Religious Language

The problem is one of meaning. If we are to believe in God or some aspect of religion, we can only do this if we can use language to talk about it in a meaningful way. If talk of God is nonsense then the idea of God is nonsense.

The debate is ages-old. The religious have always claimed that the divine is difficult to express in terms of limited human language. In the Old Testament, the prophet Isaiah found himself in God’s presence and said, “woe is me, a man of unclean lips!“. This connects with the idea that God is transcendent - beyond us. Yet, the opposite point has also long been recognised: if God cannot be described then there may be a little scope for belief.

Two main types of language: Cognitivism and Non-Cognitivism.

Critics of religion might emphasise the non-cognitive language.

The first criticism originates from Logical Positivists, they were concerned with the relationship between the use of language and knowledge, rejecting as meaningless what they saw as non-cognitive claims.  Wittgenstein suggested that meaningful language is connected with things we know from our senses.

A.J. Ayer  §

“A statement which cannot be conclusively verified… is simply without any meaning” (A.J. Ayer)

Verificationists like Ayer hold that statements can only be meaningful if they can be demonstrated, and these can be divided into two types:

1. Analytic positions: which are true by definition, either because this is required by the definition of the words used e.g. “this circle is not square” or because they are mathematical.
2. Synthetic positions: which are true b confirmation of the senses e.g. “I can see that all bachelors are happy”.  Ayer thought that religious claims are non-cognitive and impossible to verify, so they are meaningless. He does not say that they are just false; it is more that they cannot really tell us anything at all.

“No sentence which describes the nature of a transcend God can possess any literal significance” (A.J. Ayer)

However, the idea of a Verification Principle faces a number of serious problems. How much can be really verified? Many things we cannot observe ourselves, or subject the hypothesis to any new or further forms of testing.

Verification and Falsification debate §

• Some claim that religious language is meaningful because it can be verified, at least to the believer’s satisfaction.

• The verification principle stemmed from the movement known as Logical Positivism and from a group of philosophers in the 1920s known as The Vienna Circle.

• For a statement to be considered meaningful, it had to be verifiable by our sense experiences.

• Analytic statements: True by definition. These are a priori statements that are true because they contain their own verification.

• Mathematical statements: A.J. Ayer observed that apparent inconsistencies in mathematical calculations would be discovered to be the product of human error rather than a genuine difference in the fact of the case.

• Synthetic statements: These are statements that can be verified or falsified by subjecting them to empirical testing. They are a posteriori statements which cover claims that can be verified or falsified through observation and are therefore contingently true or false

• The Vienna Circle concluded that religious statements were meaningless, on the basis that they do not satisfy any of these criteria, because religious language claims are subjective and cannot, therefore, be empirically tested and verified.

• A.J. Ayer observed that, since the existence of God cannot be rationally demonstrated, it is not even probable, since the term ‘god’ is a metaphysical term referring to a transcendent being which cannot, therefore, have any literal significance.

• Interestingly, he observed that the same had therefore to be the case for atheistic and agnostic statements, since any statement which includes the term ‘God’ is meaningless.