religious language

• Verification


  Invented by 1920's philosophers called the Logical Positivists of the Vienna Circle
• Verification


  Language is only meaningful (Tautology) if it can be verified by sense observation
• Characteristics of language


  • Influenced by science
  • Facts
  • Gives us knowledge about the way the world is
  • Must be seen as true or false
• Language that talks of God is meaningless
• Language that cannot be proved true or false has no meaning in a factual sense
• When a firm increases advertising

  Their demand curve shifts right, increasing the equilibrium price and quantity
• Marginal utility


  The additional utility (satisfaction) gained from the consumption of an additional product
• If you add up marginal utility for each unit you get total utility
• Verification


  Statements that are tested in reality and shown to be probable by observation and experience
• Practical verifiability


  Statements that are tested in reality, e.g. Manchester United wear red football shirts
• Verifiability in Principle


  Statements that are meaningful and verifiable, we just don't have the technology to verify them yet, e.g. there is life on other planets in the Milky Way
• Religious claims are meaningless as they cannot be supported by observations from sense experience that are probable
• Statements about metaphysical ideas beyond the world of senses are meaningless because we have no knowledge beyond our own sense experience
• Religious experiences are meaningless as they are not verifiable, as one is recounting a set of emotions that can be explained through psychological means
• Swinburne: Excludes many areas of knowledge "generally agreed to be false"
• Swinburne: Cannot talk of history as meaningful using strong verification as no observation can confirm historical events
• Swinburne: Excludes universal statements e.g. water boils at 100 degrees centigrade as there is always a possibility this changes
• Direct verifiability


  Statements that are verifiable by an observation, e.g. all post boxes are red
• Indirect verifiability


  Using proof based on sense experience to support an idea that cannot be directly observed, e.g. science can use observation to predict the existence of black holes in space
• Verification is unverifiable - the statement "statements are only meaningful if verifiable by sense observation" is itself unverifiable
• John Hick suggested religion is not meaningless because its truth is verifiable in principle (Celestial City story)
• Ayer says religious experiences are rejected, however researchers say there is clear evidence such experiences happen and God cannot be ruled out, so can religious experiences be verified weakly?
• Poetry, Music or Shakespearean Sonnets have meaning even though they cannot be verified
• Swinburne's obsession with toys


  Possible for a statement to be meaningful without being verifiable, e.g. toys come out at night when no one observes them
• Falsifiability


  The criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, refutability or testability
• Antony Flew: For a statement to be meaningful, it must be known what empirical evidence could count against it (or prove it wrong)
• Religious statements like 'God is good' cannot be proved false to a believer
• Hare coined the word 'blik' to describe the way in which people see and interpret the world, which are not falsifiable and do not make factual claims
• Ayer rejected falsification, arguing statements cannot be conclusively falsified any more than they can be conclusively verified
• Flew was wrong - we can understand ideas even though they may not be falsifiable, e.g. toys in a cupboard
• R.B. Braithwaite: Verification/falsification make the mistake of regarding religious language as cognitive (fact) when it is non-cognitive, and religious language is ultimately moral language
• Via negativa


  Knowing that God exists but not knowing anything about God, as God is described as 'I am who I am' - beyond any description
• Aquinas: Using negative language does not get us any closer to describing God - it does not say anything directly
• Hick believes Dionysius contradicts himself by saying God is ineffable, yet revealed in the Bible
• The via negativa may give people an insight into the nature of God by pointing beyond the language used
• Symbols


  Have deeper significance and 'point beyond themselves', being a pattern or object which points to an invisible metaphysical reality and participates in it
• Symbols


  • Pictorial, abstract, verbal or active (a symbolic action), e.g. a light burning over a Tabernacle in a Catholic church
• Tillich held the belief that symbols 'participate' somehow in the object they refer to, e.g. a national flag representing and being part of national pride
• How symbols work


  1. Motivating - firing up emotions and inspiring people to action

  2. Socially binding people with the same understanding of the symbol

  3. Communicating things that are not literal

  4. Disclosing - revealing hidden depths to us about spiritual
• Physical, contingent language


  Yet what you are saying about God is likely to be non-physical and non-contingent