religious language 2 Flashcards
verificationism
Verificationismwas invented by the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle
They believed that a priori reasoning about reality beyond empirical investigation), including religious language, is meaningless.
The idea is that words get their meaning by connecting to things in our shared experience, or by being true by definition. If a word connects to the world, that connection should be verifiable.
Ayer
If someone is talking about something that does not refer to anything in public experience then we can’t know what they are talking about and it seems valid to call that meaningless.
‘God’ is a metaphysical term according to Ayer, which means it is about something beyond the empirical world, so there can be no way to empirically verify it
verificationism criticism
initially criticised for being overly restrictive of meaning. It would make all statements about history meaningless because they can’t be empirically verified.
Ayer responded by strengthening his theory with weak verification. We can weakly verify anything for which there is some evidence which provides probability for it being the case. E.g. Historical documents and archaeological findings can be verified, and on the basis of those we can weakly verify that there were certain civilisations in the past with certain histories to them.
- setting up reasonable standards for evidence
Direct verification – a statement that is verifiable by observation. E.g. ‘I see a key’ is directly verifiable and so has factual meaning.
Indirect verification – when a direct verification supports a statement which we haven’t directly verified but in principle know how to verify. E.g. ‘This key is made of iron’.
This rules out the possibility of verifying God either directly or indirectly. Even if we see direct evidence of causation or complexity & purpose which supports belief in a God, we still don’t know how to verify God even in principle
Hick - the whole idea of final judgement
implies that God will be seen and known. Hick calls this future possibility ‘eschatological verification’.
However, verificationism states that meaningful statements must be either analytic or empirically verifiable.
Yet, this criterion for meaning is not itself analytically true or empirically verifiable.
This paradox highlights a limitation of verificationism—its inability to justify its own criteria for meaningfulness.
Verificationism wants to provide criteria for meaning which eliminates metaphysical statements, but the idea of ‘meaning’ itself is a metaphysical concept
Quine concludes that the verificationism is just a modern linguistic form of Aristotelian metaphysics. Aristotle claimed the essence or formal cause of a human is rational thought. Logical positivists are simply now calling that ‘meaning’.
But we do not know what thought, rationality and meaning actually are. The framework of logical positivism is undermined by its own criteria
ifwe accept empiricism, we will find the results of a non-empirical approach meaningless.
wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein introduced the concept of language games.
He argued that words gain their meaning through their use in specific social contexts or language games.
Each language game has its own set of rules, and meaning is inseparable from the rules of the game being played.
For Wittgenstein, attempting to analyze religious language outside of its language game context is misguided. The meaning of religious words like ‘God’ arises from their usage within the religious language game.
Fideism is the view that faith alone can gain knowledge of God, not reason
religion is purely a matter of faith. It is a totally separate language game to science which is a matter of a posteriori reason
Phillips = the ‘reality’ of God or religion does not lie in the abstract issue of whether God exists, but instead is located in the words and practice of religion. What God is, is defined by the language game of faith.
Religious language is meaningful as it explains the rules of religion
e.g. saying ‘God is love’ is not describing an actual being, but the way the word God should be used
wittgenstein criticism
Wittgenstein fails to capture religious meaning.If Wittgenstein is right, it means that when a religious person says ‘God exists’ they aren’t actually claiming that there objectively exists a God. Really, they are just speaking in a certain way based on how they have learned to speak by internalising a set of behavioural rules. However, most religious people would object that they really do mean that there objectively exists a God.
eg. Aquinas wrote 5 inductive proofs of God’s existence on the basis of empirical observation. Even if they fail logically, it’s hard to deny that they express cognitive belief in God. Aquinas clearly believed in his proofs cognitively
- Religious language is both factual and expressive.
It struggles to explain how individuals convert to a religion or engage in inter-faith dialogue when they supposedly cannot understand the words of a language game they are not part of.
Gellner - lang games are circular - meaning of word comes from lang game, but lang game gets meaning from the words that constitute it
- how do you treat the entire theory of lang games? why should this be priviledged over any other? the truth of the theory lies in an assertion underlying the entire theory, but beyond justification
popper
Popper thought verificationism couldn’t capture empirical generalisations, which he illustrated with the claim ‘all swans are white’.
the claim is falsifiable because we can say what would prove it wrong; seeing a non-white swan.
if there is a belief that is unfalsifiable – that we can’t imagine how it could be wrong – then it cannot be about reality.
anthony flew
Anthony Flewapplied this to religious language. He claimed that because religious people can’t say what logically possible state of affairs is incompatible with their claim that God exists they are not actually asserting anything about the way things are
Religious language fails to assert anything about reality.
