religious language is meaningless essay

Overview – Religious Language

Religious language in A level philosophy looks at the meaning of religious statements, such as:

“God exists”
“God answers my prayers”
“God loves us”

This topic is not about whether these statements are true or false. Instead, the debate is about whether such religious language is meaningful or whether it is meaningless .

You also need to know the difference between cognitivist and non-cognitivist views of religious language .

Cognitivism and non-cognitivism

All the arguments we’ve looked at so far ( ontological , cosmological , teleological , problem of evil ) assume a cognitivist view of religious language.

The arguments so far treat “God exists” as a scientific, empirical statement – i.e. a statement that aims to literally describe how the world is. They then aim to show that this statement is either true or false.

But some philosophers argue that religious language is non-cognitive. This is to say that religious language is not to be taken literally as true or false (in a similar way to how moral non-cognitivism says moral judgements are not to be taken as literally true or false).

Cognitivism is perhaps the ‘common-sense’ view of religious language. When someone says “God exists”, “God loves me”, or “God answers my prayers” then, according to cognitivism, they are making a statement that is intended to be taken literally as true or false.

Non-cognitivist statements are neither true or false. In the context of religious language, a non-cognitivist might say religious statements like those above express someone’s attitude to the world.

Religious language is meaningless

Aj ayer: verification principle.

If you don’t remember from metaethics , AJ Ayer’s verification principle says: a statement only has meaning if it is either:

An analytic truth (e.g. “a triangle has 3 sides”)
Empirically verifiable (e.g. “water boils at 100c”)

Any statement that does not fit these descriptions is meaningless , according to verificationism. This is a similar claim to Hume’s Fork from epistemology .

Applying the verification principle to religious language, Ayer argues that statements like “God answers my prayers” and “God exists” are not analytic truths. Further, they are not empirically verifiable or falsifiable (see below) .

Therefore, according to Ayer’s verificationism, religious language is meaningless.

Problem: Self-defeating

In response to Ayer’s argument you can argue that Ayer’s verification principle fails its own test.

Ayer’s claim that “a statement is only meaningful if it is analytic or empirically verifiable” is itself neither an analytic truth or empirically verifiable! Therefore, according to its own criteria, the verification principle is meaningless.

Falsifiability

Despite how it may sound, falsifiability is not about being true or false. Instead, falsifiability is part of what it takes for a statement to be meaningful .

Falsifiable statements are meaningful and capable of being true or false
Unfalsifiable statements are meaningless , and not capable of being true or false.

A statement is falsifiable if it is inconsistent with some possible observation. In other words, there has to be some possible evidence that could count against that statement – otherwise the statement is meaningless.

The statement “water boils at 100°c” is falsifiable because it could be proven wrong by some possible observation. For example, if we heated a beaker of water and it didn’t boil despite a reliable thermometer showing 500°c, this observation would count against the statement. So, “water boils at 100°c” is a falsifiable and meaningful statement because there are possible tests that could prove it wrong.

In contrast, the statement “everything in the universe doubles in size every 10 seconds” is unfalsifiable because no possible observation could disprove it . You could use a ruler to measure things every 10 seconds but this couldn’t disprove the claim because you could just say that the ruler doubled in size as well! There is seemingly no possible experiment that could disprove the statement “everything in the universe doubles in size every 10 seconds” and so it is unfalsifiable and meaningless.

Anthony Flew: Invisible Gardener

Anthony Flew gives the following analogy in an attempt to show that religious language – in particular the statement “God exists” – is unfalsifiable , and therefore meaningless:

Two explorers find a clearing in a jungle. Both weeds and flowers grow here.
Explorer A says the clearing is the work of a gardener. Explorer B disagrees.
To settle the argument, they keep watch for the gardener.
After a few days, they haven’t seen him, but Explorer A says it’s because the gardener is invisible
So, they set up an electric fence and guard dogs to catch the gardener instead
But, after a few more days, they still haven’t detected him
Explorer A then says that not only is the gardener invisible, he’s also intangible, makes no sound, has no smell, etc.
Explorer B: What is the difference between this claim and the claim that the gardener doesn’t even exist?
In other words, Explorer A’s theory is unfalsifiable – nothing could possibly prove this theory wrong, but nothing could prove it correct either.
Because it is unfalsifiable, Explorer A’s theory is meaningless.

In case it’s not obvious:

Jungle clearing = the world
Invisible gardener = God
Flowers = Good
Weeds = Evil

So, Flew is arguing that “God exists” is meaningless because it is unfalsifiable in the same way the existence of the invisible gardener is unfalsifiable. We can’t even use the problem of evil as evidence against God’s existence because the religious believer just creates reasons (e.g. free will , soul-making ) why an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God would allow evil.

Flew argues that because the religious believer accepts no observations count as evidence against belief in God, the religious believer’s hypothesis is unfalsifiable and meaningless.

Religious language is meaningful

Note: You can think of the arguments below as responses to Flew (and Ayer’s) claim that religious language is unfalsifiable.

Hick: eschatological verification

Eschatological verification: A statement that can be verified after death, or at the end of time.

John Hick agrees with Ayer and Flew that “God exists” is not empirically verifiable in this life . However, Hick argues that many religious claims are about things beyond the limits of human life . And, he argues, such religious claims are falsifiable because it is possible to verify them after we die. For example, many theists believe in a life after death during which they will meet or otherwise experience God (which would be unambiguous verification that “God exists” is true).

To illustrate this, Hick tells a parable of a ‘celestial city’ :

Two men are travelling on a road – it is the only road there is, so they both must travel it
Traveller A believes the road leads to a celestial city, whereas Traveller B believes the road leads nowhere and that the journey is meaningless
As they travel along the road, they experience both “refreshment and delight” and “hardship and danger”
If Traveller A is correct, they will eventually arrive at the celestial city and he will be proved right
If Traveller B is correct, they will just keep going forever, and neither will be proved right

In this parable, Traveller A is the theist and Traveller B is the atheist. The “hardship and danger” represents the problem of evil . If the theist is correct, his belief will be verified in the afterlife when he meets God – this is the equivalent of reaching the celestial city. However, if the atheist is correct, his belief will never be verified because he’ll be dead and unable to verify anything – this is the equivalent of walking forever.

So, in short, Hick says “God exists” is not necessarily meaningless, because it is eschatologically verifiable:

If “God exists” is true, then it can be verified after we die
But if “God exists” is false, then it is unfalsifiable

Basil Mitchell: resistance fighter

Mitchell agrees with Flew that in order for a statement or belief to be meaningful it must be possible for some observation to count against it (i.e. it must be falsifiable in order to be meaningful).

But, Mitchell argues, just because there are some observations that count against a certain belief, that doesn’t automatically mean we have to reject that belief. Mitchell gives the following example to illustrate this:

You are in a war, your country has been occupied by an enemy
You meet a stranger who claims to be leader of the resistance
You trust this man
But the stranger acts ambiguously, sometimes doing things that appear to support the enemy rather than your own side
Yet you continue to believe the stranger is on your side despite this and trust that he has good reasons for these ambiguous actions

In this analogy, the stranger represents God and his ambiguous actions represent the problem of evil . Mitchell is arguing that we can accept that the existence of evil counts as evidence against the statement “God exists” (and so it is falsifiable ) without having to withdraw from belief in this statement.

Mitchell argues that religious beliefs are not ‘provisional hypotheses’ like scientific statements that the believer is totally detached from. But nor are religious beliefs ‘vacuous formulae’ that the believer holds regardless of any evidence to the contrary.

Instead, reasonable religious beliefs are a kind of middle ground: They are ‘significant articles of faith’ . The religious believer is invested in these beliefs and so doesn’t withdraw from them as soon as the slightest evidence to the contrary turns up. However, this is not to say that the religious believer would believe “God exists” in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary – that would be irrational or, to use Mitchell’s term above, a ‘vacuous formulae’.

So, Mitchell is arguing that we can accept that the existence of evil counts as evidence against God’s existence (and so “God exists” is falsifiable and meaningful ) without withdrawing belief in God.

R.M. Hare: bliks

According to Hare, religious statements are not things that can just be shown to be true or false. Instead, they are basic fundamental beliefs that are not empirically testable – Hare calls these attitudes ‘bliks’.

To illustrate what bliks are, Hare uses the example of a paranoid student who thinks university lecturers are trying to kill him.

You assure this student that university lecturers are not trying to kill him and provide tons of evidence, yet the student still believes it anyway. Imagine, for example, that you decide to go with him to speak to a university lecturer and the lecturer acts totally normal:

You: See, he’s fine – the university lecturer isn’t trying to kill you! Paranoid student: But he was just pretending to be normal so as not to reveal his true plan to kill me!

So, no amount of evidence/reassurance will convince the student that his blik is false. In other words, their blik is unfalsifiable .

But despite being unfalsifiable, Hare argues that bliks are still meaningful to the person who holds them. In the case of the university lecturers example, the blik clearly means something to the paranoid person because it has an effect on his behaviour: He won’t go to lectures, and will look over his shoulder to check university lecturers aren’t following him, for example.

Hare argues that religious language is the same: “God exists” may be unfalsifiable to people who have this blik, but it clearly means something to them. For example, people who believe “God exists” might pray or go to Church – it means enough to them that it affects their behaviour.

In other words, a blik is unfalsifiable but still meaningful to the person who holds it.

<<<Does God exist?

“Religious Language is Meaningless!” Discuss [40]

For religious believers, the importance of arguing that religious language refers to something and is thus meaningful is obvious. Without meaningful language, religion becomes difficult. Faith may well be possible without formal, positive doctrine or liturgy – as the silent worship and commitment of members of the Society of Friends demonstrates – but without the ability to describe beliefs in religious doctrines it is difficult to hold a religious community – let alone a religious denomination – together for long. The multiple splits in the Quaker community and the diversity that still characterizes it is evidence of this. Plato and Aristotle understood words to be signs, pointing towards meaning beyond themselves. For Plato, ultimate meaning was metaphysical in the forms, which we recognize through reason as reflections in the world around us. For Aristotle, the forms exist within human reason itself, but they still exist for words to point towards. The central problem with religious language is that if religious words are signs, they point towards something that we cannot see, hear, touch, smell or taste… nor even understand in a complete way. Can a sign which points towards nothing determinate really be understood as a sign at all? If language is seen in this traditional way, then religious language must be meaningless, and yet this is not the only way of seeing language.

For David Hume, human knowledge is much more limited than it first seems. Knowledge based on sense-experience is more certain than that which is not, but even the senses can be misleading. A red ball is not really red, but is just perceived as such by the rods and cones in our eyes, which are stimulated in a way that our brains usually interpret as red by the particular wavelength of light that the ball reflects. Yet Hume agreed with Locke that the only way that the philosopher can progress is to cut away the undergrowth of assumption and conjecture, identifying the few relatively certain propositions and concentrating on those. This critical approach to philosophy inspired Immanuel Kant, who in the “Critique of Pure Reason” (1781) divided all claims into three categories

synthetic claims which are supported by observation and provide new knowledge, albeit of a quite limited variety (this ball is red, geese honk loudly, crisps are salty)
analytic claims which refer to logical relationships between terms and provide no new knowledge, although they clarify and support understanding (2+2=4, an unmarried man is a bachelor, a triangle has three sides)
meaningless claims which refer neither to observable things nor to logical relationships between terms.

For Kant, it is impossible to speak meaningfully about God. The arguments for God’s existence all fail because human knowledge is rooted in our phenomenal experience and claims about what lies beyond it in the noumenal realm, including about God, are just speculation. The most human beings can do, argued Kant in “Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone” (1794) is to POSTULATE God’s existence as the best explanation of order and the necessary reason to trust in the fairness of the universe and carry on trying to do what it appears we cannot do… be good.

Kant’s critical approach to knowledge was highly influential, but it rests on some very big assumptions and (arguably) needs to stretch the limits of knowledge beyond breaking point by its own definitions in order to work. Firstly, American logician WV Quine attacked Kant’s “Two Dogma’s of Empiricism” in 1951, pointing out both the difficulties in relying on sense-data (Descartes previously described these in the 17th century) and the fact that Kant and the later logical positivists accept logic as a form of knowledge and as a means of refining and interpreting sense-data without real argument. What makes unquestioning faith in logic and assumptions about things being the way they appear to some people’s senses better than unquestioning faith and assumptions about other things? Secondly, Kant’s system needs the postulates of God, freedom and immortality to work… none of which can be known to exist by Kant’s own categorization of knowledge and against how things appear to most people.

Human freedom seems to be constrained by everything from social norms to genetics, yet Kant has to suppose that people are free both in order to support the credibility of reason and the demand of the moral law.
The evil and chaos in the world speaks against the existence of God and yet Kant has to postulate God to explain the order he needs to believe exists in order that reason and morality retains credibility.
Finally, there is no observable or logical evidence for an afterlife, yet Kant has to suppose that one exists or he cannot hang on to order in the universe, on which reason and the credibility of the moral law depends.

In the end, Kant relies very heavily on things that can neither be proven nor even supported through experience in order for his critical system to work. Although Kant raises serious questions about the possible meaningfulness of religious language, the force of these questions is taken away by the cracks in the foundations of Kant’s critical system.

Nevertheless, despite the problems with Kant’s critical approach to knowledge and language, through the 19th Century philosophers were heavily influenced by it. Gotlob Frege drew heavily on Kant in his work on Logic, which went on to inspire the work of Russell and Moore (and Russell’s protege Wittgenstein) in pre-war Cambridge, as well as Viennese philosopher-scientists Otto Neurath and Moritz Schlick and their “Vienna Circle”, which started to meet in 1921. Seeking advance understanding, Schlick brought Mathematicians, Scientists, Psychologists and Philosophers together to follow on from work done by Russell, Moore and Wittgenstein in establishing the nature and limits of human knowledge. Starting with Kant’s distinction between synthetic, analytic and meaningless claims (and inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein, who had argued that “ of that which we cannot speak, we should be silent ” at the end of his first work the “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” (1921)), Schlick proposed that a “Verification Principle” should be used as a test of meaning – claims that are not in-principle verifiable through the senses (i.e. claims that cannot be physically checked) or which are not related to the logical relationships between terms should be labelled meaningless and excluded from academic discussion. Because of this, during meetings of the Vienna Circle, discussions were strictly focused on what can be known … an adjudicator was even appointed to prevent discussions straying into speculative metaphysics by making claims about such matters as… God.

Partly because the Logical Positivism of the Vienna Circle were published in a Manifesto in 1929, and were of unusual political interest, Schlick’s ideas were influential. In Oxford, following a visit to Vienna instigated by his tutor Gilbert Ryle, AJ Ayer developed and refined the Verification Principle in “Language Truth and Logic” (1936), the same year in which Schlick was murdered by a former student who claimed (at his show-trial) that Logical Positivism had “interfered with my moral restraint”. The book was reprinted after the war and caught the mood of the times. After the discovery of Hitler’s crimes and the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima, it was difficult to hang on to any belief in God or moral absolutes! Logical Positivism dominated Philosophy into the 1950s, with its exclusive focus on what can be known through science and mathematics and its relegation of topics outside these spheres – moral philosophy, aesthetics and religion – to junk-status. Nevertheless, despite the popularity of Verificationism it failed to show that religious language is meaningless. This is because…

Verificationism rules out many areas of academic discussion along with theology and religion. The consequences of not being able to discuss morality meaningfully were thrown into sharp relief when Schlick’s Nazi student Johann Nelbock shot him on the steps of the university. Nelbock claimed that Schlick’s teaching had “interfered with his moral restraint” and maybe he had a point. If Schlick (and Hume and Ayer) was right and morality depends only on sentiment, personal emotion and preferences, then it is difficult to argue that Schlick’s murder was wrong – especially on the eve of the Anschluss when Nazi ideology was incredibly popular in Vienna.
Ayer was forced to accept that many fruitful forms of academic discussion are not even in-principle verifiable. Historical events cannot be verified except through secondary sources. Some scientific questions are not open to verification – for example, quantum events cannot be observed accurately because the act of observation affects the event. In additio, as Thomas Kuhn and Norwood Hanson pointed out, no observation is ever entirely neutral, no matter how “scientific” it might appear. We interpret what we see through an accepted paradigm… maybe we only actually see what we want to see… As the great Art Critic John Berger argued in “Ways of Seeing” , seeing is avowedly political rather than scientific and neutral.
As Verificationism cannot itself be verified it is a self-defeating theory that fails to mean its own standard of meaningfulness.

