Religious Language 2 Flashcards

Question

Flew Quotes (mjfqb)

Answer 1

• “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”

Answer 2

(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

Answer 3

(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

Answer 4

(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

Answer 5

“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

Answer 6

• 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’

Answer 7

• 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

Answer 8

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)

Answer 9

-e.g. ‘God loves humanity’ 1. as provisional hypotheses (to be discarded if experience goes against them) 2. as vacuous formulae (perhaps out of a desire for reassurance) to which experience makes no difference and which make no difference to life 3. 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’”

Answer 10

• 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”

Answer 11

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

Answer 12

• studied engineering at Cambridge before becoming intrigued by philosophical questions raised by mathematics and reading Russell and Schopenhauer • proposed that religious language is anti-realist, it doesn’t make factual statements • maintained throughout his life that reality is not all intelligible to us • we can understand and experience most of reality with the senses and speak about it, though we should recognise that there are many parts we cannot understand • “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent” • Tractatus Logico Philosophicus (1921): attempted to set out principles to demonstrate what could, and could not, be expressed in language, and to show the scope and limitations of philosophy • had an effect on the Vienna Circle and logical positivism • later on, though, Wittgenstein began too think his criteria for meaningfulness were too narrow

Answer 13

• we know how to ‘play language’ only once we know the rules • this doesn’t imply language is trivial, but is just an analogy describing the scope and limitations of language • we can say we understand words once we have used them in context • in ‘On Certainty’: language makes groundless statements (e.g. we cannot explain why we call paper ‘paper’) • definitions are ‘groundless beliefs’ but they shape the way we understand the world

Answer 14

* players of one language game cannot criticise another or enter the game without first learning its rules because language games have their own criteria of coherence * concerned only with the use of language rather than its meaning, since meaning can depend context. Wittgenstein: “I think differently, in a different way. I say different things to myself. I have a different picture” * different uses of language reflect different forms of life, none of which are necessarily right or wrong. Language treated in the wrong way will not be understood * misunderstanding language is a category mistake: “For a blunder, that’s too big”

Answer 15

• uses the example of a chess piece: we can’t talk much about the ‘king’ if we don’t understand that it can only move one square in any direction and that it is significant to the game • playing the language game requires understanding the rules agreed on by everyone else • gave the example of driving a steam train: we can see the buttons and pedals and levers, but we can’t understand them fully without having driven the train

Answer 16

• took a Wittgensteinian approach to argue that religious language was just a way of defining the rules of a game of religion • ‘God is love’ is not a description of an existent being, but shows how the word God can be used • the same argument can be made about religious experience • religious experience has to be seen in the context of religion before it can be judged • religious language is therefore meaningful for those who use it and does not need to be justified to those outside of the game • it doesn’t make sense, for example, to talk about sin and salvation outside of religion

Answer 17

* it recognises the non-cognitive nature of religious language and distinguishes it from other uses of language * language games unite believers in a common bond and provide boundaries for the correct use of language * believers can be initiated in to the rules of language * language games defend language against criticism from other ‘forms of life’

Answer 18

* language games do not allow believers’ claims to be objectively true * because religious language is distinct from other language, it alienates those outside of the game * we cannot ensure that rules are correctly interpreted or if maybe they can be changed * beliefs cannot be tested * maintains that faith is independent of reason, or that they are hostile to each other and faith is superior at arriving at particular truths

Answer 19

supporting language games Peter Donovan (‘Religious Language’): “They mean what they do because of their connections with other parts of the religious system and its thought-world” “misunderstanding and confusion are likely to result if statements are taken away from their context”