a principal criterion for establishing the meanings of language.
- I recognise that the initial criteria for the verification principle did not take into account historical statements or even universal scientific statements as meaningful further undermined its usefulness.
- John Hick argued that the fact the Christian concept of God was very verifiable in principle. using his parabola journey to the celestial City take demonstrated that whilst of knowledge of the existence of the Christian God may not be immediately verify and practice there’s a possibility that it can be verified in the future after death eschatological verification.
What is Richard hair criticism of falsification.
suggested that the concept of meaningless came from the impact that a belief had an individual not for me empirically verifiable no falsifiable nature of belief. Coined blik which is a way to describe looking at our lives and experiences and propose that a blik had the power to radically affect our behaviour and relationship in this sense the blik was meaningful and even if it could not be falsified.
What is basil Mitchell’s criticism of falsification?
basil Mitchell suggested to flew that he had fundamentally misunderstood the religious believers perspective when flew stated that religious believers allowed nothing to count against their beliefs. he stated that religious believers are frequently faces challenges to their belief and with evidence that seems to be country to their beliefs. it was a matter of faith as to how the individual dealt with those challenges but it’s not true to say that such evidence had no impact on the religious believer.
Mitchell’s point therefore was that such beliefs constituted trial of faith but test for the religiously held the beliefs that individual had.
What is criticisms of falsification by Richard swinburne.
Richard swinburne noted that there were plenty of instances where the human language was used in ways which were accepted as meaningful by people even without the empirical evidence to support this. just because my dear cannot be falsified does not necessarily mean that it should be automatically discounted meaning this we may not be able to disprove something but that does not mean that such a thing does not actually happen.
Beliefs that such things do happen despite a lack of evidence should be taken and held as meaningful.
What is the proportion of attribution by Thomas Aquinas?
Aquinas recognise that language was often using two ways univocal and equivocal. when languages used universally it is used in the sense that there is some term that means the same thing whatever the context.
No going to be used equivoque any was where it was using the sense that there’s the same term that has completely different meanings according to the context in which it is used.
clearly neither of these uses of language were helpful for the believer and trying to gain a deeper insight into the nature of God Aquinas therefore settled on the use of analogy as a middle ground because on one hand it was accepted that part of what was being spoken about was in perfectly understood and what it is based on his understood.
What is a creditors analogy of proportion?
Aquinas considered that the universe was inhabited by different orders of things is what I Rocco in the sense of status so for example God will be above all creation. therefore each other presents particular characteristics which are appropriate to to its status even though the same adjective may be applied.
For instance what it means for a human to be intelligent and for an animal the human would have to be far more intelligent than the animal would have to be to be intelligentrather use the same word the features between them in relation to human of fox are different in this sense we can see the link but we understand the difference in proportion.
therefore it is possible to talk and then logically about God by making reference to human qualities to talk about God as being good made sense analogically because we understand what it means for human to be good.
What is Aquinas analogy of attribution?
it is possible to talk about God in a meaningful sense was doing analogy of attribution an attribute is a characteristic or feature that someone possesses.
Herbert Aquinas believe that these at the between tidy divinely inspired human beings can only be good because they come from God and gods goodness is that the beat which all humans have.
therefore we can talk about our goodness Innocence from God as all goodness comes from God.
What is Ian Ramsey qualifier and disclosure?
Disclosure - where something is made known where previously it was hidden or unknown.
Qualifier - where a word or phrase is used to give a deeper meaning to the model that the qualifier proceeds.
the Ramsey religious language that grew out of religious situations became revelatory in the sense that the religious experience with various he referred to as disclosures moment where the person was often able to grasp an understanding of the Divine.
Clever on their own they are still insufficient way to properly refer to God which is why Ramsay believed he need to make use of qualifiers words or phrases that could be added to these earlier terms in order to provide them with the quality and sense that they were greater than what was normally represented.