Verificationism lacks credibility as well as practicality as an approach to defining meaning in language generally, so its attack on meaning in religious language must fail.

Verificationism was definitely in decline by the 1950s, but it was replaced by the Falsificationism proposed initially by Karl Popper and rooted in scientific method. Falsificationism suggests that the meaning of a claim depends on being able to define circumstances in which the claim could be falsified. Scientific claims such as “all swans are white” are meaningful, not because they can be verified – and they cannot be, because even without black swans, the total population of swans through history is never going to be available to check – but rather because we can describe a situation in which the claim would be shown false… such as the discovery of black swans. Falsificationism presents a more serious challenge to the meaningfulness of religious language than either Kant’s critical approach to knowledge or verificationism because it goes against the nature of faith to describe circumstances in which faith will be falsified. John Wisdom’s parable of the gardener was used by atheist Anthony Flew to make this point. Two people look at the same patch of land – one sees the weeds and claims that it is uncultivated land and another sees the shadows of paths and claims that it is a garden whose gardener is on holiday. Assuming the gardener never shows up there is no way that either person will change their claims about what they see. Flew claimed that Religious faith is like this – unfalsifiable and therefore meaningless. A believer looks at the world and sees God’s fingerprints all over it… they will never accept that there is no God, even when they see a film about the Holocaust, when their pet dies in agony or when they themselves have a run of undeserved bad luck. The believer will always explain away things that go against their belief rather than accept that the belief has been falsified. In Psychology this would be called confirmation bias – people tend to see things that agree with their world-view and ignore or explain away things that challenge their worldview. As Kuhn, Hanson and Berger said, no observation is neutral. Flew definitely has a point. Religious claims – at least those made by most ordinary believers – are often unfalsifiable. Attempts by John Hick and Richard Swinburne to argue that religious claims are in principle verifiable and falsifiable with reference to the afterlife are unconvincing.

Yet despite the fact that religious claims such as “God exists” or “Jesus loves me” are often unfalsifiable, it is possible that other forms of religious language retain meaning of a different sort. Ludwig Wittgenstein rejected the traditional view of words as signs, pointing towards a meaning beyond themselves, and argued instead that meaning comes from the way in which words are used. Language is like a game; you can only understand somebody if you understand the rules of the game they are playing. What it means to score a goal in football and in netball are different – and knowing the rules to one game will not help you to understand a conversation about the other. Similarly, understanding religious language depends on knowing the “rules” of the religion, denomination, community or even smaller group within which that language is being used. For Wittgenstein, and later for Anti Realists like DZ Phillips and for some Postmodernists, meaning depends not on what words correspond to, but on what they cohere with. It is possible for the same religious claim to be true within one form of life and yet false within another. Jesus rose from the dead is true for Christians and false for Muslims at the same time, regardless of whether the resurrection actually happened or not. Compare religion with the famous “Schrodinger’s Cat” experiment. After 5 minutes, nobody knows whether the cat is alive or dead… for Wittgenstein it is as meaningful to say that the cat is alive as that the cat is dead – both are true just as surely as both are false or one is true and one is false. For anti realists in religious language, words cannot be understood as simple signs, because they point towards a God who is “other, completely other” (St. Augustine), “radically other” (Karl Barth) and “neither something nor nothing (St. Thomas Aquinas). The meaning of religious language cannot depend only on what it refers to; it also depends on the effects it has on human beings and their spiritual state.

Maybe, as Paul Tillich suggested, religious language is symbolic rather than built up of simple signs. Religious claims participate in the meaning they refer to rather than just point towards it. In a very real sense repeating the words becomes and defines a world of faith rather than creating it. Religious language is necessary to religion in the way that God is necessary to the universe – not just as a cause in fieri , the words giving rise to a belief that can continue with or without the words – but as a cause in esse , the words sustaining the belief and its object in being. In a way, this is what Iris Murdoch gestured towards in her version of the Ontological Argument. She used the analogy of a tooth, venerated for centuries as a relic. It may have been a dog’s tooth, but in the light of sincere veneration it begins to glow. As Murdoch and before her Karl Barth recognized, the success or failure of the Ontological Argument does not depend on whether it is valid or sound. Its true value is as a spiritual exercise, forcing the believer to reflect on the nature of existence itself and in so doing growing closer to a spiritual understanding of God’s necessity if not to an analytical proof of it. Reflecting on the nature and possible meaning of religious language is a similar exercise. While it shines a light on the difficulties in taking religious claims at face value, it also exposes wider difficulties in human beings making any claims to knowledge… and so brings people closer to appreciating the necessity of God.

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Religious Language

The principal aim of research on religious language is to give an account of the meaning of religious sentences and utterances. Religious sentences are generally taken to be have a religious subject matter; a religious utterance is the production in speech or writing of a token religious sentence. In principle, religious subject matters could encompass a variety of agents, states of affairs or properties—such as God, deities, angels, miracles, redemption, grace, holiness, sinfulness. Most attention, however, has been devoted to the meaning of what we say about God.

The scope of religious language and discourse could be construed more widely. For instance, while The Song of Songs has little in the way of distinctively religious content, it could be included in the field because of its place within a religious canon. Alternatively, the field could be characterised pragmatically to include utterances which are used for religious purposes or in religious contexts (Alston 2005: 220; Donovan 1976: 1; Soskice 1999: 349; Charlesworth 1974: 3). In practice, however, philosophical treatments have not extended so broadly, instead focusing on sentences and utterances with putatively religious content. This is partly because it is difficult to find a principled characterisation of a religious context that would delineate a philosophically interesting scope for the topic. When a church congregation is told “Please kneel”, this direction appears to be in a religious context and have a religious purpose but it is difficult to see how the analysis of the meaning of this instruction would informatively contribute to the topic. It is also because the most pressing questions about religious language seem to be those that come into alignment with questions in other areas of philosophy of religion. Is there anything distinctive about the meanings of what we say about God and other religious matters that are also the focus of metaphysical and epistemological discussion? If, in talking about God, speakers are not expressing propositions or not talking literally—to take a couple of the more radical proposals—that would accordingly require dramatic adjustments in approaching questions about knowledge of God or God’s existence.

Research in the field has a lengthy history, with sustained discussion of the meanings of religious expressions and utterances stretching back at least to the middle of antiquity. Notable treatments of the topic include the work by medieval theologians and philosophers concerned with the meanings of divine predicates, including the debates surrounding analogy and apophaticism (White 2010; Turner 1995; Scott & Citron 2016), and debates about the meaningfulness of religious language that were prompted by Ayer’s 1936 popularisation of logical positivism in Language, Truth and Logic and remained a central issue in the philosophy of religion through the mid-twentieth century. Religious language has also become a topic of interest in continental philosophy (Derrida 1989 and 1992; Marion 1994 and 1995).

A distinction that guides the selection of material for this article is between revisionary and non-revisionary accounts of religious language. Non-revisionary theories aim to explain what religious sentences and utterances mean. Revisionary theories, in contrast, propose accounts of what religious language should mean or how it should be used. While non-revisionary theories are descriptive of religious language and should do justice to linguistic data, revisionary theories are usually driven by metaphysical or epistemological considerations. This article will mainly be concerned with theories of the former type i.e., what religious utterances mean rather than what they should mean.

1. Preliminaries: The Face Value Theory

2.1 ayer and verificationism, 2.2.1 religious plans: r. b. braithwaite, 2.2.2 mixed strategies: george berkeley, 2.2.3 the prospects for religious non-cognitivism, 2.3 paradoxical content, 2.4 reductionism, 3.1 analogy and metaphor, 3.2 praise and prayer, 3.3 fictionalism, 3.4 religious purposes, 4.1 minimalism about religion, 4.2 wittgenstein, 5. reference and logic, other internet resources, related entries.

A useful starting point for thinking about religious language is a face value theory that promises to give an interpretation of religious sentences and utterances that adheres as closely as possible to what they appear to say. Take, for instance, the affirmation of an indicative religious sentence such as

(1) God is omnipotent

According to the face value theory, (1) has various apparent characteristics: (a) It has the propositional—or “linguistic” or “semantic”—content that God is omnipotent and is true just in case God is omnipotent; (b) it is an assertion that conventionally expresses the speaker’s belief that God is omnipotent; (c) it is a descriptive utterance that represents (truly or falsely) the fact that God is omnipotent, just as other descriptive utterances in other fields of discourse (in science, history, etc.) represent facts. For proponents of face value theory, generalisations of (a), (b) and (c) that extend to indicative religious utterances such as (1)—(a*), (b*) and (c*) respectively—provide the starting point for the interpretation of religious discourse. It should be treated in the same way as the interpretation of other descriptive areas of discourse: there’s nothing special about religious discourse other than its distinctive subject matter.

The face value theory will, of course, need more development if it is to explain other areas of religious discourse. The approach taken to (1) clearly does not apply to non-literal or non-assertoric religious utterances, such as metaphors, questions, fictional stories, expressions of hope, or devotion. However, these are all forms of expression that occur outside religious discourse; they are not unique to religion. For the face value theory, the treatment of religious cases will fall in line with the treatment of non-literal and non-assertoric communication more generally. So, other than the fact that religious discourse is about God, the afterlife and so on, there is nothing remarkable or distinctive in the interpretation of religious utterances.

A large part of research on religious language has been concerned with whether one or more of (a*), (b*) and (c*) ought plausibly to be rejected. Indeed, the attention that some theories of religious language receive is in part due to their divergence from a face value interpretation. Most of the theories that are discussed within the field reject at least one of the components of face value theory.

The most radical rejection of face value theory is the denial of (a*), i.e., that religious utterances express religious propositions. [ 1 ] These theories will be explored in section 2 . The most famous example of this position is Ayer’s version logical positivism ( 2.1 ). Non-cognitive accounts, from which we have selected Braithwaite ( 2.2.1 ) and Berkeley ( 2.2.2 ), are similarly radical but are differently motivated and offer a more positive alternative account of the meaning of religious utterances. The prospects for a more sophisticated non-cognitivism are considered in 2.2.3. A third class of theories ( 2.3 ), propose that religious utterances are paradoxical or fail to express complete propositions. A fourth group, reductionist and subjectivist theories ( 2.4 ), allow that religious utterances express propositions but not the ones that they appear to. Instead, their truth conditions are given by “reduced” (typically non-religious) sentences.

Section 3 will look at theories that reject (b*), i.e., that indicative statements affirmed about God are not literal assertions. 3.1 will review metaphor theories, encompassing a discussion of analogy. Interpretations of religious discourse as a form of praise or prayer, suggested by Jean-Luc Marion and Jacques Derrida, will be considered in 3.2. These theories propose that despite appearing to literally assert religious sentences, speakers are instead employing a different type of speech act. An alternative approach is to argue that religious utterances are avowed for practical reasons rather than their truth. Ian Ramsey ( 3.3 ) takes this approach, as do hermeneutic fictionalists ( 3.4 ).

Minimalists ( 4.1 ) agree that indicative religious utterances are representational and assertoric but deny that they represent religious facts in the way that other areas of descriptive discourse represent facts. That is, they agree with (a*) and (b*) but reject (c*). This view is sometimes associated with Wittgenstein, whose brief remarks and lectures on religion have been highly influential. However, the interpretation of his work is not widely agreed upon and some different possibilities will be considered in 4.2.

The face value theory is a widely assumed—if not the default—approach taken to religious discourse in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion. Resistance to it is sometimes presented a brief aberration confined to the middle decades of the twentieth century (Mackie 1982: 2; Swinburne 1993: 88) with questionable if not anti-religious motivations (van Inwagen 2006: 156; Plantinga 2000: ch. 2, particularly in reference to Gordon Kaufman). However, as will become clear in the following sections, the opposition to face value theory is not of recent vintage and although some who disagree with face value theory may be atheists, the position is not tied to atheism.

2. The Content of Religious Utterances

Although Ayer’s version of verificationism is one of the most well-known rejections of (a*), his approach is unusual in two respects. First, he offers no positive alternative account of the meaning of religious utterances. Ayer saw little value in religious discourse and preferred its elimination. In contrast, the other theories considered in this section propose that religious language may be meaningful even if it does not express religious propositions. Various options have been proposed: it may express non-cognitive states, have a practical value in modifying the thought and action of speakers, or represent non-religious facts. Second, Ayer’s account is ostensibly comprehensive for religious language whereas most other theories are more piecemeal, that is, they reject (a*) for some significant subclass of religious utterances but for other religious utterances accept face value theory.

The verificationist theory of meaning was popularised by A.J. Ayer in his 1936 Language, Truth and Logic . Ayer argues that religious statements —his term for indicative sentences—are “literally meaningless”. According to Ayer, a statement is factually contentful if and only if it is empirically verifiable. A statement is empirically verifiable if what it says can in principle be shown to be true or false by observation. Although logically necessary statements are not verifiable, according to Ayer they are analytic or true by virtue of the meaning of their constituent terms. As such, “none of them provide any information about any matter of fact” (1936: 79). Ayer encapsulated the verificationist theory of meaning with the infamous empirical verification principle : to have literal meaning a statement must be either analytically true (and thereby factually uninformative) or empirically verifiable.

Ayer’s chief target is metaphysics and he rather ambitiously titled the first chapter of his book “The Elimination of Metaphysics”. Metaphysics is taken to be made up of statements that concern the nature of reality that falls beyond the scope of scientific inquiry. Examples include the existence of the external world, the number of substances that there are in the world, whether the world is made up of ideas and the reality of propositions or universals. Because theories on these issues are not empirically verifiable, Ayer takes them to lack “factual meaning”: they should be eliminated as a topic of debate. Other conspicuous victims of the application of the verification principle were ethical, aesthetic and religious statements all of which, so Ayer argues, are not susceptible to verification and are thereby similarly factually meaningless.

Notably, however, Ayer has a positive “emotivist” story to tell about ethical statements. Although he takes ethical statements to be unverifiable descriptions of normative facts, from which he concludes that an ethical predicate “adds nothing to the literal meaning of the sentence”, he argues that ethical language has a non-descriptive function of expressing approval or disapproval as well as encouraging attitudes of approval or disapproval in others. For example, in saying “Stealing money is wrong”, the speaker does not say something that is true or false but expresses disapproval towards stealing (1936: 107). Ayer extends his emotivism to aesthetic language: it is used “simply to express certain feelings and evoke a certain response” (1936: 113). What of religious language? Ayer is silent on this issue, implying that religious language should be dispensed with in the same way as other areas of metaphysics.

