is religious language meaningful essay

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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.

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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. 

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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.

Other Problems with Pascal's Wager:

Based on this work:   Richard T. Hull   Pascal's Wager: Not a Good Bet ,  Free Inquiry  , Vol 25, No. 1. , Dec. 2004/Jan.2005

1. Many Gods Problem:

If a skeptic were to accept Pascal's invitation to believe in what deity would that person place their psychological commitment to believe?  There are different conception of the deity in different religions of the West and the East.  If the deity does exist and it is the one and only and it does pay attention to what humans do and it will reward and punish then the would-be believer needs more than Pascal's argument to arrive at  the proper conclusion as to exactly which conception of a deity to place trust and hope in in order to avoid the possibly vindictive deity who would punish both non-believers and those who believed in a "false" or inaccurate conception of the deity.

While " Pascal clearly intended his argument to persuade the reader to adopt belief in Christianity... the same argument can be given , with suitable substitution for the word  God  and its associated concept, for any other religion."

2. The assumption that believing in God has no different result than not believing in god , if there is no god. This is not always the case however.  If a person chooses to believe in a deity and that belief leads a person to certain actions such as using prayer in the place of medication for illnesses for which there are known cures then there is a decided difference.  A believer in the deity of the Christians or Islamic people might lead a person to a negative regard for others or even into physical acts of violence towards infidels.

3. "a similar argument could be given for believing in any supernatural conception of the world: forces that determine earthquakes, tornadoes, or floods or the supposed power of other humans to make magic, do psychic surgery or read minds."   

It would appear that Pascal's approach would have appeal for those who do not want to use the intellect to its fullest extent and investigate all claims about what exists or does not exist.  It would appeal to those who want to have some being to appeal to for favor or exemption from harms and ills or favor for support against those they would oppose.

Fideism is a view of religious belief that holds 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.

• faith as against reason
• faith as above reason

Soren Kierkegaard

For Kierkegaard faith is the highest human virtue. Faith is necessary for human fulfillment. It is above reason. Genuine faith is beyond the end of reason. Faith is higher than reason. Faith is the result of human striving. Faith should be the result of a subjective experience. The only way to know God is through such an experience that is extremely subjective and personal.

Robert Adams

Professor Adams argues against Kierkegaard’s approach to faith. He argues against the approximation, postponement and passion arguments. For Adams, A person is justified in believing in a set of claims (S) if that person is willing to sacrifice everything else to obtain it even if there is but a small chance of success.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

For the British Philosopher, Wittgenstein, the religious believer is participating in a unique form of language or language game when speaking of religious matters. The ideas, concepts and claims of the religious believer can not be fully understood by someone who is not participating in the same language game or form of life as the religious believers. The claims of the religious language game can not be subjected to the rules of another language game, such as science. To attempt to do so would be absurd.  Wittgenstein has studied and observed the different types of linguistic framework.  He has found that in some cultures there may exist different meanings for the same word.  This leads him to believe that there are different usages of language, with different meanings.  He has categorized then as language games or forms of life.  He believes that a single person can enter into many different language games in his own lifetime.  Some examples of these games are science, sports, and religions.  So when a person claims that something exists it means one thing in the religious form of life and another in the scientific form of life.

Norman Malcolm

The American philosopher, Norman Malcolm shared in Wittgenstein’s view. He held that religious beliefs are not to be treated as hypotheses as in science. Religious beliefs participate in another language game and form of life. Malcolm held that religious beliefs are groundless beliefs. Just as science has a set of basic beliefs that are not capable of verification upon which others are built or depend, so too does religion have such beliefs. Such beliefs can not and should not be rationally justified. They do not need such support. Science proceeds with the beliefs that (1) things don’t just vanish, (2) the uniformity of nature and (3) self-knowledge of our own intentions.

Science and religion are two different language games and one should not submit the claims of one system of thought to the criteria or rules of another language game or system of thought. Neither is in any greater need for justification or support than the other is.

The word "true " in the science language game has a different meaning than the word "true" does in the religious language game.  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.

Michael Martin

This American holds that while  Wittgenstein  and  Malcolm  may be correct concerning the variety of language games there must be some common conceptual framework with which the various forms of life or language games can be evaluated. He holds that there must be some criteria for rational assessment. Therefore, analysis and evaluation of all worldviews is possible and ought to be performed by rational beings. This is based on the following:

• It is possible to distinguish one form of life from another
• Each form of life has its own standards
• External criticism is possible and does exist

e.g., the argument for the existence of god may be considered as compelling within the religious form of life but not compelling or invalid external to the religious form of life.

Martin concludes that fideism is no more successful than the traditional or existential and pragmatic approaches to religious faith.

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

Martin, Michael.  “A Critique of Fideism.”   Atheism:  A Philosophical Justification.   Philadelphia:  Temple University Press, 1990. 

Michael Martin disagrees with the notion held by Wittgensteinian fideists that religions cannot be examined and criticized externally.  Martin argues that religions and their language games can be criticized from the outside and this external evaluation and critique is necessary as the adherents to the faith may be blind to contradictions and problems.  For Martin, an outsider’s eyes are often needed to shed light on inconsistencies.  Although Wittgenstein and other fideists argue that religions have their own language which cannot be taken out of context.  To the Wittgensteinians, the language of religion is specific to religion.  However, Martin argues that this is not exactly the case.  Martin makes it clear that it is certainly possible for a scientist and a religious person to hold a dialogue, just as it is possible for a Christian and a non-Christian to do so, or a Catholic and a Baptist to do so.  Martin maintains that religious language as a whole is neither compartmentalized from all other languages and the languages of each sect are not compartmentalized from the other sects.   

Additionally, the Wittgenstein fideists argue that religious belief is groundless—it is agreed upon and embedded because of common training.  The fideists believe that within the religious language game, religious beliefs can be justified.  However, they admit that there is no justification for the game itself.  Malcom, a Wittgenstein student, argues that the belief in God is similar to our belief that objects do not vanish into thin air (another groundless belief).  However, Martin points out that there are not many sane persons in our society that question the idea that objects do not vanish into thin air, yet there are many people who question the existence of God or find it difficult to defend the belief in the existence of God.   

In reply to the idea that a religious belief is reasonable within the language game but becomes unreasonable when viewed from outside the game, Martin says that it is unclear  how an argument could be both reasonable and unreasonable at the same time, unless, of course, religious language is so incredibly compartmentalized.  However, the idea of complete compartmentalization was refuted earlier in the essay.  In conclusion, Martin finds Wittgensteinian fideism unsuccessful in explaining religious faith.   

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

This next article considers the reasonableness of belief in the Judeo-Christian-Muslim God (‘God,’ for short), the nature of reason, the claim that belief in God is not rational, defenses that it is rational, and approaches that recommend groundless belief in God or philosophical fideism.

READ  Religious Epistemology   

Conclusion: "Is belief in God rational? The evidentialist objector says “No” due to the lack of evidence. Theists who say “Yes” fall into two main categories: those who claim that there is sufficient evidence and those who claim that evidence is not necessary. Theistic evidentialists contend that there is enough evidence to ground rational belief in God, while Reformed epistemologists contend that evidence is not necessary to ground rational belief in God (but that belief in God is grounded in various characteristic religious experiences). Philosophical fideists deny that belief in God belongs in the realm of the rational. And, of course, all of these theistic claims are widely and enthusiastically disputed by philosophical non-theists."

