Background to religious language

• 20th century thinking on Religious Language 


  There were many factors for underlying the approach of 20th Century philosophy - The rejection of the philosophy that had been current, which was about the progress of humanity
• 20th century thinking on Religious Language


  The carnage of WW1 influenced philosophers
• 20th century thinking on Religious Language


  Hume's 'Fork' stated that there was two areas about which we can have knowledge: matters of fact and the relations between ideas
• 20th century thinking on Religious Language

  Wittgenstein's 'Tractatus' claimed that the only was that relating to scientific fact and empirical reality
• 20th century thinking on Religious Language

  The Vienna Circle adopted Wittgenstein's approach - there are only two types of meaningful language, Synthetic and analytic. Their thinking became known as Logical Positivism: Scientific/logically necessary statements alone have meaning; metaphysical statements (which include religious statements) are literally meaningless. This was taken up by A.J Ayer