Logical positivism was briefly in vogue in the 1930s but quickly ran into intractable difficulties. That something is seriously awry can be seen by subjecting the verification principle to its own standards: it is itself neither empirically verifiable nor analytically true, so literally meaningless according to its own criterion. Ayer exacerbated this problem by exaggerating the predicament of statements that failed to satisfy this principle, sometimes characterising them as “nonsense”. However, the central reason for the theory’s collapse was the failure to come up with a workable version of the verification principle (see MacDonald 2010 for a review). Ayer was unable to find a happy medium between a strict formulation that renders statements of scientific theory unverifiable and a lax formulation that allows any statement to be verifiable.

This brings us to the question of why religious statements should be held by to fall foul of the verification principle. Why can’t religious statements legitimately be regarded as scientific hypotheses (as Swinburne 1994, among others, argues)? Religious statements do in many cases appear to have implications for what is or should be observable. We can predict, for instance, that a world created by God will exhibit various kinds of orderliness. It seems, therefore, that some religious statements should be in a good a position to satisfy the standards of literal content set up by the empirical verification principle. Ayer’s reply to this argument is surprisingly terse. Suppose, he argues, that “God exists” entails that there should be observable regularities in nature. If that exhausted the observable results of “God exists” then “to assert the existence of a god will be simply equivalent to asserting that there is the requisite regularity in nature” (1936: 115). Clearly, Ayer contends, this is not all that religious believers intend to assert in saying that God exists: they are committed to the existence of an unverifiable supernatural agent.

Ayer’s response seems to involve a sleight of hand. The verification principle is presented as a way of demarcating factually contentful from contentless statements. In arguing against the verifiability of religious statements, Ayer relies on the assumption that the verification principle provides the means for specifying what statements mean. In this case, that the content of “God exists” is exhausted by the observation statements that (in combination with other assumptions) can be deduced from it. However, this is in effect to concede that religious statements are verifiable according to the original (official) version of the verification principle. As to the meaning-specifying, unofficial version of the verification principle, this is not something that Ayer defends. However, it would place religious statements in good company with scientific statements that posit theoretical entities that are not directly observable and the meanings of which are similarly not exhausted by the observation statements that are derivable from them.

Despite the availability of conclusive objections to Ayer, worries about the verifiability (or falsifiability) of religious statements continued to exert a remarkable influence on work in the philosophy of religion, with papers and books being produced well into the second half of the twentieth century. Particularly notable is John Hick’s argument that theism could be verified postmortem: “the verifying situation lies in the final fulfilment of God’s purpose for us beyond this present life” (1977b: 190). Other examples include Flew and MacIntyre (1955), Ferré (1962), Macquarrie (1967), Donovan (1976) and Tilley (1978); for a discussion of this prolonged impact see Scott (2013: 45–48).

2.2 Varieties of Non-Cognitivism

Ayer argues that although ethical statements are not descriptive they have the important function of giving voice to our non-cognitive attitudes of approval and disapproval. However, he offers no positive non-cognitive theory of the meaning of religious statements. Braithwaite addresses this asymmetry with a non-cognitivist account of religious language. His theory is modelled on Ayer’s ethical emotivism but with modifications. [ 2 ] Braithwaite takes the same approach to religious statements. He proposes that religious statements are “primarily declarations of adherence to a policy of action, declarations of commitment to a way of life” (1955: 15). For example, “God is love” expresses the intention to follow an agapeistic way of life. Religious discourse concerned with matters that are not directly concerned with behavioural conduct, such as claims about important religious figures, parables, accounts of the creation, and so on, Braithwaite calls stories . These stories, according to Braithwaite, provide models of exemplary behaviour (or behaviour to avoid) that serve as psychological assistance for the believer to act on their intentions. For this reason, their truth is not crucial to the action-guiding role that they play: they are entertained rather than believed (1955: 24). Braithwaite combines a non-cognitive theory of a range of core religious judgements and doctrinal claims with a theory of religious “stories” as useful fictions.

A religious belief is an intention to behave in a certain way (a moral belief) together with the entertainment of certain stories associated with the intention in the mind of the believer. (1955: 32)

To the extent that the negative part of Braithwaite’s position—that religious utterances lack factual significance—relies on Ayer’s verificationism, his theory encounters similar problems. However, the positive part of Braithwaite’s theory also runs into difficulties both for its psychological implausability (Swinburne 1993: ch. 6) and as a theory of religious language (Scott 2013: ch. 4). Here is one objection. What are the intentions expressed by different religious statements? Braithwaite is rather sketchy on the details but he proposes that Christian statements express an intention to pursue an agapeistic way of life (1955: 21–22). However, equipped with only one plan, Braithwaite’s theory will have all Christian claims (or at least all doctrinal claims) meaning the same. They will all express an intention to pursue the same plan. Even if Braithwaite could identify some additional plans there seems no prospect of finding plans to individuate the meanings of all statements of Christian belief.

George Berkeley offers the most detailed and important account of religious language of any of the major early modern philosophers. These are elaborated in his 1732 dialogue Alciphron . His account has negative and positive elements. First, he rejects (a*) for a limited range of religious utterances. Specifically, Christian doctrinal concerns about grace, original sin, the afterlife and other Christian “mysteries”. Regarding the rest of religious discourse, Berkeley offers a thoroughly cognitive account: religious terms—and in particular “God”—correspond to ideas that refer to really existing features of reality. Moreover, Berkeley believes many Christian claims are not only cognitively contentful but also rationally defensible. Second, he proposes that this limited group of utterances should be interpreted non-cognitively: they do not represent facts but evoke various attitudes and practical dispositions.

In a part of the dialogue concerned with the Christian doctrine of grace, Berkeley attributes two arguments to the sceptical interlocutor Alciphron. First, when we consider the meaning of the word “grace” we find a “perfect vacuity or privation of ideas”; it is an “empty name” ( Alciphron , 7.4). Second, in saying that grace “acts” or “causes” things to happen, we are employing words that are clear and intelligible when used to describe the behaviour of physical objects but have no similarly clear significations when applied to a “spiritual” matters. In supposing that talk of the causally efficacious properties of grace is contentful, speakers are unjustifiably trading on the familiar meanings of these words when talking about physical properties and causal relations between physical objects; when used to elaborate on the nature of grace or describe its nature, these words do not have a clear sense. We have, concludes Alciphron, no clear idea corresponding to the word “grace”; we “cannot assent to any proposition concerning it” or have any faith about it. Berkeley, through the interlocutor Euphranor, rejects Alciphron’s conclusion but concedes Alciphron’s arguments that the word “grace” does not suggest a clear idea. Nevertheless, a discourse “that directs how to act or excites to the doing or forbearance of an action may … be useful and significant”—and express faith—even if it is not representational ( Alciphron , 7.5).

Berkeley goes on to develop his non-representation account not just for grace but a variety of Christian doctrines. Talking of grace has a practical role in encouraging conduct in accordance with Christian faith:

Grace may … be an object of our faith, and influence our life and actions, as a principle destructive of evil habits and productive of good ones, although we cannot attain a distinct idea of it. ( Alciphron , 7.7)

He takes a similar approach to the Trinity: we lack a clear idea of what it is, but talk of it is significant because of its practical role in modifying the attitudes and conduct of the faithful ( Alciphron , 7.8). Original sin receives a similar treatment. In general, talk of the “religious mysteries”, according to Berkeley, serves a practical function of motivating and guiding the faithful to think and act according to Christian principles. They are “placed in the will and affections rather than in the understanding, and producing holy lives rather than subtle theories” ( Alciphron , 7.10).

One of the distinctive characteristics of Berkeley’s account is his attempt to develop a non-cognitive theory for only a limited region of religious language, while retaining a cognitivist account for the rest. Let’s call this a mixed theory. There are two pressing problems for a mixed theory. First, how should we differentiate areas of religious language which should be given a face value interpretation from those that should be given a non-cognitive interpretation? Second, how are the non-cognitive areas of religious language meaningfully related to the cognitive areas of language? Berkeley answers the first problem by an introspective experiment. We reflect on what we are thinking when we talk about the Christian mysteries and find that we lack clear ideas or beliefs. However, this is unsatisfactory. There is no general agreement on which religious expressions or sentences we are sufficiently clear about to make them suitable vehicles for expressing religious beliefs. Nor does Berkeley identify anything that specifically characterises the Christian mysteries as matters on which speakers have much less clear ideas than many of the other ideas that form part of religious judgements, not least the ideas of God and divine properties. Berkeley does not, therefore, have a successful method for discriminating religious ideas and thoughts that are cognitively contentful from those that are not.

On the second problem, suppose for example we follow Berkeley giving a face value account of

(4) God is good

and a non-cognitive interpretation of

(5) Salvation is given by divine grace.

That is, (5) does not have a propositional content but is used to encourage faith and virtue. How should (6), be interpreted?

(6) If God is good then salvation is given by divine grace.

The mixed theory has two problems. This sentence combines (4) and (5) in a conditional sentence but since the consequent is taken to express an attitude it is unclear how it should be understood. This is because one can assert (6) without expressing the attitude in (5); one might, for example, think that the antecedent and consequent are false but nevertheless think that (6) is true because if the antecedent were true then the consequent would be true. It seems, therefore, that if the mixed theorist is right that (5) expresses a non-cognitive attitude then it must have a different meaning in (6) where it is not tied to the expression of any attitude. This brings us to a second problem, which is that (4) and (6) together entail (5). Together these sentences make an evidently valid modus ponens argument. However, if (5) means something different when asserted and when embedded in the conditional (6), then this argument is invalid. More generally, the mixed theory looks in difficulty when trying to explain the meaning of conditionals or valid arguments that contain expressive and cognitive religious sentences.

Some of the problems with Berkeley’s theory arise from its limited application to only parts of religious language. This raises the question of whether a more thoroughgoing non-cognitivist theory of religious language could be developed, perhaps employing the methods developed in the defence of current expressivist theories of ethics. The prospects for such a theory remain relatively unexplored territory but here are a couple of relevant consideration, one in favour and one against.

An important part of religious discourse is the communication of faithful attitudes. Moreover, faith is a state that appears to be intrinsically connected to our motivations and feelings. This is something that Berkeley makes great play of:

Faith, I say, is not an indolent perception, but an operative persuasion of mind, which ever worketh some suitable action, disposition, or emotion in those who have it; as it were easy to prove and illustrate by innumerable instances taken from human affairs. ( Alciphron , 7.10)

The idea that faith must have a practical element commands broad support. Faith is said to be intrinsically motivational (Bishop 2007: 105–106), to involve desires (MacDonald 1993: 44; Howard-Snyder 2013: 363), plans and commitments (Swinburne 2005: 211–212; Kvanvig 2013: 111), stances (Callahan & O’Connor 2014: 13–14) pro-attitudes (Audi 2011: 67; Alston 1996: 12–13; Schellenberg 2014: 83). Berkeley sees it as one of the main selling points of his non-cognitivism that it explains why faith in religious mysteries should have practical effects on the dispositions and behaviour of the faithful and lead people to change their lives ( Alciphron , 7.10). More generally, it appears that there are at least the rudimentary components for an argument akin to the argument from motivational force used to support ethical non-cognitivism (see van Roojen 2016). This offers one potentially promising line of argument for the non-cognitivist to pursue. Note that religious utterances need not be exclusively either cognitive or non-cognitive. It is possible to argue that religious utterances conventionally express both non-cognitive attitudes and beliefs (for a defence of this position see Scott 2013: 71–85).

There are general objections to ethical and other varieties of non-cognitivism—most notably the Frege-Geach and the “embedding” problems (see Schroeder 2010 for an overview)—that will equally apply to a putative expressivist account of religious language. However, a thoroughgoing religious non-cognitivism will face the additional problem of identifying the relevant attitudes and plans that are expressed in religious utterances. While there are attitudes that might be considered characteristic of religious language—for instance, awe, devotion and obedience—it is difficult to see how such attitudes could provide the resources to provide a plausible account of the meaning of religious utterances or to individuate the meanings of different religious utterances. To take just one example, “God is omniscient” will need to be expressive of a distinct non-cognitive attitude to “God is omnipresent” to distinguish their meanings.

Some of the claims most commonly made about God’s nature and doctrinal claims, particularly those of Christianity, have been said to be absurd, paradoxical or impossible to understand. The most familiar version of this worry concerns the consistency of the predicates ascribed to God such as omnipotence and doctrinal views such as the Trinity. Considerable effort has been directed towards establishing that religious claims are coherent (for example, Swinburne 1994). Those who concede that some religious claims are paradoxical have proposed a variety of different responses. Paradox in religious claims has been seen as grounds for atheism (Martin 1990), for modifying religious doctrine or changing our attitudes towards them (Hick 1977a: 1993), or as an ineliminable part of faith (Kierkegaard [1844] 1985; see Evans 1989). However, there is a further question about what such claims mean. If we take paradoxical utterances (or ones that are in some way absurd or impossible to understand) as failing to express propositions, then allowing that some of the principal expressions of faith are paradoxical (or absurd or impossible to understand) is thereby to reject (a*).

A number of accounts of religious language appear potentially sympathetic with this approach. For example, Ronald Hepburn (1958)—according to whom “paradoxical and near-paradoxical language is the staple of accounts of God’s nature” (16)—proposes that religious ideas and stories may have the role of imaginatively informing a moral way of life. This view has some similarities with fictionalism, discussed below. More recently, Stephen Mulhall (2015) has suggested that some religious utterances can be understood as unresolvable riddles the meanings of which we are unable to grasp fully, inviting an open-ended process of articulating their meaning that is pursued by those engaged in religious discourse.

Also relevant here are the works of authors in the apophatic and mystical tradition that was particularly prominent from mid-antiquity through to the late medieval period. Although a variety of accounts of religious language are suggested by the writings of authors in this tradition, some of what they say appears sympathetic to paradoxicalism about utterances about God’s nature. Two themes that are found in their writings are particularly notable. First, God’s nature is taken to be both inconceivable and inexpressible (Dionysius The Mystical Theology : ch. 5; Gregory of Nyssa Contra Eunomium II : 61; Maximus the Confessor, Chapters on Knowledge : part one 1–2, part two 2; Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed : ch. 58). It appears to follow from this that in saying, for example, “God is good”, one does not succeed in representing God in either thought or language. A second theme found in some apophatic writers is that an important aspect of religious engagement is establishing a secure relationship with God—sometimes characterised as an “ascent” to God (Dionysius The Mystical Theology : ch. 1.1; Cloud of Unknowing : ch. 4)—and a recognition of the abject failure of what we say to communicate any representation of God’s nature may form part of that process. Far from being pointless, religious discourse about God may assist in the recognition of our intellectual and linguistic limitations ( Cloud of Unknowing : ch. 8). For further discussion and other interpretations of these works see Turner 1995 and for a detailed review focused on religious language see Scott and Citron 2016, Gäb 2020 and Hewitt 2020.

One difficulty that might be pressed by supporters of the face value theory is these theories, as least to the extent that they are providing accounts of religious language, appear revisionary rather than descriptive of the meanings of religious utterances. For example, the proposal that “God is good” does not simply express the proposition that God is good seems, in the case of apophaticism, to be based on a contentious theological view about what can be represented in thought and language rather than what speakers mean when they utter this sentence. The sentence is used in a variety of apparently descriptive ways by speakers: it is said to be true (or false), it is used in apparently valid arguments, can be embedded in a conditional, it is said to be a matter of belief or even of knowledge. Any account of religious language will need to do justice to the evidence that religious utterances are used descriptively, particularly ones that put (a*) into question.