READ  Reformed Epistemology      From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Reformed epistemology  is the title given to a broad body of epistemological viewpoints relating to God's existence that have been offered by a group of  Protestant   Christian   philosophers  that includes  Alvin Plantinga ,  William Alston , and  Nicholas Wolterstorff  among others. Rather than a body of arguments, reformed epistemology refers more to the epistemological stance that belief in God is properly basic, and therefore no argument for His existence is needed. It has been said the title comes from the fact that this view represent a continuation of the thinking about the relationship between faith and reason found in the  16th century   Reformers , particularly  John Calvin . Reformed epistemology aims to demonstrate the failure of objections that theistic Christian belief is unjustified, unreasonable, intellectually sub-par or otherwise epistemically-challenged in some way.  Rationalists ,  foundationalists  and  evidentialists  claim that theistic belief is rational only if there is propositional and or physical evidence for it, of which they assert there is none. Reformed epistemology seeks to defend  faith as rational  by demonstrating that epistemic propositions of theistic belief are  properly basic  and hence justified; as opposed to the truth of theistic belief. Reformed epistemology grew out of the parity argument presented by  Alvin Plantinga  in his book 'God and Other Minds' of 1967. There Plantinga concluded that belief in other minds is rational, hence, belief in God is also rational. Later, Plantinga in his 1999 book 'Warranted Christian Belief' argues that theistic belief has 'warrant' because there is an epistemically possible model according to which theistic belief is justified in a basic way. In epistemology, warrant refers to that part of the  theory of justification  that deals with understanding how beliefs can be justified or warranted. Plantinga contends that this model is likely true if theistic belief is true; and on the other hand, the model is unlikely to be true if theism is false. This connection between the truth of theism and its positive epistemic status implies that the goal of showing theistic belief to be externally rational or warranted requires reasons for supposing that theism is true. Those of faith have frequently criticized Reformed epistemology for favoring or for being exclusively committed to negative apologetics, counter-arguments to arguments that faith is not rational, and that it offers no reasons for supposing that theism or Christianity is true, so-called positive apologetics. Criticisms from those critical of or neutral to faith as rational have included that Reformed epistemology rests on the presupposition that there is religious truth, but does not present any argument to show that there is any. Another common criticism is that as a tool for discriminating justified from unjustified constituent beliefs, Reformed epistemology falls short; that it springs forth from a presupposition that within each of us resides a doxastic mechanism that generates religious convictions, belief in God, etc., supporting the conclusion that such beliefs are innate, hence properly basic.

Now after the first overview of the basic positions the reader is better prepared to read this work providing another overview of the positions on religion and reason or religion and epistemology.

READ   The Epistemology of Religion

VII. Role of Reason

What might the role of reason be in the life of a religious person? How can a religious person use reason within the religious life? How can a person use reason with religious beliefs?

For Hick religious experiences generate religious beliefs. These beliefs are natural beliefs. They are overwhelmingly evident to the believer.

Alvin Plantinga

Professor Plantinga opposes the view of religious beliefs that subjects them to verification to the need for evidence to support claims.  Plantinga  holds that religious beliefs are foundational beliefs or basic beliefs. Belief in the existence of God is a proper and basic belief that is part of the set of foundational beliefs.

Martin  opposes  Plantinga ’s view.  Martin  hold claims that  Plantinga ’s view leads to radical and absurd relativism wherein any beliefs may become basic and called rational simply because one chooses to hold them.  Martin  thinks that on  Plantinga ’s view anyone could justify any belief system.

Louis Pojman

Pojman  rejects the foundationalist view of religious beliefs and in its place he prefers a coherentist view. In this view religious belief systems, indeed all such systems, are subject to reason. A belief system is a web or network of mutually supportive beliefs. Some beliefs in the set are more privileged than others because they are more self evident to the believer. Few of the beliefs are sustained outside of the system. All believers access the beliefs within the system (world view) from personal interpretive perspectives. The goal of the use of rational processes upon such systems of beliefs is a set of optimally rational positions.  Pojman  holds that that it is difficult but not impossible to be critically rational about religious belief and experiences.

All religious experiences must be scrutinized rationally, honestly.

All religious belief must be justified.

All religious belief systems should be coherent.

Religious beliefs sometimes consist of conflicting accounts that impedes coherency that reason demands. Physical or phenomenal evidence to substantiate religious beliefs is impossible to produce. Religious experiences usually occur privately, and are subjective, making it impossible to be justified, and scrutinized rationally and honestly. It is more logical to trust and believe that which is reasonably evidenced, than that which is absent of reason and evidence. Reason can discredit many religious experiences. In the absence of evidence, veracity is questionable. That which is contradictory or incoherent can be reasonably rejected. 

Pojman, Louis P., ed.  “Can Religious Belief Be Rational?,”  Philosophy of Religion, An Anthology.   Belmont, CA:  Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1998.   

 Summary by Meghan Ramsay, QCC 2004

Pojman argues that there is an ethical duty to believe what is supported by the best evidence available.  Since a person’s beliefs can have an affect on the well-being of others, one is compelled to maintain an open mind towards criticism and investigation.  Pojman likens the believer to a doctor who must keep up with the newest trends in medicine to avoid being negligent.  Pojman points out that beliefs which are the most rational, justifiable beliefs are more likely to be true than beliefs that go against rationality and justification.  Pojman also argues the case for “soft-perspectivism” in which he states that there are certain universal inductive and deductive rules of inference.  Thus, humans are capable of understanding the worldviews of others.  In comparing one’s own views to that of others, one is more equipped to find flaws in his/her beliefs and disregard weak and irrational explanations.   

Pojman also explains that rationality does not imply neutrality.  While many think that in order for someone to use reason and to be able to accept criticism of his/her beliefs, s/he must be neutral.  This, according to Pojman, is not the case.  Neutrality implies inaction or passivism.  However, one need not remain on the sidelines in order to rationally believe.  Instead, one must remain impartial, which implies action.  When one is impartial, s/he is actively involved in the conflict because s/he objective and eventually choose a side.  Rather than a bystander (neutral), one must be a judge who is willing to hear both sides of the case and make a well informed, objective decision when it comes to religious beliefs.   

While he states that rationality leans towards truth, Pojman admits that rationality and truth are not mutually exclusive.  Pojman states that there are two components that make up rational judgment:   intention  and  capacity-behavioral .  One must have the intention of seeking the truth, s/he must revere the truth even when there may be a discrepancy between the truth and one’s desires.  Additionally, one must be capable to make impartial judgments—to be willing and able to make judgments that hold an “ideal standard of evidence” above self-interest and emotion. 

Additionally, Pojman argues that one cannot immediately abandon his/her beliefs when faced with an obstacle.  He uses the analogy of a researcher with a hypothesis that comes into conflict with evidence.  The researcher does not immediately dismiss the hypothesis as false.  Instead, s/he surrounds it with ad hoc theories which cushion the core hypothesis and resolve the obstacles.  However, after a certain point of tearing down and putting up new ad hoc hypotheses, the researcher must eventually decide whether or not it is rational to go on believing in his/her core hypothesis.  The same holds true for religious beliefs.  The believer can cushion his/her core belief with other ad hoc explanations until the point where a decision must be made.   

Although many philosophers argue that one should hold off on believing until there is irrefutable evidence proclaiming that belief to be true, Pojman argues that one must simply make an educated and objective decision, again, much like a judge or a jury.     

Pojman also argues that it is possible to approach the Bible and other Scriptures within a rationalist point of view.  He argues that the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, often focuses on “evidence, acts of deliverance, and the testimony of the saints and prophets who hear God’s voice…”  While he mentions these points, Pojman also explicitly states that he is not attempting to claim that the Bible is fully based upon reason. 

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

Faith without Belief?

Is it possible to have faith without belief?  Pojman  thinks that it is. He substitutes an interim assent with hope.

Importance of Belief as a religious attitude

• intellectual and emotional end to doubt
• guides action

Faith as Hope

• the object of desire may not obtain
• hope precludes certainty
• hope entails desire for a state of affairs
• hope disposes one to bring about a state of affairs

Hope does not entail belief but a more proactive attitude favoring the desired state of affairs.

