Background to religious language

• there were many factors underlying the approach of twentieth-century philosophy to the meaning and significance of religious language
• the rejection of contemporary philosophy, which was all about the progress of humanity:

  • the carnage of the First World War put paid to that thinking
• the empiricism of John Locke and David hume:

  • humes 'fork' stated that there were two areas about which we can have knowledge: matters of fact and the relations between ideas.
• Ludwig Wittgenstein's tractatus, published in 1921

  • this claimed that the only meaningful language was that relating to scientific fact and empirical reality
  • nothing could be said about anything that lay outside this
• the thinking of the Vienna circle, which 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.
• Vienna circle

  a group of philosophers who met in Vienna in the early part of the twentieth century. their theory of logical positivism was the inspiration behind ayer's verification principle.
• logical positivism

  the claim that only statements of logic or those capable of proof by empirical evidence are meaningful. metaphysical and religious language are meaningless.
• metaphysical statements

  claims made about things beyond the empirical world.