A variety of philosophical positions go by the name “reductionism” but reductionist theories of language aim to give the truth conditions for sentences that are apparently about a certain range of phenomena in terms of sentences about some other range of phenomena. We can call these (following Dummett 1991: 322) the disputed and reduced class of sentences respectively. Commonly discussed examples include logical behaviourism (see Graham 2017), which reduces sentences about mental states to ones about behaviour, and temporal reductionism (see Markosian 2016) which proposes that sentences about time can be reduced to sentences about temporal relations between things and events. Most varieties of religious reductionism posit various naturalistic phenomena as the subject of the reduced class of sentences. Unlike other positions considered in this section, religious reductionists agree with face value theories that religious utterances have propositional content, however, they argue that the content in question is not the face value subject matter but instead the subject matter described by the reduced class of sentences.

A variety of reductionism adopted by early Christian writers in their treatment of pagan religion, such as Lactantius ([4 th century] 1871: 22) and Augustine ( The City of God , VII ch. 18), proposes that the pagan deities were based on real, mortal historical figures revered after their death for their contributions to human society and subsequently elevated to the status of gods. However, this is clearly not a linguistic reductionism. Augustine—in a chapter titled “A more credible cause of the pagan error”—aims to discourage and debunk pagan beliefs: they are fictions inspired by the benevolent deeds of mortal leaders. Linguistic reductionism does not seek to explain religious belief but identifies a reductive class of sentences by which the truth or falsity of sentences in the disputed class is determined.

Linguistic reductionism has never received widespread support, and has never been developed systematically or comprehensively for religious language. Nevertheless, it has an interesting pedigree. For example, Spinoza, one of the most influential defenders of pantheism, suggested ways of interpreting sentences about God in terms of facts about nature (Mason 2007). He writes:

By God’s direction I mean the fixed and immutable order of Nature, or chain of natural events … So it is the same thing whether we say that all things happen according to Nature’s laws or that they are regulated by God’s decree and direction. ([1667] 2002: 417)

Since all human actions are, according to Spinoza, the product of the predetermined order of nature, we can—following the reductive strategy—say that nobody acts except by the will of God. Similarly, since anything that we can achieve is produced by either our own actions and/or by external conditions, all such achievements can be understood as the result of divine providence. So, for example, (6) is true if (5) is true.

(5) Nobody acts except by the will of God.
(6) All actions are the product of the predetermined order of nature.

Spinoza also proposes naturalistic reductions of talk about the Holy Spirit (1667 [2002, 525]), divine action and providence (1667 [2002, 445]) and miracles (1667 [2002, 448]).

Naturalistic interpretations of religious language became popular in the 1920s in both Britain and America. For example, Julian Huxley (1931) suggests that talk of God could be understood as a way of talking about forces operating in nature or about aspects of nature that we do not understand (see Bowler 2001), and proposes naturalistic interpretations of talk of the Holy Ghost and the Son of God (1927: 37). Influential early figures in the American tradition of “religious naturalism” or “religious empiricism” are Bernard Meland (1976) and Henry Wieman (1932). Wieman offers various naturalistic accounts of talk of God, usually identifying God with natural processes that yield or facilitate ethically or socially desirable results.

Also notable is the work of Gordon Kaufman, a leading figure in the development of modern liberal theology. He observes that in many cases the natural phenomena that are integral to giving our lives meaning are deeply mysterious, for instance, that humans are capable of consciousness and thought and the appreciation of beauty. He contends that “God” is the name given to the “pervasive mystery” that gives life meaning (2007: 12). Saying that God is “real” or “exists” express the belief that underpinning this “pervasive mystery” are natural forces that promote and facilitate ethical, aesthetic and social human flourishing (1981: 49).

Does truth-conditional reductionism offer a plausible theory of religious language? The obvious place to start is to consider whether or not there are any compelling reasons to prefer a reductive rather than a face value theory. Unfortunately, reductionists appear to stumble at this first hurdle. It is clear from the writings of reductionists that the reductionist interpretation of religious discourse is not advanced from a consideration of the meanings of what speakers say when they talk about God but instead on the basis of religious or metaphysical theories about the nature of the universe. However, the belief that there is no creator God is not a reason for giving naturalistic truth-conditions to (1); it is a reason for thinking that (1) is false. Notably, even among writers more sympathetic to linguistic reductionism we find lapses into non-linguistic reductionism. For example, while Kaufman sometimes presents his theory as an account of what is meant by talk about God, at other times he presents a much more clearly revisionary proposal. He writes, “It is this cosmic serendipitous creativity, I suggest, that we should today think of as God” (Kaufman 2007: 26, my italics) and he proposes that the “traditional notion” of God’s purposive activity in the word should be replaced with

what I call trajectories or directional movements that emerge spontaneously in the course of evolutionary and historical developments. (2007: 25)

For further discussion of reductionism see Alston 2005 and Scott 2013: ch. 9; the latter also discusses subjectivist versions of reductionism.

3. The Use of Religious Language

Suppose that religious sentences represent a religious subject matter, i.e., that (a*) is true. There remains the further question of what speakers mean when they use religious sentences. The semantic or propositional content of a sentence and its truth conditions is one thing, the information that a sentence is used to communicate is another. Any philosophical account of religious discourse must allow for non-literal utterances, where the propositional content of the utterance and the thought that it is used to communicate appear to diverge. However, according to the face value theory, utterances such as (7), (8) and (9) should—unless the context indicates otherwise—be understood as literal assertions that, if sincerely stated by a religious believer, express the speaker’s belief in what is said. [ 3 ]

(7) God created the world.
(8) The authors of the Bible were inspired by the Holy Spirit.
(9) God is omnipotent.

There are two main types of opposition to (b*). The first is that religious utterances—including utterances of indicative sentences that are apparently literal—are not literal assertions but fall under some other standard category of speech act. Speech acts—or illocutionary acts in Austin’s (1955 [1975, 95]) terminology—are what a speaker does in saying something. Examples include assertions, questions, commands, warnings, threats, statements of intention, requests. So, according to the first type of opposition to (b*) religious utterances, while many of them appear to be literal assertions, are in fact some other kind of speech act. Proposals include analogy or metaphor ( 3.1 ), praise or prayer ( 3.2 ), and pretence or other kinds of quasi-assertion ( 3.3 ). The second type of opposition to (b*), considered in ( 3.4 ), proposes that religious sentences are used for various (non-assertoric) purposes but does not identify a unified speech act as characteristic of religious discourse.

The two main kinds of non-literal discourse that have been seen as particularly important in religion are analogy and metaphor. [ 4 ] Analogy relates to the use of expressions that occur in both religious and non-religious contexts. Take, for example, the expressions “good”, “wise” and “powerful” when used in ordinary contexts to talk about people. Do these expressions have the same meaning when used to talk about God, or are they used analogously: is the conventional meaning they have when used to talk about mundane objects in some way modified when used to talk about God? Discussion of religious analogy was particularly lively in early medieval theology and Aquinas was a leading proponent of an analogical treatment of religious predicates. See Roger M. White (2010) for a detailed account of Aquinas’ theory, its background in Aristotle’s philosophy as well as subsequent ideas about analogy in religion in the work of Karl Barth and Immanuel Kant.

A detailed contemporary account of analogy by Richard Swinburne (1993: ch. 4) proposes that analogical use of a term involves a modification of its syntactic and/or semantic rules. A syntactic rule for the use of a term p sets down general conditions governing its use. A semantic rule for p gives examples of the things to which p correctly applies, or does not correctly apply. For instance, giving a semantic rule for red might involve pointing to various examples of red objects and contrasting them with objects that are not red (1993: 58). In using an expression analogically, Swinburne proposes, its semantic or syntactic rules are loosened. So W *, the analogical use of a predicate W , may require a less strict degree of resemblance to standard examples of W for its correct use. Swinburne believes that “person” which in its ordinary sense has living human beings with physical bodies as its standard examples, must be used analogically with a suitable weakening of its semantic rules and modification of its syntactic rules when applied to God.

It is notable that on Swinburne’s theory analogy can be seen as a commonplace feature of language use that is both compatible with a face value theory and found much more widely than in religious discourse. For example, consider the following utterances:

(10) The lawn is square.
(11) The audience was silent.

Lawns do not, of course, have four sides of equal length and in saying (11) the speaker does not mean that the audience was not making any noise whatsoever. According to modern pragmatic theories of interpretation (such as Sperber & Wilson 1986; Carston 2002; Recanti 2004), constituent expressions or concepts undergo an ad hoc modification prompted by the context in which they are uttered and understood. For instance, (10) might involve a loosening of the concept SQUARE, i.e., SQUARE* that includes not just objects that are square but also objects (like lawns) that look square or are approximately square. Akin to Swinburne’s account of rule modification in analogy, the condition that squares have four sides of equal length and internal angles of ninety degrees is relaxed. Understood in this way, however, analogy is not distinctive of religious discourse but a prevalent characteristic of normal communication. When God is the subject matter, expressions undergo a suitable ad hoc loosening as part of normal, literal communication.

Recent research has focused more on religious metaphors. [ 5 ] The importance of metaphor has long been noted by theologians, with Sally McFague (1983) offering the most extensive treatment, while in the philosophy of religion William Alston (1989: ch. 1 and 2), Janet Soskice (1985), Anthony Kenny (2005) and Richard Swinburne (1991: ch. 3; 1993: ch. 4 and 5) have all contributed to the discussion.

Since metaphors are commonplace in various areas of discourse, it may seem that questions about religious metaphor should be subsumed under questions about metaphor in general raised in the philosophy of language. However, some have proposed that what is said about God is irreducibly metaphorical . Tillich’s (1951) theory that religious language is symbolic is perhaps an early expression of the view, and Anthony Kenny and Sally McFague are more recent proponents of a view of this type (see also Jüngel 1974; Sarot 1992). William Alston, the chief critic of the theory, offers the following statement of irreducibility theory (1989: 17–19):

(IT) Religious metaphors are the only way of stating truths about God, and the content of a metaphorical utterance about God cannot be stated, even in part, in literal terms.

Alston sees the supporter of IT as construing even apparently literal claims about God as metaphorical. However, Alston’s formulation may be overly modest, since both Kenny and McFague seem to take the view that all talk of God is irreducibly metaphorical, irrespective of whether it is true or false.

IT fails, according to Alston, because metaphors, religious metaphors in particular, are always in principle susceptible to literal paraphrase. Scott (2013: 180–182) argues that IT, on any plausible account of what metaphors are, faces insurmountable problems. For example, according to one standard theory (Searle 1993), metaphors say something that is usually patently false with the aim of implying something other than the false thing that is said. “God is my rock”, for instance, might imply that God is a source of confidence for the speaker. However, it follows from IT that if a metaphor about God implies anything true about God then that implied claim should also be metaphorical. This appears to undermine truthful communication about God. If, however, talk of God is not in the business of expressing truths, according to what norm are utterances about God affirmed or rejected? Metaphor theories therefore face challenges in specifying and defending the irreducibility claim as well as in as well as elaborating what a metaphor is.

Although some caution is needed in placing work in continental philosophy into the analytic classifications that inform this article, the treatment of religious language by Jean-Luc Marion (1994, 1982 [1995]) and Jacques Derrida (1992) appears sympathetic to the speech act theories considered in this section. Speakers, according to Marion, in uttering indicative sentences about God praise God (and thereby express devotion, awe, and so on, towards God) rather than express beliefs about God. Derrida is critical of Marion; not, however, because he endorses a face value approach but because he believes speakers are better understood as voicing prayers to God rather than praise.

Marion’s theory is influenced by the apophatic idea that God cannot be accurately conceived of. Conceiving of something, according to Marion, involves placing some descriptive limitation or restriction on that thing. God and other religious subjects, Marion claims, are “saturated phenomena” that cannot be captured by human concepts:

That he is the given par excellence implies that “God” is given without restriction, without reserve, without restraint. “God” is given not at all partially, following this or that outline … but absolutely, without the reserve of any outline, with every side open … (1994: 588)

However, inspired by Dionysius’ writings, he presents an interpretation of religious discourse as referring to God without ascribing properties to God. For example, “God is good” addresses rather than describes God (1982 [1995, 76]). Marion calls this non-objectifying and non-predicative way of talking about God “praise”; it is a form of speech that is laudatory but combined with a recognition (at least by the speaker) that the property that is apparently predicated of God is inappropriate. Praise “feeds on the impossibility or, better, the impropriety of the category” (1982 [1995, 76]). In talking of God, therefore, speakers praise God but recognise the inadequacy of the concepts they are using to represent God: the predicate expressions are not used with the belief that they accurately represent God. In saying “God is good” speakers do not, therefore, believe or assert that God is good . For further discussion see James Smith 2002.

Derrida is sympathetic to Marion’s account but raises the objection that praising God (the “encomium” of God), on Marion’s account, still involves predication:

Even if it is not a predicative affirmation of the current type, the encomium preserves the style and the structure of a predicative affirmation. It says something about someone … [Praise] entails a predicative aim, however foreign it may be to “normal” ontological predication. (1992: 137)

Derrida proposes instead that religious talk about God should be understood as prayer rather than praise. Unlike praise, prayer is a form of address that, Derrida argues, is entirely non-descriptive. Prayer “is not predicative, theoretical (theo logical ), or constative” (1992: 110). He elaborates:

I will hold to one other distinction: prayer in itself, one may say, implies nothing other than the supplicating address to the other, perhaps beyond all supplication and giving, to give the promise of His presence as other, and finally the transcendence of His otherness itself, even without any other determination; the encomium, although it is not a simple attributive speech, nevertheless preserves an irreducible relationship to the attribution. (1982 [1995, 111])

Derrida’s objection is unconvincing. (12) and (13), for example, appear to have the same “style and structure”:

(12) God is good.
(13) The table is round.

However, Marion’s point is presumably that the similarity of (12) and (13) is purely superficial. Marion does not give specifics, but one way of developing his is account is to take (12) to be communicating (something like):

(14) Oh, God you are good!

Where (14) is understood as an expression of (say) the speaker’s respect and admiration of God and the speaker recognises the descriptive inadequacy of “good”. Derrida is, in effect, reading too much into the surface appearance of utterances: (12) and (13) may look similar but they are not thereby speech acts of the same type.

The strengths and weaknesses of Derrida’s and Marion’s accounts are as yet largely unexplored in analytic philosophy. There are, however, some obvious challenges that need to be addressed. For example, Marion claims in praising God the predicates that are ascribed to God are recognised as inadequate by speakers . This seems implausible. Speakers in many cases appear to believe what they are saying about God. Marion might argue that such religious believers have false beliefs about God’s nature, but to claim that they do not have beliefs about God’s nature that they intend to communicate seems to be a misrepresentation of speakers’ states of mind. Moreover, Derrida’s own suggestion that talk of God should be understood as prayer does not seem to have any advantage over the position his is criticising. Prayer also involves utterances that appear to represent God: “Our Father, which art in heaven”, for instance.

Fictionalists defend the moral and intellectual legitimacy of engaging with a field of discourse for speakers that do not believe that the sentences of that discourse are true (for a general overview see Divers & Liggins 2005, for a review focused on religious fictionalism see Scott & Malcolm 2018, Brock 2020). Some fictionalists propose that that speakers employ quasi-assertion . A quasi-assertion is a speech act that has the appearance of an assertion—it is the utterance of an indicative sentence—but it does not commit the speaker to the truth of the expressed proposition. The speaker goes along with or accepts the content of what is quasi-asserted but does not thereby believe it. The details of quasi-assertion depend on the kind of fictionalism being proposed and a variety of options have been proposed (for an overview see Kalderon 2005: 119–129). On some accounts, quasi-assertion involves the assertion of something other than the propositional content of the uttered sentence. For example, a fictionalist about mathematics might argue that a mathematical sentence M is used to assert that M is true according to standard mathematics (Field 1980). Alternatively, to quasi-assert a sentence might be to pretend to assert it. Comparable approaches are found among religious fictionalist. Peter Lipton (2007), for instance, suggests that engagement with religious could be akin to immersion in a fiction; the fictionalist accordingly pretends that the claims of religion are true. Other religious fictionalists (such as Robin Le Poidevin 2016, 2019) propose that the fictionalist, without believing that a religious utterance is true, may say it on the basis that it is true within some religious tradition.