Pojman  recommends that people live imaginatively in hope. Religious believers can give interim assent with honest doubt. Decisive assent (firm belief) should not be a requirement for religious participation and for salvation. Interim assent and hope should be enough. It is a position which reason can support.

“Faith Without Belief?” by Louis P. Pojman

Summary by Meghan Ramsay (QCC, 2004) 

Pojman argues that it is possible for one to have religious faith based upon hope rather than steadfast belief that the object of the faith exists.  There are many people who have doubts as to the existence of God, yet they maintain faith based upon hope rather than a will to believe or a Pascalian viewing of selective evidence.  Pojman argues that one can live an experimental faith, in which he hopes that the existence of God is true, and he believes that such an existence would be a good thing.  Even if the hopeful believer finds it only slightly probable that this God exists, the fact that he hopes for the existence to be true gives him faith.  One who has hope in God rather than undoubted belief is, Pojman argues, more apt to have an open mind towards evidence.  Although the hopeful man does not act out of complete certainty as the believer does, he still acts as though God exists, and his occasional doubt or skepticism provides him with the opportunity to notice inconsistencies, problems, or evidence that the believer pays no mind to.  Although some would argue that the man who only hopes for the existence of God is not entitled to the same benefits of salvation as the believer, Pojman disagrees.  Instead, Pojman finds that there may be just as much virtue in doubt as there is in belief.  He certainly holds that the man who lives in doubtful hope is more virtuous than the man who simply pretends to believe or the man who believes simply because it may prove beneficial in the future (i.e. Pascal’s wager).   

Some argue that this idea of experimental faith set forth by Pojman is objectionable because the experimental believer lacks the complete commitment that believers find necessary for religious faith.  Pojman cites philosopher Gary Gutting who argues that experimental faith or “interim assent” is inadequate because rather than longing for God as the believer is required to do, the man living with experimental faith only longs to conclude whether or not God exists.  Additionally, Gutting argues that religious belief requires complete acceptance of the implications of the beliefs, and in constantly doubting or reflecting upon the truth, the man with only hope is incapable of the complete abandonment and sacrifice required by the believers.  Finally, it is typical of many religious believers to equate non-belief as being fundamentally bad.  Thus the man living in experimental faith is also bad, and thus, not worth of salvation.   

In reaction to Gutting’s claims, Pojman argues that since there is not irrefutable evidence for belief, it seems that believers have not fully examined their beliefs—that they are closed minded.  Additionally, Pojman argues that perhaps the traditional religions place too much emphasis on having a firm set of beliefs.  Pojman also argues that the hoper in God can use his longing for the truth as a method of worshipping and longing for God, thus refuting Guttings first objection to experimental faith.  In response to the idea that the hoper is less able to surrender to the life of complete sacrifice led by true believers, Pojman argues that while it is true that a hoper in God might not be as fanatic or willing to die for God as the believer, the hoper still lives as if God exists—he behaves in accordance with the moral principles set forth by this possible God and he lives as this possible God would expect him to live.  Finally, in response to Gutting’s third argument, Pojman once again reiterates that living as if God exists while balancing both hopes and doubts must certainly be good—especially in comparison to those who believe only because they have tricked themselves into belief.   

In conclusion, Pojman states that it is not necessary to have undoubted belief in God in order to have faith.  Instead, one can use his doubts to attempt to arrive at a clearer answer, and in the meantime he can live a “dedicated and worshipful moral life” based upon the hope that God exists.   

Pojman, Louis P. “Faith Without Belief.”   Faith and Philosophy.   3.2 (April, 1986). 

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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9 Religious Language

William P. Alstonis Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, Syracuse University.

• Published: 02 September 2009
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Many philosophers and theologians have protested against the concentration of philosophers on religious statements to the neglect of other religious uses of language. Their complaint can be briefly summed up as follows. The heart of religion is found in talk to God in prayer, worship, and liturgy. Talk about God is a secondary phenomenon that gets its religious significance by its dependence on the former. The valid concerns of philosophers with statements about God can be pursued while recognizing their connections with the rest of religion. Instead of speaking of predicates of religious statements, one could speak of religious concepts . Because predicates express concepts, problems about the meaning of the former are translatable into problems about the content of the latter.

1. Introduction

The first order of business is the disavowal of the title. To speak of religious “language” is, at best, misleading. There is no language that is used only for religious purposes. “Do you speak English, French, or religious?” What this jibe reflects is that in the proper sense of “language,” in which it is what is studied by linguists, a language contains resources for anything that its users have occasion for talking about. The term “religious language” is a special case of the bad habit of philosophers to speak of a special language for each terminology or broad subject matter (the “language of physics,” the “language of ethics,” etc.). This evinces neglect of the crucial distinction between language and speech. The former is an abstract system that is employed primarily for communication, and the latter is that employment. What is erroneously called religious language is the use of language (any language) in connection with the practice of religion—in prayer, worship, praise, thanksgiving, confession, ritual, preaching, instruction, exhortation, theological reflection, and so on. Despite what I have just said, I will continue to go along with the term religious language, and not only in the title. It is too well entrenched in the literature to be wholly ignored.

The laundry list just given indicates the tremendous range of religious uses of language. Another way of bringing this out is to consider the diversity to be found in religious writings. Sacred books contain cosmological speculations, fictional narratives, historical records, predictions, commandments, reflections on human life, moral insights, theological pronouncements, and legal codes. In devotional literature we find biographical reminiscences, theologizing, rules of spiritual life, suggestions for spiritual development, and descriptions of religious experience.

All of these present interesting topics for study. But philosophers have been narrowly selective in their approach to the field. Dominated for the most part by epistemological and metaphysical concerns, they have concentrated on what look to be factual statements about God or other objects of religious worship. They have been preoccupied with two questions. (1) Are such apparent statements the genuine article? Can they be construed as making genuine truth claims or are they to be understood in some other way? (2) If they are what they seem to be, just what claims are they making? This second concern plunges them into the most fundamental issues in the philosophy of language. Take the putative statement, “God made the heavens and the earth.” If this is a genuine truth claim, it raises two basic questions. (1) Just who (or what) are we referring to by “God,” and how, if at all, is this reference secured? This is an instance of the general problem of understanding singular reference. (2) How are we to understand the predicate “made the heavens and the earth”? More generally, what sorts of predicates, if any, can be intelligibly, and possibly truly, applied to God? We may call this the “problem of theological predication.” The organization of this chapter reflects these dominant philosophical concerns.

Many philosophers and theologians have protested against the concentration of philosophers on religious statements to the neglect of other religious uses of language. Their complaint can be briefly summed up as follows. The heart of religion is found in talk to God in prayer, worship, and liturgy. Talk about God is a secondary phenomenon that gets its religious significance by its dependence on the former. I find this criticism to be valid if, but only if, the study of religious statements is divorced from its connection with more basic aspects of the religious life, as too often it is in philosophical treatments. But it need not be so. The valid concerns of philosophers with statements about God can be pursued while recognizing their connections with the rest of religion.

Instead of speaking of predicates of religious statements, we could speak of religious concepts . Because predicates express concepts, problems about the meaning of the former are translatable into problems about the content of the latter. Instead of asking how predicates applied to God are to be understood, we could just as well ask about the content of concepts applied to God. And because genuine statements express beliefs, instead of asking whether our efforts at religious statements make claims to objective truth, we could ask whether alleged beliefs about God are capable of objective truth value. Because of the “linguistic turn” that has been so prominent in twentieth-century philosophy, the linguistic style of formulation has been much more prominent. But the fact that speech gets its meaning by virtue of the thoughts it expresses is a reason to think that the for mulation in terms of thought is more fundamental. I will be moving freely from one of these formulations to the other, except in those cases, like the question of whether certain statements about God should be understood literally or figuratively, that require a linguistic formulation.