Flew illustrated his approach using belief in a gardener as an analogy for belief in God. Two people are walking and see a garden. One claims there is a gardener who tends to it, so the other suggest waiting and seeing if that is true. After a while, the other says ‘actually, they are an invisible gardener’, so they set up barbed wire fences and so on to try and detect this invisible gardener, at which point they then say ‘actually, it’s a non-physical gardener’.
At this point the other person asks “But what remains of your original assertion”. The religious person claims to believe in a God, but in order to protect that belief from empirical testing they continually add qualifications to the belief. eventually, it’s going to be nothing, causing the concept of God to ‘die a death of a thousand qualifications’.
what is the difference between a world in which this gardener (God) exists, and a world in which it doesn’t exist. If belief in God is consistent withany possiblediscovery about reality, then its existence surely can make no difference to reality. It cannot be about reality. Flew claims Religious language therefore ‘fails to assert’ anything.
John Frame - Flew’s approach fails because his belief in atheism is also unfalsifiable. Atheists believe there isn’t sufficient evidence to justify belief in God. The issue is, they cannot say what could prove that belief false.
R M HARE
Hare argues that religious language does not express an attempt to describe reality but is instead a non-cognitive expression of a person’s ‘Blik’, meaning their personal feelings and attitude.
Hare thinks that since Bliks affect our beliefs and behaviour, they are meaningful.
Hare illustrated his theory with the example of a paranoid student who thought his professors were trying to kill him. Even when shown the evidence that they were not trying to kill him, by meeting them and seeing they were nice people, the student did not change their mind.
despite being unfalsifiable, Hare argues that bliks are still meaningful to the person who holds them.
Evans - Hare’s Bliks allow for no concept of right and wrong and thus the notion of value becomes meaningless
if there are no facts supporting religious claims then they are simply expressions of a worldview without ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ values
Hare criticism
Although Hare saves religious language from being disregarded as a meaningless failed attempt to describe the world, nonetheless he only does so by sacrificing the ability of the meaning of religious language to have any factual content.
So when a religious person says ‘God exists,’ for Hare they are really expressing their attitude rather than actually claiming that there objectively exists a God. Many religious people would claim however, that they really domeanthat ‘there objectively exists a God’, irrespective of their attitude.
So arguably Hare fails to capture the true meaning of religious language.
Mitchell
religious claims are grounded in some facts and that the faithful do allow that evidence may stand against what they believe.
So with God: one could trust in God while recognising the contrary evidence: that he allows evil and suffering, or disbelief.
Mitchell imagines an illustrative parable. A soldier is fighting for the resistance against the government in a civil war. One day someone comes to them and claims to be the leader of the resistance. They stay up all night talking and the stranger leaves a strong impression on the soldier. As a result, the soldier decides to have faith in this person, even when they see them fighting for the government.
This is analogous to the way Christians have an initial experience/relationship with God which justifies their faith.
Each individual Christian will have their own limit regarding the amount of evil that would cause them to abandon their belief. Often, this limit will not be known in advance. Nonetheless, there is a limit, and therefore religious language for the most part is falsifiable
One problem for Mitchell is that we wouldn’t be able to know which religious believers have an unfalsifiable blind faith, and which simply didn’t know their falsification in advance
religious encounter with God only happens inside people’s minds. That’s not really analogous to actually meeting a person in reality and weighing whether they are on your side.
Experience of and relationship with God is not valid empirical evidence.
swinburne
people generally accept “all ravens are black” but no way to confirm this statement-it cannot be proved true or false-yet it still has meaning
Swinburne seems to have a more scientific criteria for meaning. If we understand the words in a sentence and the significance of their combination, then it is meaningful to us. We don’t have to know how to test it through experience.
Swinburne created an illustrates of this. We know what toys are and what it would mean for them to come alive when no one was watching. We currently have no way to test whether that truly happens, nor can we even imagine such a test in principle. Yet, it is meaningful because we understand the concepts involved.
Similarly, we may not currently know how to verify or falsify God, but so long as the concept can be understood it is meaningful.
e.g. we cannot go against some scientific theories for the universe, but that does not render them meaningless
BUT There is a sense in which we can understand such ideas, but it is not a cognitive factual sense. So, Ayer and Flew can be defended in their claim that we cannot understand unfalsifiable/unverifiable claims as being factually significant.