Particularly important for our purposes is the distinction between revolutionary and hermeneutic fictionalism. Revolutionary religious fictionalism is not a theory of religious language—it is not a position on what speakers actually mean—but instead a revisionary proposal that is usually offered in response to error theory about religion. Despite religious claims being untrue, revolutionary fictionalists argue religious discourse has sufficient pragmatic benefits that we should continue to employ religious language and engage in religious thought rather than eliminate it, even though we should not believe that it is true. In general, revolutionary fictionalism is motivated by the wish to continue to receive the social and other benefits of engagement with a religion without commitment to its truth. LePoidevin and Lipton are both revolutionary fictionalists. The Sea of Faith Network, inspired by the work of Don Cupitt (1980), can also be understood as sympathetic to revolutionary fictionalism because it promotes Christian practice and the continuing engagement with religious discourse without religious belief. Interesting though they are, we will not be investigating these theories further because they are not saying anything about the meaning of religious utterances. Instead, they are recommending a change of attitude towards the claims of religion and quasi-assert rather than assert them.

Hermeneutic fictionalism about religion is the view that speakers are not committed to the truth of what they say on religious matters: speakers are quasi-asserting rather than asserting indicative religious sentences. This is not offered as a proposal about what speakers should do but instead as a fact about current linguistic practice. Speakers accept but do not believe what they say when engaging in religious discourse. So, along with other positions discussed in this section, hermeneutic fictionalists reject (b*). Defending this position may seem like a tall order: isn’t hermeneutic fictionalism undermined by the apparent linguistic evidence that religious speakers are committed to the truth of what they say? Nevertheless, there are a couple of positions that look to be potential contenders for religious hermeneutic fictionalism.

First, Georges Rey has defended a position that he calls meta-atheism according to which practitioners of religion exhibit widespread self-deception about what they say (2006: 337). For anyone with a basic education in science, Rey contends, it is obvious that religious claims are false. Rey is not proposing, however, that educated speakers are insincere when they affirm religious claims since they may think of themselves as believing what they are saying (2006: 338). Instead, speakers are in a state of self-deception. While they may recognise on a more critical level that religious claims are false, they do not entertain this when engaging in religious discourse. Why do religious people do not recognise and consciously draw out the implications of their disbelief? Rey suggests a number of reasons: loyalty to family and other social groups, personal ties and identifications with religious institutions, resistance to changing one’s public stance, the wish for one’s life to be part of a larger project. Rey supplements his arguments by pointing up differences between religious and scientific judgements aimed at showing that the latter are “understood to be fictional from the start” (2006: 345). Now, Rey’s position is, to say the least, contentious—for starters, his contention that religious claims are obviously false seems unsupportable (see Scott 2015 for a more detailed critique). However, with some assumptions about self-deception, we can understand meta-atheism as a kind of hermeneutic religious fictionalism. Speakers are in a conflicted state of self-deception that falls short of belief: on some level or in some uncritical contexts speakers treat religious claims as if they were true, while also believing in critical and reflective contexts that they are false. Accordingly, in uttering religious sentences speakers engage in quasi-assertion whereby they accept what is said without genuinely believing it to be true.

Second, a point of debate in current research on the nature of faith is whether propositional faith—i.e., faith that p —requires belief that p . Supporters of traditional doxastic accounts defend this condition while supporters of non-doxastic theories of faith argue that it is sufficient that one have a positive cognitive attitude towards p other than belief. There are various proposal for what this non-doxastic attitude is. Candidates include: acceptance (Alston 2007), assent (Schellenberg 2005), assumption (Swinburne 2005; Howard-Snyder 2013), trust (Audi 2011), hope (McKaughan 2013; Pojman 1986 and 2001), or acquiescence (Buchak 2012). However, to the extent that religious discourse is in the business of trading in the expression of faithful attitudes then it follows from the non-doxastic position that a speaker may sincerely affirm their faith in a religious proposition without believing it to be true. Notably, some non-doxastic theorists offer linguistic evidence to show that speakers do not believe what they say. This appears to concede a hermeneutic fictionalist account of faithful discourse (for discussion see Malcolm & Scott 2017 and Scott 2020). It seems likely that many proponents of non-doxastic theories of faith will not welcome the characterisation of their position as a variety of hermeneutic fictionalism (see Howard-Snyder 2016 and Malcolm 2018). However, non-doxastic theories are usually presented primarily as psychological or epistemological theories about the nature of faith; the implications of the position for religious discourse, and its relationship with hermeneutic fictionalism, have yet to be fully set out.

We have been looking at theories than characterise the affirmation of indicative religious sentences by a type of speech act other than literal assertion. However, some accounts propose that religious discourse, rather than exhibiting a distinctive type of speech act, employs language for certain distinctive purposes. Possible examples of this position include Wittgenstein’s suggestion that a religious judgement should be understood as a picture that has a regulative function in guiding practical decisions (1966: 53–4) and Kant’s proposal that religious utterances communicate guidance for how to think ( Critique of Pure Reason A671/B699; A686/B714). This section will consider the accounts from Ian Ramsey (1957) and more recently Rowan Williams (2014).

According to Ramsey, full-blooded religious engagement involves two things: a commitment and a discernment. The commitment is an attitude that is directed towards the universe as a whole; it is “total” and has a particular intensity akin to a personal relationship. The discernment involves a “disclosure”, which he describes as a recognition of something of enormous importance. The something in question is not a new fact but a recognition that “brings together” what is known whereby one appreciates the world in a new light. For Ramsey, the purpose of religious language is to communicate and promote religious commitment and discernment: “religious language talks of the discernment with which is associated, by way of response, a total commitment” (1957: 49). With respect to utterances about God, Ramsey says:

My suggestion is that we understand their logical behaviour aright if we see them as primarily evocative of what we have called the odd discernment, that characteristically religious situation which, if evoked, provokes a total commitment. (1957: 50)

When it comes to the details of how to interpret specific religious utterances, Ramsey’s proposals are very varied. Some utterances he takes to be expressive of attitudes. Talk of “eternal purpose” aims to evoke a sense of “cosmic wonder” (1957: 77). Some are metalinguistic claims about the proper use of religious discourse:

to say that “God is impassable” is to claim that the word “God” is a word which cannot be confined to passability language. (1957: 89)

Others are about mystery:

Let us recognize that the doctrine of the Virgin Birth is essentially a claim for mystery at Christ’s birth or at Christ’s death. (1957: 132)

However, for Ramsey, religious sentences have representational content but are used by speakers in a variety of non-representational ways—expressive, metalinguistic, to generate a sense of mystery—for the purposes of evoking discernment and encouraging commitment, rather than descriptively.

Recently Rowan Williams (2014) has proposed that religious language serves to challenge us both morally, by undermining selfishness and complacency, as well as conceptually by encouraging us to think about the world in different terms. The use of religious language involves innovations that “invite us to rethink our metaphysical principles” (2014: 130), undercut “our sense of being a finished subject with a clear agenda of need and desire” (2014: 152–3), and “open us to a truth that is changing us and never leaves us in complacent possession of the power we think we have” (2014: 154). A similar approach is taken to discourse about God. What we are representing in talking of God is not an object but “a particular aspect of every perception, the aspect that gives to any specific perception its provisionality, its openness to being represented afresh” (2014: 148). These purposes can be furthered even by using religious sentences that are not consistent.

Face value theorists will, of course, find much to object to in both Ramsey’s and Williams’ discussions of religious language. One obvious point to raise is that if engagement in religious discourse is driven by the purposes that Ramsey and Williams describe then it seems that one need not be concerned with the truth of what one says. Notably, Williams appears to be sympathetic to the endorsement of incoherent claims if they further the broader proposed purposes of religious discourse. However, caution is needed in classifying these accounts as descriptive of religious discourse rather than revisionary proposals for objectives that speakers might aim for. If they fall into the latter category, then they are in a similar position to revolutionary fictionalism.

4. Religious Minimalism

Minimalist accounts of religious language, which are—rightly or wrongly—closely associated with Wittgenstein, agree with (a*) and (b*) but take issue with the face value understanding of descriptiveness along with associated ideas of fact, representation, reference and truth. For convenience, let us call these realism-relevant concepts. The opposition involves two main ideas. First, rather than posit a demanding standard that a field of discourse must meet to count as genuinely descriptive, minimalists propose that a discourse that satisfies very modest conditions—for example, that it possesses a truth predicate and standards of justification for what is affirmed or rejected—is thereby descriptive. Second, realism-relevant concepts are taken to be at least partly constituted by features of the discourse (or “language game”) in which they are used. Minimalists thereby reject a uniform account of descriptiveness across different areas of discourse. Descriptiveness, reference, truth, and so on are language-game-internal concepts: they are constituted differently in different areas of discourse. 4.1 will consider minimalist accounts of religious discourse and 4.2 will look at whether Wittgenstein might plausibly be understood as sharing this approach.

The discussion in this section touches on issues that have been explored in detail outside of the philosophy of religion. For more on the wider philosophical background see Stoljar & Damnjanovic 2014 on deflationary and Pedersen & Wright 2013 and 2016 on pluralist accounts of truth.

The two key features of minimalism are prominent in Hilary Putnam’s Wittgensteinian account of religious language in Renewing Philosophy (1992). First, Putnam draws attention to Wittgenstein’s well-known remarks on family resemblances (1953: 65–66). Wittgenstein’s target in these remarks is the idea that an expression requires necessary and sufficient conditions for its correct application. Intuitively, it seems that there must be such conditions if the meaning of the expression remains the same when it is used in different contexts. However, consider the term “game”, with its varying applications—board games, card games, Olympic games, and so on; we can see, Putnam (following Wittgenstein) argues, that for any particular condition that appears to characterise some types of game, there will be others that fail to satisfy it. Rather than common necessary and sufficient conditions for all uses of “game”, there is a network of similarities and relationships between them. Putnam proposes that Wittgenstein took a similar lesson to apply to notions like language , reference and truth :

referring uses don’t have an “essence”; there isn’t some one thing which can be called referring. There are overlapping similarities between one sort of referring and the next, that is all. (1992: 167–8)

Philosophical confusion results when, for instance, we attempt to apply standards of reference appropriate to descriptions of the perceived world to mathematical claims. Putnam then extends this point to religion:

The use of religious language is both like and unlike ordinary cases of reference: but to ask whether it is “really” reference or “not really” reference is to be in a muddle. There is no essence of reference … In short, Wittgenstein is telling you what isn’t the way to understand religious language. The way to understand religious language isn’t to try to apply some metaphysical classification of possible forms of discourse. (1992: 168)

A similar point is taken to extend to truth, descriptiveness and other realism-relevant concepts.

Second, Putnam argues that truth can be understood as idealised rational acceptability. [ 6 ] This is not to say that truth depends on justification here and now —that is, what seems to us justified on currently available evidence—but rather that truth is not independent of all justification: “To claim a statement is true is to claim it could be justified” (1981: 56). To be truth-apt, it is sufficient that the assertoric utterances of religious discourse are governed by internal standards of warrant. While the standards of warrant in a given area of religious discourse may be significantly different to those in science (appealing to the authority of the Bible or the Pope, for instance, would not count in favour of a scientific theory), the condition that there are such standards is clearly satisfied. To arrive at a positive account of what constitutes truth (and other realism-relevant concepts) in religion , therefore, requires an examination of the specific standards of justification that are in play in religious discourse (or, more accurately, the different standards in different religious discourses).

D.Z. Phillips was a leading interpreter and champion of a Wittgensteinian approach to philosophy of religion. His early writings appear sympathetic to a non-cognitivist account of religious discourse. He questions whether religious utterances are descriptive and proposes, for instance, that “religious belief is itself the expression of a moral vision” (1976: 143) and that

the praising and the glorifying does not refer to some object called God. Rather, the expression of such praise and glory is what we call the worship of God. (1976: 149)

In his later writings from the 1990s, however, Phillips’ remarks appear more minimalist.

By all means say that “God” functions as a referring expression, that “God” refers to a sort of object, that God’s reality is a matter of fact, and so on. But please remember that, as yet, no conceptual or grammatical clarification has taken place . We have all the work still to do since we shall now have to show, in this religious context, what speaking of “reference”, “object”, “existence”, and so on amounts to, how it differs, in obvious ways, from other uses of these terms. (1995: 138)

Here, Phillips allows that religious expressions refer and religious sentences are descriptive, etc., but proposes—in line with minimalism—that the reference and descriptiveness of religious discourse is partly constituted by features distinctive of religious discourse. For a detailed and sympathetic treatment of Phillips’ work see Burley 2012 and for a critique see Scott & Moore 1997.

In general, religious minimalists agree on a number of points. They grant that religious statements have propositional content, and may be true, descriptive, factual, and so on. Second, realism-relevant concepts are understood as language game internal concepts. To know what makes for truth in religion, for instance, we need to look at the internal standards of justification that inform religious discourse. Third, the primary aim of minimalism, at least in the Wittgensteinian form it takes in philosophy of religion, is to elucidate the different standards that characterise different areas of discourse, and to spell out the differences between realism-relevant concepts in religion and realism-relevant concepts in science or history. However, there is also an important area of disagreement between religious minimalists. Phillips takes the different constitution of truth in different areas discourse to show that “true” means something different in different discourses: We have multiple truth concepts, with different extensions (1976: 142; 1995: 149). In contrast, Putnam appears to be more sympathetic to a pluralist account of truth: the truth predicate has certain necessary and sufficient conditions for its use (such as the disquotational schema) but may be additionally constituted by different further conditions according to whether we are talking about religious truths, scientific truths, or ethical truths (see Wright 1992: ch. 2). Fragmentary accounts of truth of the kind that Phillips appears to endorse have been widely criticised—see, for example, Timothy Williamson (1994: 141) Christine Tappolet (1997).

Religious minimalism is usually offered as a program of research rather than a detailed account of religious discourse. There is talk of the need to attend to the practices and forms of life of religious believers, an emphasis on the difference between religious and other areas of discourse, and warnings against applying scientific or historical standards to religious judgements, but the positive story of the meaning of religious utterances is often left as a promissory note. However, there are some areas where more substantial points of disagreement can be pursued. For instance, many supporters of the face value theory will reject the pluralist or fragmentary accounts of truth that inform the minimalist approach. Also, even if one is sympathetic to a pluralist account of truth, it does not straightforwardly follow that truth in religion is different from truth in science or history (for a defense of this point see Scott 2013: ch. 11). Religious minimalism will also be rejected by non-cognitivists. If the descriptiveness of religious language is secured as easily as minimalists propose, then this will undermine the non-cognitivist position that it is—despite superficial appearances—not descriptive. Non-cognitivists argue that the “propositional surface” of language conceals a variety of different functions: ethical statements express approval or disapproval, mathematical statements are stipulations, and so on. For a defense of this see Blackburn 1998.