One other preliminary point. I said that the central concern of philosophers with religious language had to do with statements about God or other objects of religious worship . That second disjunct was added because to give a truly comprehensive treatment of religious statements, we must range over religions that recognize an ultimate reality that is not thought of as personal in the way God is in “theistic” religions like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. But I cannot aspire here to so complete a coverage. Because the philosophical problems and positions with which I will be dealing have their home in a theistic, primarily Judeo-Christian, religious setting, I will limit myself to statements about God. There is enough variety in the way God is construed in theistic religions to keep us occupied.

2. Can There Be Statements about God with Truth Values?

From my preliminary statement of problems, I begin with the one an affirmative answer to which is required for the other problems to arise, namely, whether what appear to be statements about God that have an objective truth value really have that status or are something quite different—expressions of emotion or attitude, commitment to a policy of action or a lifestyle, ways of evoking “disclosures” by the use of symbols, or whatever. In the 1950s and 1960s many philosophers embraced “verificationism,” the view that an attempted factual assertion can have an objective truth value only if it is, in principle, subject to empirical verification or falsification. In that period a number of philosophers of religion applied this principle to alleged statements about God and took them to fail the test. Verificationism was made prominent in the early twentieth century by a group known as the Vienna Circle, prominent members of which included Rudolf Carnap, Moritz Schlick, and Otto Neurath. The view was originally developed in the philosophy of science, but severe difficulties led to its progressive abandonment in the field of its birth. Though news of its demise took a while to reach metaphysics, philosophy of religion, ethics, and other outlying territories, it is no longer a major concern in those areas either. But because there is still a small but determined rear guard of the movement in philosophy of religion, I will briefly review the main difficulties with verificationism. Before doing that, I will point out that its application to talk about God is by no means as straightforward as is often supposed. It depends on how we think of God and his relation to the world whether empirical confirmation and disconfirmation of statements about God are possible. But limitations of space prevent my going into that here. 1

The most serious defect in verificationism is this. Any statement that is not, like “The liquid is cloudy,” formulated in observational terms, and hence that is not directly tested by observation, can receive confirmation or disconfirmation from the results of observation only if it is conjoined with “bridge principles” that are partly in observational and partly in nonobservational terms, and hence make it possible for the results of observation to have a logical bearing on “theoretical” principles. Thus, laws of thermodynamics, when conjoined with principles that spell out how to measure the temperature of a substance, can be tested by such measures. The reason this consideration is fatal to verificationism as a criterion of genuine factuality is that no one has been able to put restrictions on bridge principles that will let in nonobservational statements the verificationists want to treat as verifiable and exclude those they do not. Here is a simple example of the latter. We can take any nonobservational statement, for example, “God is perfectly good,” and make it subject to empirical test by conjoining it with a hypothetical statement like “If God is perfectly good, then it will rain tomorrow here.” This conjunction implies “It will rain tomorrow here,” and this makes an observation of the weather have a bearing on the justification of the theological statement. No doubt, it would be absurd to accept this bridge principle. But bridge principles in science often have no antecedent plausibility. And despite the expenditure of a lot of effort, no one has been able to come up with a plausible criterion of acceptability for bridge principles that will let in accepted scientific examples and keep out theological and metaphysical examples.

Here is another indication of what is wrong with verificationism. In the history of science, hypotheses, for example, the atomic hypothesis concerning the constitution of matter, were originally put forward without anyone as yet having any idea as to how they could be empirically tested. Eventually the atomic hypothesis was brought into effective connection with empirical tests. But unless the hypothesis was understandable as a factual claim at the earlier stages, those developments would have been impossible.

If one is convinced, despite the criticisms just mounted, that no utterances about God, as construed in developed theistic religion, are factually meaningful, how will one construe them? There are a number of alternatives. The simplest one is to avoid the necessity of any reconception by ignoring them altogether or, in Hume's memorable phrase, consigning them to the flames. But if one is sufficiently motivated to retain God-talk, there are a number of ways to do so while avoiding any reference to a transcendent deity. These can be divided into two main groups. One seeks to preserve the statemental character by giving a purely natural-world meaning to God-talk. The other chooses to interpret putatively statemental talk about God as expressive of feelings, attitudes, commitments, and the like.

Here are two examples of the first alternative. The American theologian Henry Nelson Wieman defines “God” in naturalistic terms as “that interaction between individuals, groups, and ages which generates and promotes the greatest possible mutuality of good” (Wieman, McIntosh, and Otto 1932 , 13). This preserves the beneficence of God, but the personal being is completely lost. In defense of his suggestion, Wieman has this to say: “Can men pray to an interaction? Yes, that is what they always pray to, under any concept of God. Can men love an interaction? Yes, that is what they always love. When I love Mr. Jones, it is not Mr. Jones in the abstract, but the fellowship of Mr. Jones. Fellowship is a kind of interaction” (ibid., 17). Mr. Jones would no doubt be disappointed to learn that what was loved was not himself but rather fellowship with him.

Another naturalistic reinterpretation of theistic talk is found in the English biologist Julian Huxley's book Religion without Revelation ( 1957 ). He identifies God the Father with the forces of nonhuman nature (the “creator”), God the Holy Spirit as the ideals for which men are striving (at their best), and God the Son as human nature itself, which is, more or less, utilizing the forces of nature in the pursuit of those ideals. Thus, he gives us a naturalistic Trinity. He even includes the unity of the three persons in one God under the guise of the essential unity of all these aspects of nature.

The second group is extremely varied. The early twentieth-century Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana took religious doctrines as primarily symbolic of value commitments and attitudes. In Reason in Religion ( 1905 ) he distinguished two components of a religious doctrine, or “myth,” as he preferred to say. There is (1) an evaluation of some sort, which is (2) expressed in the form of a picture or story. For example, the Christian “myth” of God's incarnation in Jesus Christ and his sacrificial and unmerited death on the cross to atone for the sins of men can be regarded as a symbol of the moral value of self-sacrifice. That moral conviction can be expressed much more forcefully and effectively by that story than by just saying “Self-sacrifice is a noble thing.” Santayana also considers religious myths to have the function of guiding our lives in certain directions. This directive function is emphasized in Braithwaite ( 1955 ). He takes religious statements “as being primarily declarations of adherence to a policy of action, declarations of commitment to a way of life” (80). We also find such an approach in the American theologian Gordon Kaufman. He says that the question of the existence of God is a question of the viability and appropriateness of an orientation, a true or valid understanding of human existence ( 1993 , 35–46).

It is clear that much speech about God does have these expressive and directive functions, and if we have discarded the truth claims that are ordinarily taken to undergird those functions, the latter will be all that is left. But we will be forced into these reconstruals by the verifiability criterion only if more traditionally con strued statements about God are not empirically confirmable, and only if empirical confirmability is a necessary condition of factual meaningfulness. Because I have presented reason for rejecting the latter, the argument from verificationism against the possibility of factual truth claims about God can be ignored, and we can proceed to consider problems that arise with respect to such truth claims.

