Religious Language

• Religious Language

  • Addresses cognitivist and non-cognitivist theories
  • Distinction between the two regarding religious language
  • Challenges of empiricism for metaphysical religious language
  • Verification and falsification for religious language
• Cognitivism: propositions are subject to being true or false

  Non-Cognitivism: propositions are not subject to being true or false
• Ayers verification principle

  • A statement is only meaningful if it is
  • True by definition (tautology)
  • Empirically verifiable (observation statements)
• Ayer

  • cognitivist
  • religious statements not factually significant
  • religious language not meaningful
  • not falsifiable or verifiable
  • atheist
• Falsifiability

  • capable of being true or false
  • refutable, has to be plausible to be proved wrong
• Strong verification

  • possible to verify at every location in the world
  • true for certain
  • not falsifiable
• Weak verification

  • significant evidence has been gathered to assert this as true
• Ayers verification principle re religious language - syllogism

  1. claims are meaningful if they are true by definition or empirically verifiable
  2. religious language is not analytic
  3. religious language makes claims about metaphysical entities
  4. metaphysical entities are beyond observation and cannot be verified
  5. therefore religious claims are not factually significant as they fail the verification principle
  6. religious claims ‘god exists‘ ‘god answers my prayers’ not meaningful, but are pseudo-statements
• Criticisms of Ayer

  • rules out aesthetic discussions on feelings and emotions - anything not logical
  • metaphorical and poetic language considered meaningless but we still derive much meaning from these
  • Stuart Sutherland
  • wrong to dictate what can be considered knowledge - intellectually imperialistic
  • against human nature of communication
  • Verification principle fails itself
• Eschatological verification

  • verifiable after-death, presumably in the after-life
• Hick

  • Christian
  • cognitivist
  • eschatological verification
  • religious statements are factually significant
  • verifiable in the after-life
  • Argues that verifiability should be judged by whether it is possible to remove the grounds for rational doubt
• Celestial city parable - Hick

  • Two men are travelling on a road
  • A believes it will lead to a celestial city
  • B believes the road leads no where, is meaningless
  • while travelling they both experience hardship and danger and delight and refreshment
  • when they turn the final corner their beliefs will be verified
  • hardship and danger = problem of evil
  • celestial city = heaven / god
  • god is not empirically verifiable but eschatologically
• Objections to Hick - personal identity

  • is the person the same after going to the afterlife
  • does someone’s identity remain on death
  • a clone, or an exact copy?
• Hicks response to personal identity problem

  • Exact doubles include memory
  • ‘Person x’ resurrection example
• Objections to Hick: duplicate people

  • Alter hicks scenario so that person X remains along side a duplicate
  • Must be two different people
  • Has to be some kind of bodily continuity for personal identity to survive after death
• Objections to Hick: verification in heaven?

  • may not be possible to verify in heaven as god is completely beyond human understanding and we may not be able to comprehend it
• University debate

  • Flew (atheist), Hare + Mitchell (theists)
  • Debated whether religious language could be falsified
• Flew

  • atheist
  • cognitivist
  • falsification shows if a statement is meaningful
  • religious statements are factually significant
  • religious language
  • invisible gardener
  • falsification most important
  • ‘god exists’ is falsifiable
• Parable of the invisible gardener (Flew)

  • Two explorers find a clearing where weeds + flowers grow
  • A says ‘there must be gardener’ B disagrees
  • They watch for days even with dogs, no gardener
  • A says ‘the gardener must be invisible, odourless and intangible’
  • B says ‘there is no difference between this claim and the claim that the gardener does not exist’
  • A’s claim is unfalsifiable, unable to be proved wrong
  • Weeds and flowers = good and evil
  • Invisible gardener falsification= god
  • Clearing = the world
• Flew continued

  • ‘God exists’ is meaningless as it is unfalsifiable
  • Flew argues that because believers accept no observations against God’s existence their beliefs is unfalsifiable and meaningless
• Death by a thousand qualifications

  • if we repeatedly qualify an original assertion in light of new evidence (ie the invisible gardener) to avoid having to give it up
  • assertion has been watered down and qualified so much it has lost its original meaning
• Basil Mitchell

  • Theist
  • Cognitivist
  • Believes religious language is falsifiable
  • Religious statements are factually significant
  • Resistance fighter parable
• Mitchell

  • agrees with flew that a statement must be falsifiable to be meaningful
  • But he argues that just because there are some observations that count against a certain belief doesn’t mean it is to be rejected
  • resistance fighter parable
• Resistance fighter parable : Mitchell

  • You are in war and your country has been occupied by the enemy
  • You meet a stranger who claims to be the leader of the resistance
  • You trust them, they act ambiguously however sometimes appearing to support the enemy side
  • Yet you continue to trust them and believe they have their own morally sufficient reasons for ambiguity
  • Stranger = god
  • Ambiguous actions = problem of evil
• Mitchell continued

  • mitchell argues that we can accept evil as evidence against gods existence without withdrawing belief from the statement
  • this means it is falsifiable
  • there are occasions where you may doubt your faith (evil)
  • therefore religious language is meaningful
• Hare

  • believes in God
  • non-cognitivist
  • religious statements aren’t capable of being true or false, instead they are fundamental beliefs that aren’t empirically testable (bliks)
  • religious statements aren’t factually significant but religious language is meaningful because of bliks
• Lunatic student and bliks - Hare

  • Paranoid student who thinks his lecturers are out to get him and trying to kill him
  • Meet with the mildest tutors to show that they are normal And have no ill intent
  • He is unconvinced
  • No amount of evidence, persuasion or reassuring will convince the student to believe that their blik is false
  • Blik is unfalsifiable
  • Still meaningful to the person that holds them
  • Ie has an effect on the paranoid students behaviour, underpins other beliefs about the world
• Hare continued

  • to hare religious language is the same, ‘God exists’ may be unfalsifiable but it means something to the people who hold that blik
  • means enough to affect behaviour ie going to church, praying
  • bliks are unfalsifiable but meaningful to those who hold them