Wittgenstein’s work on religion has served as a sourcebook for modern opposition to the face value theory. His remarks have been seen as lending support to many of the positions considered in this article. Non-cognitivists can find support in Wittgenstein’s characterisation of religion as “a passionate commitment to a system of reference” (1970 [1994, 64]; see also Tilghman 1991); fictionalists in his proposal that religious believers live their lives according to certain “pictures”; non-assertoric speech act theorists in his comparison of religious utterances to commands (1970 [1994, 61]). Wittgenstein was even attracted (if only briefly) to a subjectivist interpretation of God-talk ([PO]: 42). Given Wittgenstein writings on religion are only infrequent and relatively brief, it is perhaps not surprising that, beyond his clear resistance to the face value theory, he would not have settled views on the topic. For accounts profoundly influenced by or interpretative of Wittgenstein, see Winch (1987), N. Malcom (1997), Rhees (1970).

The minimalist reading of Wittgenstein is supported by his apparent endorsements of a deflationary account of truth (1953: 136), although he does not explicitly endorse the idealised justification theory that Putnam proposes. However, the best evidence for minimalism comes from his emphasis on the differences between the use of religious sentences, and historical or scientific (and in general empirical and descriptive) sentences. Specifically, he points up differences between the standards of warrant employed in religious and other discourses—the kinds of circumstance in which a religious believer judges something to be true, grounds for disagreements between religious believers and non-believers, and so on. This pervades his work on religion. For example, Wittgenstein compares the religious belief in the Last Judgement with scientifically based beliefs, or ordinary beliefs about observable states of affairs (he gives the example “There is a German aeroplane overhead”). While religious believers may speak of “evidence” and “historical events”, Wittgenstein argues that the evidence and events cited in connection with religious judgements do not constitutes reasons to believe them in the way that evidence given in support of a hypothesis gives a reason to believe that the hypothesis is true. In religious discourse “reasons look entirely different from normal reasons” (1966: 56), religious belief is not “a matter of reasonability” (1966: 58), religious beliefs are not hypotheses or opinions, they are not properly spoken of as objects of knowledge or as having a high probability, and when historical facts are introduced in support of religious belief “they are not treated as historical, empirical, propositions” (1966: 57). Here Wittgenstein seems at pains to emphasise the contrast between religious discourse and empirical discourses. Indeed, he implies that when taken (or where offered) as reporting scientific facts or scientific theories, religious sentences are in error. Wittgenstein is not, according to the minimalist interpretation, seeking to find any disadvantageous comparison between religion and science; to show, for example, that religion is merely expressive of attitudes, while science is properly descriptive. Rather, he is describing the different standards that make for truth and descriptiveness in these fields of discourse and, in so doing, elucidating the distinctive characteristics of religious truth as well as other realism-relevant concepts.

Notably, if Wittgenstein was a minimalist about religious discourse then one standard line of objection to his account is misplaced. Wittgenstein is sometimes criticised as proposing that religious discourse should be quarantined from other areas of discourse, in particular science and history. This is seen as leading to a variety of fideism, where religious beliefs are compartmentalised and unsusceptible to non-religious intellectual evaluation. The objection is forcefully prosecuted by Kai Nielsen. According to Wittgenstein, Nielsen argues,

no philosophical or other kind of reasonable criticism, or for that matter defence, is possible for forms of life or, indeed, of any form of life, including Hinduism, Christianity and the like. (2000: 147)

However, contrasting the different standards exhibited by religious and scientific discourses is consistent with scientifically or historically well-founded evidence informing religious judgement. Indeed, minimalists would be remiss in not taking account of the fact that historical evidence clearly is seriously weighed in a variety of religious beliefs including belief in Christ’s resurrection, or the creation of the world, and beliefs about miracle workers and what they have done. Insofar as this happens, the verdicts of historical or scientific investigation can modify religious judgements. In a similar way, many religious judgements are dependent on historically or scientifically assessable evidence. For example, compelling evidence that the documentary and eyewitness testimony for a miracle was a hoax would be a good reason not to believe that the miracle in question occurred and this evidence comes from “outside” the religious language game. However, minimalists can allow that empirical evidence is part of the justification for many religious beliefs while maintaining the theory that religious discourse employs distinct standards of justification to science.

Although they have received less attention that the other topics in this article, two other issues relating to religious language should be noted. First, the reference of “God”, second, the logic of religious language.

Recent work on the reference of “God” mostly proceeds from the assumption that “God” is a name rather than a title or a description (for criticism of this view see Johnston 2011: 6–7; for supporting arguments see Scott 2013: 86–7). From this starting point, attention has focused on how to apply the rich resources of research on names from the philosophy of language to this case. For example, according to descriptivist theories “God” has a descriptive content (a view that stretches back at least as far as Anselm), whereas according to Millian theories “God” refers to its bearer without conveying any information about the object referred to. The latter theory can be combined with a causal theory of reference (Kripke 1980) to explain how the name becomes attached to the referent. Although many of the arguments in this debate derive from the philosophy of language, there are also interesting implications of these positions for the philosophy of religion. For instance, a descriptivist theory appears to place limits on how wrong we can be about what God is like. A causal theory of reference, in contrast, will need to be backed up by a defence of the possibility of causal interaction with God and an account of how God is named. For discussion of these theories see Alston 1989 and 1991, Gellman 1997 and Sullivan 2012. For a recent review of the field see Scott 2013: ch. 7.

Does religious language adhere to a non-classical logic? This issue has been raised in at least two contexts. First, some of the writings of authors in the apophatic tradition have been seen as supporting a paraconsistent logic of religious language, specifically dialetheism, the view that some contradictory sentences are true (see Priest 2002: 22–3, although Scott & Citron 2016: 72 cast doubt on this as a plausible interpretation of apophatic authors). Second, Michael Dummett considers a number of arguments in favour of the view the divine omniscience entails bivalence, i.e., that for any statement p it is determinately either true or false. For example, if God knows that p , then He knows that he knows that p and therefore it is true; but if God does not know p then He knows that He does not know it and hence knows that it is not true. From this it can be shown that God must know whether p is true or false, thereby securing bivalence (2004: 94–96; see also 1991: 318–9, 348–351). Since, for Dummett, realism for a field of discourse hinges on the success of the principle of bivalence for the statements of that discourse, it would follow that theism leads to global realism. For a critical discussion of Dummett’s arguments see Scott and Stevens 2007.

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6.2.13: Religious Language and Worldviews

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Introduction

The relationship of religious faith to reason is a very complex issue. It is also one of the most important issues in Philosophy of Religion and an issue that focuses on the core of the religious phenomena. There are several possible views. In the course of examining religious phenomena, specifically religious faith, with critical analysis there arise several different possible explanations for what religious language is and what it is meant to convey. The relation of reason to faith is a matter of the relation of religious language through which the religious faith is described and the faculties of reasoning and critical analysis. To explore this issue is to examine or search for the very core of religion itself!

The Questions

World views and conceptual frameworks.

In order to examine these issues and to enter into a serious dialogue with others who have considered these questions it is important to understand the meaning of certain important concepts that become involved in the ongoing discussion.

Since the issues involve the basic ways in which people experience and think about their world the very concept of a basic and global perspective on life and experience must be examined. What is it? Where does it come from? How does it function? What is its importance?

What is the relation of Reason to Faith? Can or must a set of religious beliefs be rationally examined and understood? Must they be consistent and coherent, make sense and be verifiable?

Since the issues involved with examining sets of religious beliefs and they often contain or constitute the basic ways in which people experience and think about their world, the very concept of a basic and global perspective on life and experience must be examined. What is it? Where does it come from? How does it function? What is its importance?

As each person interacts with others in a given environment they learn not only about things, (their names and features) but they learn from others the basic framework in which it is believed that those things are set. People learn a number of basic ideas through the very language that they learn to speak. These ideas are imbedded in the language itself. As long as all the users of the language use it in a similar fashion there is little reason for any one of them to begin to think about the underlying assumptions or basic ideas that are imbedded in that language.

The use of ordinary language to express religious ideas about what is most important or most basic often leads others to begin the examination of the imbedded assumptions of ordinary language itself.

For example , when people grow up hearing and speaking about such things as: having a "mind", "losing my mind", "what’s on your mind?", "are you out of your mind?"

The result is that people in that culture that uses language this way have a belief that humans have something called a "mind" and that it is important and may be occupying a space in their body but is not part of it. These ideas about the existence and nature of the mind are imbedded in the language. There is not a sufficient amount of evidence to actually support these ideas and the evidence can be interpreted differently depending on whether or not one begins the examination of the evidence already with the belief in the existence of the mind.

People hold different views of various matters. The difference in those views is of different orders. Two or more people can view the same event from different physical perspectives or with different attitudes towards what they have viewed. Over and above those differences, people can view matters with very different ideas about what things mean what is valued, and what it takes to prove something, even what constitutes reality. When people share a common set of basic beliefs about what is real, true, known, valued and how one comes to know things then they share in what is known as a worldview.

Conceptual Framework

This is a set of ideas which establish a manner of viewing either all of reality or some well-defined portion of it. For example, physicists may view events using the framework of quantum mechanics or that of relativity theory. Their findings and explanations will differ accordingly.

A set of profoundly unfalsifiable assumptions that govern all of a person’s other beliefs.

Each person has such bliks and no one can escape having them. Some claim that these bliks can not be subjected to rational scrutiny. Others claim that they can and should be appraised rationally; that a gradual accumulation of evidence and reasoning can count against a blik and lead to its abandonment. For example, someone who believes in alien visitations to earth and government conspiracies to cover them up will experience official government reports and independent investigations of such phenomena and claims much differently from someone who does not hold those beliefs concerning extraterrestrials and government officials. Bliks are a “ belief which is strongly held, in spite of evidence to the contrary.” Bliks are “views that avoid debates.” R.M Hare

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Bliks by Kelly Dorsey (NCC, 2006)

Bliks are beliefs that are strongly held, in spite of evidence to the contrary. These bliks( beliefs) become the basis for other beliefs. It was thought that that if a skeptic were to present data to a believer in opposition of that person’s blik, the believer would give up that blik. However, due to the fact that bliks are so foundational, the believer will come up with a “rationalization” for the discrepancy rather than to give up on their conviction. “A blik is not an assertion, not a concept, not a system of thought. It is what underlies the possibility of any kind of assertion about facts and their meanings. Hare writes: "Differences between bliks about the world cannot be settled by observation of what happens to the world. . . . It is by our bliks that we decide what is and what is not an explanation." Furthermore, because bliks are a basis for self-involving language, we care very deeply about our religious assertions. It becomes very important to have the right blik.(R. M. Hare in Antony Flew and Alasdair MacIntyre, eds., New Essays in Philosophical Theology, pp. 100-101.)”

Hare also points out that people may agree about the facts and differ intensely about the interpretation: "The facts that religious discourse deals with are perfectly ordinary empirical facts like what happens when you pray; but we are tempted to call them supernatural facts because our way of living is organized round them; they have for us value, relevance, importance, which they would not have if we were atheists" (Basil Mitchell, ed., Faith and Logic [London: George Allen & Unwin, 1957], pp. 189-90.)

READ: The Language Gap and God: Religious Language and Christian Education by Randolph Crump Miller Published by Pilgrim Press, Philadelphia and Boston, 1970. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted and Winnie Brock.

Another way of viewing bliks is to imagine them as mental filters. Information will pass through filtration allowing fragments of reality be accepted, while other portions of reality which conflict with their blik will be sifted out.

“Hare says religious people have a religious blik. Once you accept the religious blik, you have a brand-new way of looking at the world. Your frame of reference is radically altered, and with it, your evidentiary standards. Suddenly all sorts of things that previously did not count as evidence for God begin to count. Your evidentiary filter becomes much more porous. The existence of God becomes so obvious that nothing can falsify it.”

READ: The Problem of Religious Language by Sandra LaFave of West Valley College

An example of a common religious blik shared by people of the Western religions is the belief in Creationism. No matter what evidence is provided in support of the Theory of Evolution, including human remains that predate the supposed creation of Earth, their blik remains unscathed. The reason for this is because if they discredit their blik, then other aspects of the religion might also become discredited. Creating reasons for the inconsistencies are a defense mechanism in order to preserve their way of life and possibly their mental health. If in fact the evidence against their blik was excepted by them and they did disregard that belief, a domino effect could take place. In the end the believers are left confused. If something they held as a basic truth was disproved, then the foundation for all their truths could be shaken. Bliks effect they way a person perceives the world and therefore are subconsciously protected by the believer.

Bilks also are a catalyst for bringing people together. Those who own the same bliks seek each other out in order to support their belief. The more people who believe something, the more credible the belief becomes to others. This insures that certain religious bliks will be passed down to future generations.

Linguistic Framework

Wittgenstein has observed that the limits of my language are the limits of my world. If a person does not have the words with which to think of something then it may be impossible for that person to think that the object of that thought even exists. On the other hand a person may live in a culture that has many words with which to think of things and so that person has more objects in the world than those people from cultures without the words. For example, Eskimos have many more words for "snow" than do other peoples. They experience snow differently. For them there are a far greater number of different forms of snow than the non-Eskimo experiences. Chinese languages use gerunds (action words) for nouns. Their view of reality is one which has a much greater amount of activity in it and less isolation of objects from one another than those people who are not raised with Chinese as their first or basic language.

Form of Life or Language Games

Wittgenstein has observed that humans enter into different uses of language in which the words take on different meanings. There are in life different situations or contexts in which the language usage and meaning may vary and these are repeatable and organized . They are referred to as language games or forms of life . A person could enter into several different language games during a lifetime. For example, there is the ordinary form of life and then the sports form of life. There is the scientific form of life and language game and there is the religious form of life and language game. To "steal" is wrong ordinarily but to "steal" a base is acceptable and commendable in baseball and to "steal" the opponent’s game plan or signals is acceptable in basketball or football. To " kill" one’s opponent means one thing on the streets and another in an athletic contest.

READ this on Wittgenstein's Fideism

Basic Beliefs- Foundational Beliefs

Whether it be religion or science or athletics or commerce there are certain basic beliefs upon which an entire set of ideas are built or constructed or rest. These basic ideas are not tested for their truthfulness or accuracy. They are not verified. They are not capable of being verified. Yet, the entire system of ideas rests upon them. For example, in science the idea of uniformity of nature is a "given" or basic idea and so is the very existence of an external universe that is separate and apart from the knower or experiencer. Likewise the process of reasoning known as Induction is accepted as a form of reasoning and verification. Yet there are no "proofs" that such ideas are "true". Foundational beliefs are a “given.”

READ this on Reformed Epistemology for some notion of the Basic or Foundational Beliefs

Reformed Epistemology

Evidentialist Position on Basic Belief Systems

Some theorists hold that any and all basic belief systems must be and are subject to a method of verification that utilizes physical evidence and phenomenal evidence. This requires that there be physical events, objects and experiences that confirm the basic beliefs or at least a substantial number of them.

READ this on Evidentialism The Rejection of Enlightenment Evidentialism

Coherentist Position on Basic Belief Systems

In this view the basic belief systems can not be verified or confirmed using actual evidence. It is enough for the believers to subject their belief systems to a rational examination utilizing the criteria of coherency. What is required for a believer is that the basic ideas be consistent with one another and make sense in reference to one another.

IV. Relationship of Faith to Reason

There are several possible views of the relationship of Faith to Reason. They are:

Commensurable

It is rational to believe in God and spirits and other religious claims. Reason and Faith are compatible with one another as is Science and Religion because there is but one truth.