3. Autonomy of Religious Language?

The next problem on the agenda is whether, as suggested by Wittgenstein and others, religious “language” is so completely distinct from other uses of language as to constitute a separate “language game,” with its own battery of concepts, criteria of intelligibility, criteria of truth, and so on. The most powerful of the current voices that sound this note is D. Z. Phillips ( 1970 , 1976 ). In a long series of books he repeatedly insists that religious beliefs are held subject only to criteria that are internal to religious discourse. He takes this to imply not only that the traditional arguments for the existence of God have no bearing on the acceptability of religious beliefs, but that with respect to religions like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that rest on claims about historical events, ordinary historical research has no bearing on their acceptability. This seems strongly counterintuitive. How could reasons for and against the existence of God be irrelevant to the epistemic status of beliefs that presuppose that existence? And if Christianity is based, at least partly, on certain beliefs about the life, ministry, teaching, actions, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, how could historical research into this be irrelevant to the status of those religious commitments, even though it cannot settle the questions decisively? Consider the price Phillips is willing to pay for this freedom from vulnerability to “outside” considerations. He holds that there are different concepts of truth, existence, and reality for different language games. In believing that it is true that Jesus was raised from the dead on the third day, we are not using the same concept of truth we use when wondering whether it is true that in 1200 bc the inhabitants of Crete spoke a form of Greek. And in believing that God really exists, we are not using the same notions of reality and existence that we use in asserting that King Arthur really existed and denying that there really are any unicorns.

This is a high price indeed for being able to insulate religious discourse from contact with its surroundings. It certainly doesn't feel as if we mean something different by “true,” “real,” and “exist” in religious and nonreligious contexts. As for “true,” Phillips's position could be defended by an epistemic conception of truth according to which the truth of a belief amounts to some sort of favorable epistemic status for the belief, together with the claim that epistemic criteria for religious beliefs are different from criteria for other beliefs. But to restrict ourselves to the first of these claims, it comes into direct conflict with the obvious point that it is a necessary and sufficient condition of its being true that Jesus arose from the dead that Jesus did arise from the dead; our epistemic situation with respect to the belief has nothing to do with the matter.

Although Phillips often shies away from the suggestion, it may be that what is most fundamentally behind the above views is a certain nonstatemental way of understanding the content of religious beliefs. He more than once talks as if he thinks that in affirming such beliefs we do not mean to be asserting anything about a reality that transcends the natural world, but rather expressing attitudes toward the world of nature and human life. Believing in God is variously said to be seeing a meaning in one's life (Phillips 1970 , 8), seeing the possibility of eternal love (21, 29), looking on one's life and regulating it in a certain way (157). Again, “The religious pictures give one a language in which it is possible to think about human life in a certain wayWhen these thoughts are found in worship, the praising and the glorifying does not refer to some object called Godwe see that the religious expressions of praise, glory, etc. are not referring expressions. These activities are expressive in character, and what they express is called the worship of God” (Phillips 1976 , 149–50).

To be sure, believing in God could essentially involve all that and also be a belief about a transcendent (and immanent) ultimate reality. But the above passages clearly show that Phillips thinks the aspects specified are all there is to it.

4. Meaning and Religious Practice

Another possible reason for Phillips's Wittgensteinian position on the sui generis character of religious belief, thought, and discourse is a conviction that its constituent terms and concepts are intelligible only from within religious practice. To fully understand “grace” or “love” (“agape”) or “spiritual” or “glory” as they are used in Christian discourse one must be sufficiently involved in the Christian form of life, in prayer and worship and in viewing the world and one's life in certain ways. I have put a consideration of this idea into a separate section to emphasize that it need not be associated with the “different criteria of acceptability” and “different concepts of ‘truth’ and ‘existence’ ” that Phillips accepts. The possibility of this independence rests on two considerations. First, the “meaning depends on practice” position need not hold that this is the only source of meaning, or the entire source of meaning, for religious terms. As I just formulated it, the claim is only that to fully understand these terms, involvement in Christian practice is needed. That leaves room for a partial understanding by outsiders and hence susceptibility to evaluation by epistemic criteria that hold both inside and outside. Second, terms that depend on the form of life for part of their meaning by no means exhaust the religious lexicon. It is rife with terms used exactly as they are in other contexts. Consider the Nicene Creed. It contains such phrases as “he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried ” and such words and shorter phrases as “ man ,” “apostolic church ,” “ all that is,” and “for us .” In petitionary prayer we ask for healing of sick bodies, strength, courage, and acceptance of what we cannot change. It strains credulity to suppose that such terms and phrases are used in special religious senses that differ from the senses in which they are used elsewhere. For both of these reasons, the acceptance of a partial dependence of some constituents of religious discourse on religious practice for their meaning is compatible with a denial of Phillips's contentions discussed in the previous section.

So what are we to say about the “dependence on practice” thesis? I find it very plausible. It is dubious that talk of divine grace, or divine glory, or agape will be as fully as possible understood by those who have not experienced such things in their lives, who have not gained some sense of what it is like to have been a recipient of grace or agape, to have found themselves bestowing agape on others, to have experienced the glory of God in nature, contemplation, or worship. These terms can be given theological definitions: thus, “grace” can be defined as “a freely bestowed gift by God that goes beyond the creation and preservation of the recipient.” But if that's the whole story, they will lack the dimensions of meaning that enable them and the realities they denote to play a significant role in the life of the believer. But both because other aspects of their meaning can be common to believer and unbeliever, and because of the other terms of religious discourse that can be wholly shared across the divide, this point about the derivation of meaning from active involvement in the form of life does not support the radical form of autonomy for religious discourse espoused by the likes of Phillips.

5. Reference to God

The foregoing had the function of clearing the ground for the discussion of reference to God and the status of predicates (concepts) applied to God that will constitutes the bulk of this chapter.

First, the question of reference to God. How are we to pick out God as what we are thinking or talking about? By virtue of what is the statement (thought) directed to God rather than to something (someone) else or to nothing? I address these questions against the background of the main alternatives for understanding singular reference in general.

Perhaps the most natural answer to the question “By virtue of what do we refer to a particular individual?” is the descriptive one. One refers to Hillary Clinton by having in mind a uniquely exemplified description, for example, “the junior senator from New York” or “Bill Clinton's wife.” Note that both of these descriptions themselves contain attempted singular references: New York, Bill Clinton, and the present time. (Prior to Hillary's election, the junior senator from New York was Charles Schumer.) And these descriptions are typical in that respect. It is rare to find purely qualitative properties that are uniquely exemplified, like “the first human being to run a four-minute mile.” The dependence of most such descriptions on other singular references has the consequence that although descriptivist reference is not uncommon, it can hardly be supposed to constitute a way in which reference could be instituted from scratch. This is hardly a problem for reference to God, however, for this is one case in which we can find a proliferation of descriptions that do not contain other singular references and that uniquely apply to God if to anything: “the omniscient knower,” “the omnipotent agent,” “the source of all being for everything other than itself,” “the necessarily existent being,” and so on.

The idea that reference always, or even usually, depends on such descriptions, has been effectively criticized by Kripke, Donnellan, and others. Kripke ( 1972 ) points out that there are cases of successful reference to X in which the subject, S, does not have, and does not suppose herself to have, any description that uniquely applies to X. Thus, he suggests that many people use “Aristotle” to refer to the famous philosopher with that name without being able to specify any identifying description other than “a famous philosopher” or “an ancient Greek philosopher.” He also argues that even where S has a description that he takes to fix the reference to X and succeeds in referring to X, it isn't always by virtue of that description. These cases are divided into (1) those in which nothing uniquely satisfies the description and (2) those in which it is something other than X that uniquely satisfies it. Kripke illustrates (1) with Jonah, on the assumption that none of the putatively uniquely identifying descriptions from the story succeeds in identifying the prophet about whom the legend grew up or anyone else. He illustrates (2) with a story about someone who succeeds in referring to the mathematical logician Gödel, where all he knows about Gödel is that he proved the incompleteness of arithmetic. But suppose that it was someone other than Gödel who did that. Kripke maintains that the speaker can still be referring to Gödel even though the only uniquely satisfied description he has available is satisfied by someone else.

Kripke's suggestion for an effective nondescriptivist way of securing reference runs as follows. First there is an initial “baptism.” There the practice of using that name to refer to that entity is established by intending to do so, fixing the nominatum in mind by virtue of a perceptual presentation of it. People who subsequently use the name (or other referring expression) to pick out the same entity do so by acquiring the practice from someone further up the chain of transmission, intending to use it to refer to the same entity as one's donor does. Thus it is that one can succeed in referring to a particular Greek philosopher with “Aristotle” without having in mind any description that uniquely picks out that philosopher. Though this mode of reference is commonly termed a causal theory, on the grounds that the speaker achieves unique reference to O by way of a (direct or indirect) causal relation to O, I refer to it here as a direct theory of reference.

Before continuing with a discussion of how all this applies to reference to God, let me set aside a possible confusion. In considering how reference to God is possible, I do not intend to be establishing the existence of God. Of course, if God does not exist, I cannot succeed in referring to him, there being no such him to refer to. But the discussion of referring to God, as a topic in the religious use of language, is limited to considering how one could succeed in referring to God if God exists, and if there is more than one way, what implications the differences between them have for religious thought and discourse.

Of the two modes of reference I have distinguished, it is obvious that the descriptive approach plays an important part in reference to God. It would be very unusual for one who takes oneself to be referring to God not to have any idea of what God is like. And, as noted above, purely qualitative uniquely identifying descriptions (if they are exemplified at all) are much more plentiful for God than for other objects of attempted reference. And, of course, reference to God could be a purely descriptive affair. If one believes that there is an omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good personal source of being for everything else that is—however one came by this belief, whether by philosophical argument, growing up surrounded by people who seemed to take it for granted, being initiated into the worship of and prayer to such a being, or whatever—then one could take such descriptions as picking out what one is talking about when uttering sentences with “God” as subject, even if the reference had no other source.

But it is very common for direct reference to come into the picture as well. One reason for this is that people normally pick up the linguistic practice of referring to God, as well as other religious practices, from those who introduce them to these practices. Hence, it is normal for religious believers to stand at the end of a chain of transmission of a religious referring practice, a chain of the sort envisaged by Kripke. Typically we learn to refer to God in praying to God, directing praise, thanksgiving, confession to God, entering into alleged interaction with God in sacraments and ritual, and so on. We learn to refer to God as the being with whom we and our guides are in contact in all this. Thus, even if, as is normally the case, we also learn identifying descriptions of God in the course of this training in the practice, those descriptions do not constitute our only means of picking out God. We also think of God as the one referred to in such practices by all our predecessors in the religious tradition in question.

At this point I need to sharpen up the distinction between direct and descriptive reference. I have been taking the former from Kripke's conception of an “initial baptism” followed by a chain of transmission. But, although I presented the initial baptism as involving a direct perceptual identification of the object, Kripke himself correctly points out that the “baptizer” might pick out the object descriptively as well. This indicates that the taxonomy needs to be more complex. We need to distinguish direct reference into primary and derived. The former involves zeroing in on the referent as a current object of experience. The latter involves standing at the end of a chain of transmission that originated in an experientially based identification of an object. Should we make the same distinction for descriptive reference? We could distinguish between making a descriptive reference from scratch, wholly on one's own resources, and doing so by deriving the descriptions from others. But here the distinction is less important, for once one derives identifying descriptions from others and so long as one remembers them, one is able to cut oneself loose from the source and use them just as one would if one had thought them up oneself. There is no important difference between the use of identifying descriptions by their original inventor, and their use by one who has learned them from others. But reference by perceptual encounters with an object cannot be transmitted to others in such a way as to make them usable in the same way as by the original perceiver. If a person picks up the practice of referring to God from someone who connected the term with an object of experience, and the former lacks a firsthand experience of God himself, then it is only by virtue of the source of the transmission of the referring practice that his reference to God can be called direct.

Things are this complicated even for “pure” cases, but they get more complicated with mixed cases, which are much more numerous in real life. Kripkean chains often involve multiple lines of transmission with different origins, and some of the latter may involve direct and some descriptive reference. Moreover, a person's reference to God that starts as purely derivative from a chain may later be mixed with experiential encounters with God. And this in turn may be mixed with novel identifying descriptions. But sufficient unto the day is the complication thereof. I will restrict my sights to relatively pure cases.

It will not have escaped the reader's notice that in the foregoing I have been assuming that there is such a phenomenon as perception or “experiential encounter” with God. 2 I have treated this matter in detail in Alston ( 1991 ) and do not have space here even to stick my toe in the water. Suffice it to say that there have been innumerable records of such experiences and no doubt many more unrecorded ones. For some documentation, see, in addition to the above, James ( 1902 ) and Beardsworth ( 1977 ). Lest one think that we are beyond all that now in this “enlightened” age, several recent sociological surveys show that well over half of Americans believe themselves to have had at some time an experience of God. One should also distinguish between direct and indirect experience of God, the latter coming through experience of something in nature or elsewhere in the natural world. Either kind could stand at the origin of a practice of referring to God. It is also relevant to note the plausibility of supposing that (putative) experiential encounters with God are prominent in the originating events of a religious tradition, as the Bible and other sacred texts make clear.

What important difference, if any, does it make whether a referring practice is primarily direct or descriptive? Here are two. (1) It makes a difference as to what is and is not negotiable. If reference is primarily fixed by descriptions, then the attributes there specified define what it is to be God. And so, if an alleged referent turns out not to have such an attribute, that shows that it was not God to which we were referring. It's the attributes that call the shots. Whereas if it is experiential encounter that primarily fixes the reference, the order of priority is reversed. If what one was experiencing turns out not to have some features one believes God to have, there is at least the option of denying these features to be necessary for divinity. If descriptive reference is basic, we set the requirements for being God; if a referent doesn't live up to them, it isn't God. If experiential reference is basic, then what is thus experienced is God whether he lives up to some favored description or not (so long as we continue to fix the reference by experience[s]). (2) Experientially based reference makes possible a wider commonality between religions. Even if different world religions have radically different views on the nature of Ultimate Reality, they could all be worshipping the same Reality. This would just be a particular example of the general truth that people can disagree, even radically, about the nature of something, even though they are all aware of, and referring to, the same something.

One final note on referring to God. Consider a person or group whose reference to God is both descriptively and experientially based. Which of these is more fundamental? We can explore this by considering (actual or possible) situations in which the two bases give conflicting results. Say that, although one initially takes the being encountered in prayer, worship, and so on to conform to the account of divine nature in classical Christian theology, one comes to doubt that the being so encountered is like that in some important respects. (Process theology is in this situation, denying that the God encountered in the Christian religious practice is omnipotent, the source of all being for everything else, and timeless; see Hartshorne 1941 ; Griffin 2001 ). Which will give way? Which takes priority in such conflicts? I can't see that there is a resolution to this problem that fits every such case. It all depends on how deeply rooted each of the contenders is in the person or group in question, and on how unambiguous each of them is on the issues. Because religious experience is notoriously subject to a variety of interpretations, while theological systems are more clear-cut, this tends to favor the priority of the descriptive. But the first factor, degree of rootedness, can go either way. I have given much more extensive treatment of the issues aired in the prior two paragraphs in “Referring to God” in Alston ( 1989 ).

6. Differences in Predicates Applied to God and to Creatures

Having examined the subject term of statements about God, we can now turn to the predicates. How are they to be understood? Remember that we are discussing this question in the light of the rejection of the thesis that there are no genuine religious truth claims. Hence, we take for granted that what look like statements about God do have a truth value and go on from there to raise questions about the predicates involved.

The first question is this: Why is there a problem? Predicates applied to God—“makes,” “knows,” “loves,” “forgives,” “speaks”—are all very familiar. Why should there be a problem about our understanding of them?