This is the position of the single largest religious group on earth in 2004: the Roman Catholics and has been theirs for some time. It was clearly offered by Thomas Aquinas and has recently been re affirmed by Pope John Paul II (1998)

Compatible ( Aquinas )

The basic religious beliefs are compatible with reason. There are rational supports for those beliefs. Other beliefs may be strictly matters of faith resting upon the basic beliefs.

For more detail: READ : On faith and reason

Complete Harmony ( Kant )

Religious belief and Reason are in complete harmony with one another.

B. Incommensurable

It is NOT rational to believe in God, spirits and other religious claims.

1. Irrational ( Hume, Kierkegaard )

Faith is opposed to reason and is firmly in the realm of the irrational.

2.Transrational ( Calvin, Barth )

Religious faith is over and above reason and is not to be subject to criteria generally used by reasoning beings. To use reason on matters of faith is not only inappropriate but irreverent and faithless.

For many of those who hold the transrational position religious faith may be rested upon revelation which is self-authenticating.

The relation of Reason to Faith and Religious Language Use

Logical Positivists came up with a principle that states that a statement or claim has meaning if and only if it can be proved or falsified empirically- with testing. With this principle some have attempted to totally disprove the whole of religion claiming that religious languages is devoid of meaning because it is incapable of empirical verification or falsification. But consider some points that are raised in a famous symposium. It was titled A "Symposium on Theology and Falsification," and the participants were Antony Flew, R. M. Hare and Basil Mitchell.

READ this summary of the Symposium on Theology and Falsification by Allen Stairs

Antony Flew

Antony Flew maintains that serious truth claims must be capable of rational scrutiny. For such claims to be meaningful there must exist conditions that would count against the claim being true. This is to claim that the statement must be capable of being falsified. This is known as falsifiability. If there are no conditions that would falsify the claim then for Flew the claim is meaningless and belief in it is not rational. Thus, Flew presents religious beliefs as resting upon meaningless claims because those claims can not be falsified. Anthony Flew argued this point in the Parable of the Garden by John Wisdom. Flew presented, in an essay he titled `Gods', written in 1944, that there are two men- a man who believes a gardener visits the garden unseen and unheard, giving order and life to the garden, and another man who doesn't believe in the gardener he, or any other person, has never seen. Anthony Flew takes the position of the skeptic to illustrate his point. How, exactly, does an invisible, intangible gardener differ from no gardener at all? His other argument against religious language was religious believers will let nothing count against their beliefs then they cannot be proved because they cannot be falsified.

READ Flew's Theology and Falsification

Hare maintains that Flew’s criteria for rationality should not apply to religious beliefs. Such beliefs are based upon and constitute a blik , which is a set of profoundly unfalsifiable assumptions, which people use to order their lives. There are a variety of such blik s . Science operates with its own blik and so religion is to be treated no differently. He coined the term ` blik ' to describe a state where you will not allow anything to count against your beliefs.

READ Hare's Reply to Flew

READ Flew's Reply to Hare

Basil Mitchell

Basil Mitchell's response to all of this was an attempt to take a position between Flew and Hare that held that religious believers do actually see things that count against their beliefs. Only they don't believe these things ultimately count against their beliefs. Professor Mitchell takes a compromise position between Hare and Flew. He argues that bliks exist but he holds that a gradual accumulation of evidence should be able to overturn or remove a blik . Religious beliefs are either:

provisional hypotheses
significant articles of faith
empty or meaningless statements that make no difference in experience or to life.

The religious person can not accept position (1) and must avoid slipping into (3) which leaves only (2) and continued belief.

Mitchell provides another parable. This one is about the resistance movement and a stranger. A member of the resistance movement of an occupied country meets a stranger who claims to be the resistance leader. The stranger seems truthful and trustworthy enough to the member of the resistance movement, and he places his trust in him wholly. The stranger's behavior is highly ambiguous, and at times his trust is tried, at other times his trust in the stranger is strengthened. This is how Mitchell's parable differs from Hare's: the partisan in the resistance parable admits that many things may and do count against his belief, whereas, the believer who has a blik about dons doesn't admit that anything counts against his blik. Nothing can count against bliks.

According to Basil Mitchel, “evidence can be found which counts for and against such beliefs, but once a commitment to believe has been made, neither the partisan nor the religious believer will allow anything to count decisively against their beliefs.” So then what Mitchell has argued is that religious believers do not actually have bliks. Allen Stairs describes Mitchell's position as presenting the case that " the partisan in Mitchell's parable has been moved by the stranger enough to trust that even when it seems otherwise, the stranger really is on his side. The religious believer has a similar attitude of trust in God, Mitchell claims. The trust is not without a sense of tension and conflict -- if it were, it would be the sort of meaningless non-assertion that Flew attacks. But the believer has committed himself or herself to not abandoning belief in the face of seeming evidence to the contrary, because the believer has adopted an attitude of faith." -- the Symposium on Theology and Falsification by Allen Stairs

So Mitchell's argument is straightforward- religious beliefs are a matter of fact which can be proved or disproved. The stranger knows whose side he is on. After the war the ambiguity of the stranger's behavior will be capable of being resolved. In the same way, many religious claims such as including the existence or non-existence of a deity or characteristics of a deity such as it being all loving or all powerful or having concern for humans will also be capable of being proven or disproven. Mitchell claimed he had demonstrated that religious language is meaningful. For Mitchell all that remains is to prove or disprove the truth of the claims.

Flew's response to Mitchell

Flew was critical of Mitchell's attempt to argue by analogy using the parable of the partisan and the stranger. This was because Flew thought that the analogy was comparing a mere mortal human being to a deity. The stranger is only a human being and as Allen Stairs puts it " That makes it easy to explain why he does not always appear to be on our side. But God is not limited in any way; no excuses could be made for God's lapses. However, Mitchell could surely point out: it isn't a matter of making specific excuses. It is a matter of having faith that there is some explanation, even if we can't see what it is -- of saying that we don't understand, but we trust. The question Flew would presumably ask is: don't we understand well enough?" -- the Symposium on Theology and Falsification by Allen Stairs

As is often the case in Philosophy careful examination of positions reveals the assumptions held by the Philosophers. With Flew and Hare it may appear that they start with different assumptions about what it might mean to believe in God in the first place. For Flew it appears that a belief in God and religious practice involve at least some "truth" claims, i.e., some statements that are testable, that is, that could be checked to "see" if they were "true" or "false." Flew approaches the language used by religious people as being similar to ordinary language when making claims about what is real and what exists. Hare may not be thinking of religious language in the same way. Hare appear to think that there is more to religious beliefs and the use of religious language than to be simply a set of sentences that make propositions or claims about what is or is not the case. What else could religious language be doing then?

With religion there is a form of life or language game, as Wittgenstein and the fideists would have it. Religious language is used differently than elsewhere in life. The same words take on different meaning and expressions function in different ways. In the religious form of life language is conveying VALUE and MEANING without which it is difficult for a human to live. Many of the most basic beliefs in the religious form of life are not subject to empirical verification from the science form of life. The claims appear to be empirical claims but they are not.

There is an antelope in the field.
There is a deity in heaven.
There is the Tao in all.

The first claim may be subjected to the techniques of empirical verification/falsification. It has a potential truth value.

The other two claims are not subject to such empirical examination and verification or falsification. They are non-falsifiable claims. They have an immunity to being examined by science. Why?

The later claims are in the religious form of life and they are AXIOLOGICAL claims. They are claims about what a person believes and such beliefs are expression of what a person values most in life and what thereby provides for order and meaning in life.

For more on considering language about a deity and religious language as Axiological rather than as making Ontological claims : READ: Nicholas Rescher, On Faith And Belief

Michael Scriven

Professor Scriven argues for atheism on rational grounds. He holds that one should hold a belief based upon reason. There is not a rational argument to compel belief in a deity. None of the arguments offered to prove that a deity exists is rationally convincing. None of them lead to the conclusion that there is a deity without any flaw or weakness in the argumentation. Therefore there are only two choices: agnosticism and atheism. For Scriven one can be an agnostic if there is as much evidence for a position as against it. There being no compelling rational argument for belief in a deity, Scriven concludes that agnosticism must be rejected and atheism is the position which reason obliges one to take in the absence of any evidence and compelling arguments to the contrary. Again, there being no compelling proof for the existence of a deity, atheism is the rational conclusion.

Dr. Lewis maintains that there is an accumulation of evidence in the life of a believer that becomes self-authenticating. In this sense religious beliefs can be claimed by the believer to be valuable and "true". The sense of their being "true " would not be the same sense as when scientists assert that a claim is true. In the later sense the claim has been empirically verified. In the former sense in the religious form of life or language game the religious belief is self authenticated as being a fulfillment of what was expected by believing in the claim. It is so authenticated by individual believers each in his or her own way. In the latter sense of true there is a public process of verifying the claim by a community of scientists. So it is the same word "true" but with two different meanings in the two different languages: science and faith.

Pragmatic Approach

In this view whether the ideas or claims of a religion are true or not or make sense or not is not that important as those questions may not be resolvable. What is important is whether or not there are reasons for a person to be a believer and what difference it makes in the world to be a believer.

Whether or not to believe becomes a matter for reasoning and calculating in terms of its consequences and not the veracity of the claims or the coherency of the set of religious beliefs.

Pascal ’s Wager

This French thinker held that one should use reason to determine whether or not to believe in the existence of God. He utilized a rationalization as the basis for belief. He thought that a person should conduct an evaluation of the advantages of belief and weigh them against the disadvantages; a cost-benefit analysis. The result of his "calculations" was that he thought it far more reasonable to believe than not to for the rewards are greater and the possible disadvantages are far less if one is mistaken and it turns out that there is no deity at all.

Table of possible consequences:

Therefore , it is better to believe!!!

As summarized by Louis Pojman:

“If I believe in God and God exists I win eternal happiness and infinite gain. If God does not exist, I suffer minor inconvenience. If I do not believe in God, and God exists, I lose eternal bliss. I suffer infinite loss infinite loss unhappiness.” “If I do not believe in God, and God does not exist “I gain a finite amount of pleasure.”

Non-Epistemic proofs are arguments for the existence of God that are not knowledge-based arguments. If understood properly, the non-epistemic proof should invoke a personal response. The power of Pascal's Wager is not found in valid rules of inference but in probability and possible outcomes. The Wager appeals to the gambler in us - not the philosopher. Other non-epistemic proofs have been formulated based on pragmatic concerns, beauty, morality, and more.

***************************************

Problem with Pascal's Wager: Clifford vs James

W.K. Clifford argues against such a wager and the Ethics of Belief. He claims that we should never hold a belief without sufficient justification. The moral foundation for promoting the use of reason in drawing conclusions is argued in The Ethics of Belief (1877) ( Originally published in Contemporary Review, 1877) wherein William K. Clifford concludes that :

We may believe what goes beyond our experience, only when it is inferred from that experience by the assumption that what we do not know is like what we know. We may believe the statement of another person, when there is reasonable ground for supposing that he knows the matter of which he speaks, and that he is speaking the truth so far as he knows it. It is wrong in all cases to believe on insufficient evidence; and where it is presumption to doubt and to investigate, there it is worse than presumption to believe.

READ: Clifford, W. K. “The Ethics of Belief.” Lectures and Essays. London: Macmillan, 1879.

Summary by Meghan Ramsay, QCC 2004

In his essay, W.K. Clifford opposes the pragmatic justifications, like Pascal’s wager, for belief in the existence of a deity. Clifford maintains that beliefs based upon insufficient evidence are always wrong. In essence, believing in something just because it may prove to be beneficial in the long run is not genuine belief. To illustrate his point, Clifford gives an example of a ship owner who sees that his ship is old and in need of repairs. However, the ship owner manages to convince himself that his ship has made many voyages from which it has always returned safely, and he begins to sincerely believe that this trip will be no different than all of the previous ones. Although the evidence before him suggests danger for the passengers, the owner has faith and lets the ship sail. Clifford points out that if the ship sinks, the owner will be directly responsible for the deaths that occur as a result of his negligence. Clifford also points out that even if the ship managed to make the voyage, the owner would still be guilty, he just wouldn’t be found out, as the question has to do with the foundation for his belief rather than the outcome. In this case, the ship owner had no right to believe that the ship would be safe because of the evidence before him. Clifford points out that it is not so much the belief that must be judged but the actions following the belief. Even though the ship owner believed in the seaworthiness of his ship, he could have taken the precaution of having it examined before putting the lives of others on the line. Yet Clifford points out that when acting in a way that is opposite of one’s belief, it seems to condemn the belief. For example, if the ship owner truly believed that his ship was sound, he would have no reason to have it examined. The examination would suggest that the owner did indeed have some doubts. Clifford maintains that it is one’s duty to investigate both sides of an issue, and when one holds a belief that is not based upon evidence he looses his objectivity and is unable to perform that duty. Additionally, Clifford points out that beliefs are all incredibly significant, as they lay the foundation for accepting or rejecting all other beliefs and provide the framework for future action. Additionally, one’s beliefs are not private. Beliefs are passed on within society and to future generations. Beliefs which are based upon evidence and have been thoroughly investigated allow humanity to have mastery over more of the world, but when those beliefs are unfounded and contrary to evidence, the mastery resulting is counterfeit. Clifford argues that beliefs that are unfounded are deceptive, as they make humans feel stronger and more knowledgeable when they really aren’t.

Clifford suggests that holding beliefs based upon insufficient evidence can lead to the downfall of society. Even if these beliefs turn out to be true, society will suffer, as people will stop examining the issues with an open mind. Humans will no longer inquire as to the validity of their beliefs. They will become gullible and susceptible to fraud, hastening the downfall of civilization. Thus, holding these unfounded beliefs and suppressing doubts is a sin against humanity.

William James argues that there is sufficient justification. There is a practical justification when one considers that we must make a decision and that believing can place one in a much better position.

READ: James, William. The Will to Believe. New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1897.

Summary by Meghan Ramsay, QCC 2004`

In his response to W.K. Clifford, William James points out that there are two ways of viewing humanity’s duty in terms of opinion and belief. He points out that we are commanded to know the truth and avoid error. However, knowing the truth and avoiding errors are not one commandment stated in two ways. Instead, they are separable, and stressing one over the other will provide vastly different results. James maintains that those who place the avoidance of error above knowing the truth (such as W.K. Clifford), are keeping their minds in a constant state of suspense out of fear of being duped. James likens this to a general telling his soldiers to avoid battle so that they do not suffer any injuries. Victories over neither foes nor nature are won by not taking action. Thus, James says, he is willing to face the occasional falsehood or dupe in order to eventually arrive at a true belief. James does take into account that there are times when we can postpone making a decision until more sufficient evidence is provided. However, we can only postpone making up our minds if the option is not a crucial one with earth-shattering consequences. James points out that often the need to act is not so critical and urgent that we must risk acting upon a false belief than on no belief at all.

James then moves into religious beliefs. He states that religion essentially states two things:

The best things are those which are eternal.
Belief in the first affirmation betters us now and forever.

James says that although the skeptic says he is awaiting more evidence before making his decision, he has, in all actuality already decided. The skeptic, according to James has decided that it is better and wiser to dismiss the belief in these two affirmations for fear of being duped than it is to believe and hope that they are true. In essence, by choosing to wait, the skeptic joins the side of the non-believer. Since no one is absolutely certain as to the existence of God, one must make the choice whether or not to believe or wait for more proof. However, choosing to wait is not considered being inactive—it’ is just as much an act as that of believing. Ultimately, James concludes that whether to believe or not is up to the individual. He maintains that one “enters at his/her own risk” (or does not enter at all at his/her own risk), and he concludes that no one should be intolerant of another’s choice whether to believe or not.

**********************************************************************

Notes on W.K. Clifford and William James

READ: Philip L. Quinn, Gale on a Pragmatic Argument for Religious Belief PHILO, Volume 6, Number 1.

Abstract: This paper is a study of a pragmatic argument for belief in the existence of God constructed and criticized by Richard Gale. The argument's conclusion is that religious belief is morally permissible under certain circumstances. Gale contends that this moral permission is defeated in the circumstances in question both because it violates the principle of universalizability and because belief produces an evil that outweighs the good it promotes. My counterargument tries to show that neither of the reasons invoked by Gale suffices to defeat the moral permission established by the original argument.

Final Questions

After examining religious language from a variety of perspectives and examining a variety of positions on the basic questions what questions are left unresolved? All the original issues and questions have been considered from a number of different perspectives and with a few different set of initial assumptions or worldviews and conceptual frameworks. What then is the result? The following questions remain as most important and, in some way, fundamental to understanding what religion is about :

Are religious beliefs subject to rational analysis and evaluation?
Are religious beliefs subject to scientific investigation for veracity?
Must religious beliefs satisfy the criteria of reasoning?
Is religious belief to be based upon a suspension of reasoning?
Are religious beliefs above reason or at least separate from reason?
If religious beliefs are not to be subject to reasoning or to scientific verification, how are humans who are rational beings to deal with them?

What are the possible positions that one can have on the issue of the relation of reason to faith? There are several and they include these:

1.Commensurable: Religious beliefs can be subject to reason and if they are they will be found to be quite reasonable and the basic claims.

2.Incommenserable : Religious beliefs should not be subject to reason as they are not reasonable and they do not need to be.

A. Irrational ( Hume, Kierkegaard ) It is NOT rational to believe in God, spirits and other religious claims. Faith is opposed to reason and is firmly in the realm of the irrational.

B.Transrational ( Calvin, Barth ) Religious faith is over and above reason and is not to be subject to criteria generally used by reasoning beings. To use reason on matters of faith is not only inappropriate but irreverent and faithless.

3. Fideism: This is a view of religious belief that faith must be held without the use of reason or even against reason. Faith does not need reason. Faith creates its own justification. There are two possible variations of fideism.

4. Coherentist: There is a role for reason in relation to religious beliefs. It may be limited but there is a role. Reason can not be used to determine the veracity of the reports and the veridical nature of accounts or to verify the claims made within the religious system. Yet, sets of religious beliefs or religious belief systems are at least subject to the use of reason upon them to the extent that they can be critically examined for the degree to which they are coherent and avoid inconsistencies and contradictions.

Which position is the one that makes the most sense and is supported by reasoning and evidence?

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Religous language meaningless essay

"Religious language is meaningless." Discuss. Religious language is how we communication ideas about God, faith and belief. However, the problem with religious language is that individuals have different interpretations of these concepts and will result in a difference in the use of everyday language. For some it is meaningless because the meaning is unclear. Yet, for some philosophers, religious language is meaningful and serves a lot of purpose. Some say religious language is meaningless as there is no way of verifying the language. There are several different types of language related to religion; cognitive and non-cognitive, synthetic and analytical, univocal and equivocal. Synthetic, non-cognitive and equivocal apply to religious language as everyone has a different opinion on things and we can gain a better knowledge to say what God is not rather than saying he is everything. Religious language is meaningful because we don't know how to falsify it. John Hick mentioned religious language was seen as believing in something and experiencing something. The logical positivists formulated the verification principle as they were concerned with the meaning of words and the way we use them in the context of God. They believe God's talk was meaningless as they are metaphysical statements. They believed for a statement to be deemed meaningful we had to be able to verify the truth through our empirical senses. A. J. Ayer, who was a supporter of the Verification Principle, said a proposition is meaningful if it is known how to prove it true or false. If such verification cannot take place, they become meaningless. He stated there were two types of the verification principle, the strong form and the weak form. The weak verification principle is knowing how to verify a statement. It would become meaningful if you know how to do this. The strong form of the verification principle was being able to prove something true or false through sense experience. Ayer also said to reject analytical statements would be illogical because you cannot try to disprove something that is actually true as you would be contradicting yourself.

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Is Religious Language Meaningful?

Many philosophers past and present have tried to analyse language to determine whether or not language has meaning. The topic of religious language caught the interest of philosophers around the world. Early analysis of language came from the Vienna Circle, was a group of philosophers including Schlich and Neurath who gave rise to the logical positivist movement. Logical Positivism being the movement in philosophy that believed that the aim of philosophy should be analysis of language, especially the language of science.

From the Vienna Circle came the theory which suggested that opposed religious language having any meaning, this was the Verification Principle. This stated that statements are only meaningful if they can be verified by the senses. They believed that statements only held meaning if they were empirically based, thus regarded mathematic statements as holding a lot of meaning, as all would agree 5 plus 5 equals 10 and this is empirically verifiable and true. The Verification Principle was developed and it was claimed that a statement could be meaningful if it was a tautology, something we know to be true by definition, for instance ‘all squares have four sides. Whilst tautologies are meaningful in that they are correct if thought about logically, they don’t tell us anything about the world which isn’t apparent, thus doesn’t lead to any new discoveries or a deepening of current knowledge.

The Verification Principle implies then that religious language is therefore meaningless as it is no verifiable by the senses, nobody has ever sensed could, although they can claim so, it is not empirically proven that God exists. When talking about language used to describe God one may argue that we know God to be all powerful because it is the definition of God, and we know this to be true. This argument would claim that it is a tautology and so it is meaningful, however this is would be a very weak argument which would be unable to stand up against theories opposing it.

This is a preview of the whole essay

A.J. Ayer proposed what would late be known as the weak Verification Principle… In his book ‘Language, Truth and Logic’ he rejects metaphysics as meaningless; this could explain the enthusiasm to provide a less rigid theory which could possibly imply that religious language is meaningful. His form of the Verification Principle stated that for a statement to be meaningful it must either be a tautology or verifiable in principle. This differed greatly from the ideas of the Vienna Circle as he stipulated it was not necessary to conclusively prove something by direct observation. He suggested that in order for a statement to be considered meaningful, we should be able to specify what would be required for the statement to be considered true. In this case religious language is meaningful, as it wouldn’t be difficult for somebody to suggest how it could be proven that God is faithful for example.

The falsification principle came about thereafter the Verification Principle. It looked at religious language from a new angle though. Karl Popper was prolific for his role in the Falsification Principle, he asserted that any theory that cannot be disproved is not valid. Therefore because we cannot disprove any of the statements used to talk about and describe God, it is meaningless.

Anthony Flew although he did not openly say that religious language is meaningless, his work leads many to believe that he did regard it as meaningless. He argued that religious language could not be falsified and therefore isn’t a genuine statement. He asked what would have to happen to disprove the existence of God. He used an analogy of an invisible gardener who tends to a garden who is unseen and cannot be trapped. But there is no way of disproving it existence because the statements used to describe him don’t allow it. Flew argued this was the same for religious believers as they ‘move the goalposts’ in religious language by making great claims about God which allow flexibility to get around any problem that God faces but this doesn’t mean it is true. There is no way of disproving that God doesn’t have an ultimate claim for us all, because it cannot be falsified it is false according to Flew.

Hume suggested that all language not empirically grounded should be “committed to the flames for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion” Through this he implied that religious language was meaningless and has little merit to it.

John Hick was a believer and questioned whether the Verification Principle renders religious statements meaningless, he used an analogy to illustrate that religious statements could be verified at the end of life, he calls this eschatological verification. Thus because there is a way that it could be verified, Hick argues that religious language is meaningful.

Some people claim that religious language is non-cognitive; it is not scientific, but instead emotional. Therefore it is not subject to the Verification Principle. Ayer agreed that something could hold meaning for one person and not for another, simply due to differences in belief. R.M. Hare had similar ideas and said people have bliks about the world, these are personal to them. These beliefs are not based on logic or empirical evidence. He suggests that religious believers have bliks about the world and use God to support it. Similarly empiricists have bliks and the way they see the world leads them to believe that everything must be scientifically proven. Hare says neither is more wrong or more right, thus religious language is meaningful but only to those with the same bliks.

Wittgenstein supported the ideas of Ayer and Hare; he posits that religious language is used differently and in different contexts, and has different meaning from person to person. He says that if you were to understand and practice it too, you would regard it as meaningful, but if you totally reject it then of course it would be meaningless. You could argue the same is true to different types of statements for instance mathematics or quantum physics, some people might not understand quantum physics or the reasoning behind it thus it holds no meaning for them. However, just because you don’t understand or use religious language doesn’t mean that it isn’t meaningful.

Some philosophers argue that religious statements are analogical and so they cannot be proved or disproved. They are simply metaphors, because any attempt to use precise language would only be anthropomorphising God. Therefore the verification principle doesn’t render religious language meaningless.

The Verification Principle is a challenge to religious language and its meaningfulness but not deadening as first thought. As it suggests that sense based verification is the oonly means of assessing meaningfulness, a reductionist viewpoint at best, but because there could be other ways of verifying religious language, such as Hick’s eschatological verification, religious language is not meaningless. Some may argue that religious language is meaningful dependent on the individual and their own beliefs. Due to its lack of empirical background it is a stretch to say it would have meaning for atheists, but it certainly has meaning for those who already have faith.

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Subject Religious Studies & Philosophy
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Religious Language
Religious language in A level philosophy looks at the meaning of religious statements, such as: "God exists". "God answers my prayers". "God loves us". This topic is not about whether these statements are true or false. Instead, the debate is about whether such religious language is meaningful or whether it is meaningless.
Religious Language is meaningless
The problem with religious language is that individuals' differences can impact interpretations of these concepts and thus result in a difference in the use of everyday language. For some this weakness makes religious language meaningless due to the use of equivocal language and the meaning is unclear. Yet, for some, religious language is ...
Model essay for religious language
Falsificationism does improve on Verificationism, however Mitchell shows that technically it fails to show that religious language is meaningless. Hare attempts an alternative defence of the meaningfulness of religious language as non-cognitively meaningful, but that fails to represent the way religious language actually functions.
"Religious Language is Meaningless!" Discuss [40]
Uncategorized. Religious language's meaningfulness is crucial for maintaining religious communities. Plato and Aristotle viewed words as signs pointing to meaning beyond themselves. For Kant, speaking meaningfully about God is impossible since human knowledge is rooted in observable phenomena. Verificationism and Falsificationism also challenge ...
Religious Language
Religious Language. First published Fri Aug 4, 2017; substantive revision Tue Mar 8, 2022. The principal aim of research on religious language is to give an account of the meaning of religious sentences and utterances. Religious sentences are generally taken to be have a religious subject matter; a religious utterance is the production in ...
Religious language: Negative, Analogical or Symbolic
The meaning of religious language is the spiritual connection to God it inspires through symbolic participation in the being of God. Tillich claimed that God is also a symbol for the 'ground of being' or for 'being-itself'. It's difficult to make full sense of this idea.
Religious language is meaningless, Discuss
Religious language is the communication of ideas about God, faith, belief and practice. The problem with religious language is that individuals have different interpretations of these concepts and will result in a difference in the use of everyday language. For some it is deemed meaningless because it is equivocal and the meaning is unclear ...
Problem of religious language
The problem of religious language considers whether it is possible to talk about God meaningfully if the traditional conceptions of God as being incorporeal, infinite, and timeless, are accepted. Because these traditional conceptions of God make it difficult to describe God, religious language has the potential to be meaningless.
Language, Religious
The term "religious language" refers to statements or claims made about God or gods. Here is a typical philosophical problem of religious language. If God is infinite, then words used to describe finite creatures might not adequately describe God. For example, is God good in the same sense that Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi ...
"Assess the view that religious language is meaningless."
The first argument for the idea that religious language is meaningless is logical positivism, a branch of philosophy that sprouted the idea of the verification principle. This idea first came about in the early work of Ludvig Wittgenstein, who put forward a picture theory of language.
Critically assess the claim that religious language is meaningless
Critically assess the claim that religious language is meaningless. The verification principle is a key argument for whether religious language is meaningful or not. Verification means a sentence can only be meaningful if some sense experience e.g. see, touch, and hear can count in its favour. ... This is a preview of the whole essay
6.2.13: Religious Language and Worldviews
Faith is opposed to reason and is firmly in the realm of the irrational. 2.Transrational ( Calvin, Barth) Religious faith is over and above reason and is not to be subject to criteria generally used by reasoning beings. To use reason on matters of faith is not only inappropriate but irreverent and faithless.
Verificationism, Falsificationism & Language games
Evaluation criticizing Verificationism. Verificationism wants to provide criteria for meaning which eliminates metaphysical statements, but the idea of 'meaning' itself is a metaphysical concept. Meaning is a mysterious thing which goes on in our minds. It's hard for empiricists to explain what it actually is.
(DOC) Religous language meaningless essay
"Religious language is meaningless." Discuss. Religious language is how we communication ideas about God, faith and belief. However, the problem with religious language is that individuals have different interpretations of these concepts and will result in a difference in the use of everyday language.
Logical Positivism and the Meaninglessness of Religious Language
In this, particularly, the legitimacy of religious language (and, by extension, religious belief) has been called into question, and, indeed, such language is even declared to be 'meaningless'. The claim is that propositions such as 'God creates', or 'God loves', are cognitively meaningless, lacking any clear propositional sense.
Is religious language meaningful?
Logical positivism is a theory of meaning that claims that religious language is cognitive, but literally meaningless. Ayer's verification principles states that a statement is meaningful if, and only if, it is either A. a tautology or B. an empirically verifiable proposition.
Religious language essay plans Flashcards
1. Verification - argues religious language is cognitive if it is meaningful - the meaning of a statement is its method of verification; verification is analytic or synthetic statements e.g. 2+2=4 - SCHLICK (logical positivist): argued that the meaning of a statement is its method of verification > based on HUME'S FORK: the only propositions which have meaning are synthetic statement and ...
20th century religious language A* grade summary notes
All religious language is meaningless because it is neither analytic nor empirically verifiable 'God' is a being supposedly beyond the empirical world we can experience - so there's no way to verify it. Hick's critique - eschatological verification. Religious language is empirically verifiable - in an afterlife.
"Religious Language is meaningless." Discuss.
However, according to logical positivists, because religious statements do not fit into either category (analytic or synthetic), they cannot be verified and are therefore meaningless. Anthony Flew developed this and brought about the Principle of Falsification. He was a leading atheist in the 20 th century. However, he recently turned to religion.
Religious language is meaningless
Filter Results. "Religious language is meaningless". The problem of religious language considers whether it is possible to talk about God meaningfully if the traditional conceptions of God as being incorporeal, infinite, and timeless, are accepted. Because these traditional conceptions of God make it difficult to describe him, religious ...
The Verification Principle successfully renders religious language as
These language games are private and is used within groups of people. Therefore Wittgenstein rejected Ayers idea that language can only be meaningful if it can be verified because words do have meaning in the context that they are said. The words that describe God have meaning for a religious believer who participates in that language game.
Religious language is meaningless. Discuss.
For some it is deemed meaningless because it is equivocal and the meaning is unclear. Yet, for some philosophers, religious language is meaningful and serves a purpose. This essay argument will disagree with the statement theat religious language is meaningless, as religious language is subjective. The logical positivists believed that language ...
Is Religious Language Meaningful?
When talking about language used to describe God one may argue that we know God to be all powerful because it is the definition of God, and we know this to be true. This argument would claim that it is a tautology and so it is meaningful, however this is would be a very weak argument which would be unable to stand up against theories opposing ...