To see why there is a problem here we need to realize that the above terms are typical of those applied to God in that they are borrowed from elsewhere. We learn what it is to make or know something, to love or forgive someone, to speak to someone from our experience of and interaction with other people. We then understand God's making, knowing, or forgiving, if we do and to the extent we do, by some sort of extension of our understanding of these terms in their human application to their use in application to God. And so the basic problem is: What kind of extension?

Is it necessary that we borrow terms learned in another sphere of discourse for talk of God, or could it be otherwise? Could we establish theological predicates from scratch on their home ground, just as we do with terms for speaking of human beings? No, the existing order is our only alternative, and for the following reason. We have the kind of cognitive access to human beings that undergirds a common vocabulary for speaking of each other, but we lack that support for speaking of God. A parent can tell by observation when the child is perceiving another person talking or making something, and this makes it possible to introduce the child to the established meanings of “speak” and “make” in their human application. But we can't do anything analogous vis-à-vis God. Even if the child can be aware of God's speaking to her or forgiving her or comforting her, the parent can't tell when the child is aware of this unless the child informs the parent of it. And that presupposes that the child has already learned how to apply these terms to God. Thus, there is no possibility of building up a theological vocabulary from scratch. To be sure, once we have a stock of divine predicates that have been derived from their human originals, special theological terms, like “grace” or “omnipotence” or “indwelling” can be introduced on their basis, perhaps with the help of the learner's participation in religious practice. But there is no possibility of cutting loose completely from the human prototypes and doing the whole thing on its own. So we are stuck with the problem of how we can derive terms suitable for theological use from terms originally applied to human beings.

The simplest way is to make no change at all. Apply the terms to God in just the same sense as that in which we apply them to human beings. When terms are used in the same sense in two or more applications, we speak of applying them univocally . Note that this option does not require us to make the absurd assumption that God is just like a human being in all respects. Why shouldn't we use “know” or “power” or “good” with exactly the same meaning in human and divine applications, while fully recognizing that God has infinitely more knowledge and power and goodness than any human being? But there are strong reasons for denying complete univocity across human and divine discourse, given plausible ways of assigning meanings to the relevant terms in their human applications.

Let me make explicit some constraints that govern this discussion. First, the senses of terms applied to God must be construed in such a way that it is at least possible that they are true of God. It is, no doubt, psychologically possible for someone to apply terms to God in exactly the sense in which they are true of human beings. But if that makes it impossible for the resulting statements to be true, that does not give us what we are after. Second, our decision as to whether a term in a given sense could be true of God depends on what God is like, and there are, notoriously, many theological disagreements about this. In the ensuing discussion I presuppose a position on the divine nature that is widely shared in classical Christian theology.

The most obvious reasons for lack of complete univocity concern the fact that we are embodied and God is not. This prevents action terms like “speak” from being univocally applied. To say that I spoke to you has as part of its meaning that I made sounds by the use of my vocal organs. But because God has no vocal organs, that cannot be part of what it means for God to speak to someone. In saying I parted the waters, part of what that means is that I moved parts of my body, for example, arms, in certain ways that resulted in waters being parted. But, again, because God has no arms or other bodily parts, that cannot be even part of what is meant by “God parted the waters.” To be sure, it is not always clear exactly what belongs to the meaning of a term, as contrasted with what we unhesitatingly believe about its denotation. Far from it. And it could be reasonably denied that movement of bodily parts is involved in the meaning of “He spoke” or “He parted the waters” where we refer to a human agent. Although it is indubitable that bodily movement is required for human overt action, that may not be any part of what is meant in asserting it. But it is at least plausible that this is part of the meaning.

There are many other reasons for denying complete univocity. Thus, if part of what is meant by Jones knowing that Smith is discouraged is that Jones has a belief that Smith is discouraged that meets certain further epistemic conditions, and if, as I argued in Alston ( 1989 , ch. 9), God has no beliefs, it follows that “know” is not univocally applied. But this conclusion depends not only on a controversial thesis about God's cognition, but also on a controversial thesis about human knowledge. For a final example, consider the even more controversial position that God is timeless, that he does not live through a succession of moments but exists “all at once” in an eternal now. We, by contrast, are very much immersed in time. What it means for us to have and carry out plans, purposes, and intentions, and what it is for us to perform acts of forgiveness, judgment, and bringing things into existence essentially involves moving through a temporal series of stages. Hence, if God is atemporal, talk of God's purposes, intentions, and activities cannot be univocal with talk of human purposes, intentions, and activities.

7. Partial Overlap in Meaning

Thus, there will be some differences in the meaning of at least many predicates in their human and divine applications. But what differences, and what implications does this have for our ability to speak meaningfully and appropriately of God? In the rest of this chapter I consider several kinds of difference in the order of their radicality, what can be said for and against them, and their implications.

The smallest significant step beyond univocity would involve some tinkering with the human senses so as to meet points of the sort just made. First, think of divine immateriality. If we subtract bodily movement from human action concepts, is there anything left? Of course there is. My parting the waters is not just a matter of my moving my arms and hands in a certain way. There is also my willing to do so for the sake of the waters being parted, as well as the actual resultant parting. (If you prefer not to speak of willing, you could substitute an intention or choice.) In the human case, the bodily movement functions as a bridge or conduit between the willing and the external result, enabling the willing to issue in that result. But God's lack of a body does not prevent his willing a certain external result to bring about that result and thereby doing so, just by willing it. Quite the contrary. After all, God is omnipotent. He doesn't need any bodily operation to bring about the willed result. Thus, by starting with the human action concept and weeding out the bodily intermediary, we wind up with a concept that, while retaining the most crucial part of the human concept, could be true of an immaterial deity.

We may take this example as a model for transforming predicates applied to us into predicates suitable for divine application. What this gives us is partial univocity, an alternative pervasively ignored in the millennia-old discussion of this problem. Most thinkers concerned with the issue, seeing that complete univocity will not work, have tended to jump immediately to some of the more radical solutions discussed below. But partial univocity is a serious option, one that deserves much more exploration. For another example, consider what is necessary to modify concepts of human temporal operations to make them applicable to an atemporal deity. The trick here is to replace temporal relations with relations of priority-posteriority, and of dependence of one aspect on another, that do not require temporality for their realization. Consider carrying out an intention, something that involves temporal sequence in the human case. How could it be construed for an atemporal deity? Let's say that one of God's purposes is to bring Robinson to realize that he can be what God intended him to be only if he renounces sacrificing everything else to making as much money as possible. For this illustration it doesn't matter just what means God uses to bring this about; they would all involve some influences on Robinson's thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, and feelings. Let's say God's purpose is not to bring this about in a flash, but to cause a continual process in Robinson's mind that will eventually lead to the intended result. This intended effect is a temporal process. But must God be involved in a temporal process in order to bring this about? Not necessarily. There could be relations of dependence of one aspect of God's willing on another in God's single eternal now that are, so to say, functionally equivalent to temporal relations of cause and effect. God wills that certain temporal psychological processes take place in Robinson by virtue of his willing that these processes eventuate in a certain result, and as a result of all this divine willing that result does eventuate. All this without God himself having to live through successive divine stages. We have partial univocity of human and divine carrying out of purposes, a univocity with respect to the dependence of certain aspects on others, along with a difference between temporality and atemporality.

For a more extended example, consider the concepts of psychological states that figure in the motivation of intentional actions. In Alston ( 1989 , chs. 3 and 4), I developed the idea that functional concepts of psychological states can be univocally applied to God and to us. For a proper exposition of this, I refer you to the book just mentioned. But the general idea is that a functional concept is in terms of the function of its object, not in terms of its structure or intrinsic character. Thus, a loudspeaker is anything with the function of converting electronic signals into sound; this is compatible with a great variety of composition and design, as any audio buff can testify. So if we conceive a desire, an intention, a belief, or a bit of knowledge in terms of its function in the motivation of action, then that concept can apply to items that are radically different in their composition and structure, even as radically as the divine psyche differs from the human psyche.

8. Literal and Metaphorical Speech about God

Thus, partial univocity constitutes one way of walking a tightrope between crude anthropomorphism (total univocity) and total mystery, abandoning any attempt to make intelligible and appropriate truth claims about God. But there are nonnegligible reasons for thinking that it leans too far off the tightrope toward anthropomorphism and does not take adequate account of divine mystery, the respects in which God is radically other than human beings and other creatures. Again, our judgment on this will depend on our view of the divine nature, and that in turn will depend on our attitudes toward the most important sources of the view of radical otherness. Here I mention only two such sources and the way they make things difficult for my partial univocity position.

First, consider the person who is, perhaps, the greatest thinker in the Christian tradition, Saint Thomas Aquinas. For a variety of reasons, both philosophical and theological, he held that God is absolutely simple . He meant this in the most absolute sense possible. There are no real distinctions in God between different attributes, faculties, and actions. There is no real distinction between God and his nature or his nature and his existence. Aquinas is by no means the only classical Christian theologian to regard God as absolutely simple, but he gives a particularly uncompromising and trenchant expression of the doctrine ( Summa Theologiae , 1964 , pt. I, q. 3). It is not difficult to see how the doctrine is incompatible with partial univocity. Even if the latter can accommodate divine immateriality and atemporality, the terms it deems univocal across human and divine applications are such that in predicating them of God one is committing oneself to real distinctions between God himself and the property denoted by the predicate. In fact, one cannot use propositional forms of human discourse (the only forms available to us) without expressing such distinctions. The only way a form of speech could be perfectly appropriate to divine simplicity would be to say everything about God all at once with no division of any kind between aspects of this speech, something that is far beyond human powers. It is no wonder that Aquinas says in Summa Contra Gentiles . “As to the mode of signification, every name is defective” ( 1955 , pt. I, ch. 30).

The other main source of an emphasis on divine otherness is extreme mystical experience as the main clue to the divine nature. This is experience in which all distinctions, even the distinction between subject and object, are blotted out in an absolutely undifferentiated unity. If one's take on God stems primarily from such an experience, one comes, by a different route, to a view of God strikingly similar to Aquinas's doctrine of simplicity. God is construed as so void of distinctions that none of our concepts (each of which represents certain features rather than others) can be true of him. Mystics are naturally drawn to the via negativa. Thus, Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagite, the sixth-century mystic who is the major fountainhead of medieval mystical theology, writes, “It [the Divine] is not soul, not intellectnot greatness, not smallnessnot moved, not at restnot powerful, not powernot living, not lifenot one, not unity, not divinity, not goodnessnot something among what is not, not something among what is” ( 1980 , 221–22). One can hardly get more negative than that! This approach too is incompatible with partial univocity.

If even partial univocity will not do, what alternatives are open? An obvious one is metaphor. It is as obvious as anything can be that much talk of God uses terms metaphorically. “His hands prepared the dry land.” “The Lord is my rock and my fortress .” “The Lord is my shepherd .” No one wishes to maintain that God literally has hands, herds sheep, or is a rock or a fortress. In saying things like this we are using what is literally denoted by these terms as an imaginative, vivid way of bringing out certain features of God. God is like a shepherd in caring for the well-being of his creatures. He is like a rock in being constant and unchangeable in his basic purposes. In creating he does the sort of thing human agents do with their hands. These points about God can be brought out forcefully by expressing them metaphorically.

But is metaphor used in religion only for a rhetorically more effective way of saying what could have been said literally? Or is (all or some) metaphorical speech about God ineliminable, irreplaceable by literal speech? I will not try to decide this question here (for a discussion, see Alston 1989 , ch. 1). Instead, I will consider an even more radical position, that all (intelligible) talk of God is metaphorical (McFague 1982 ). This implies that there is no literal speech about God, though it is not equivalent to that, since metaphor is not the only alternative to the literal.

Before continuing the discussion of this issue it will be useful to examine the concepts of metaphorical and literal speech, especially since these notions are roughed up quite a bit by philosophers and others.

When I make a literal use of a predicate, I make the claim that the property signified by that predicate in the language (or one of such properties) is possessed by what is referred to by the subject of the statement. If I am using “player” literally, in one of its senses, in saying “He's one of the players,” I claim, let's say, that he is one of the actors. But what are we doing if we use the term metaphorically, as Shakespeare has Macbeth do when he says “Life's a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more”? It's clear that life is not really an actor. Macbeth is “presenting” his hearers with the sort of thing of which the term is literally true; call that an exemplar . And he suggests that the exemplar can usefully be taken as a model of life, that considering such a person will reveal certain important features of life. Metaphorical speech varies along a continuum from just throwing the exemplar up for grabs and leaving the hearer to make of it what she will, and making a fairly definite statement with it. The Macbeth quotation approximates the first extreme of the continuum, while Churchill's famous statement “Russia has dropped an iron curtain across the continent” approximates the second. A serious claim that all talk of God is metaphorical would imply that much of it is making fairly determinate truth claims.

Literal speech is often confused with clearly distinct matters, for example factual claims and precise speech. As for the former, we can use terms just as literally in requests, questions, and expressions of attitudes as in factual statements. As for the latter, I can use words literally and be speaking vaguely or otherwise indeterminately. The standard meaning of many terms, for example “bald,” is vague. If I say “Jones is bald,” I will be speaking with less than complete precision as to just how much hair he has. A confusion typical of discussion of religious language is between literality and univocity. That they are distinct is shown just by the fact that “univocal” is a relational predicate, having to do with at least two different uses of a term, while “literal” can be applied to a single use. A specially important difference for this discussion is that when, as I suggested earlier, we alter human predicates to make them suitable for divine application, the result of this transformation can be used literally even though not univocally with their human use.

Metaphoricism does promise a way of walking a fine line between univocity and a purely negative theology. On the one hand, as just seen, it provides a way of making truth claims, albeit less than ideally determinate ones. On the other hand, it stops short of applying any of our concepts straightforwardly to God, instead exhibiting their literal denotations as models for thinking about God's nature, attitudes, or actions. Metaphorical statements suggest, hint at, what God is like without presuming to say it explicitly.

But in opposition to taking metaphor to be the whole story, it certainly seems that much talk of God is not metaphorical at all and seems, for all the world, to be literal. First, some trivial examples. Negative statements are clearly literal. There is no trace of metaphor in saying “God is im material, a temporal, not restricted to one spatial location, not dependent on anything else for his existence.” But, of course, the main issue concerns positive attributions. And many of those also do not look metaphorical in the least. Consider “God comforts us and strengthens us in adversity, forgives the sins of the truly repentant, communicates to us how we should live.” If these are not literal applications of the concepts these terms express in the language, then we must seek some alternative to straight literality other than metaphor. The main case for taking them to be literal is that, for the most part, the attributions have to do with results of divine action in the world, rather than seeking to give details about the divine agency itself. Thus, “God comforted me in my distress” reports an effect on my state of mind of something God did without seeking to go into more detail as to just what it was that God did to bring this about. What seems to be literal speech about God is not restricted to statements that fit this model; I mention them only as a particularly plausible case of literality. My suggestion in section 7 that we can make literal application of functional psychological concepts to God represents a bolder claim for the possibility of literal speech about God. But even if that goes beyond the bounds of possibility, there are less controversial cases, like the above.

9. Analogical Speech about God

If metaphor doesn't cover the whole field and partial univocity is rejected for unduly neglecting divine otherness, the only feasible alternative is to find some further way in which talk of God can use terms literally. But remembering that the only terms we have are taken from talk of creatures, or derivative therefrom, and if even partial univocity is ruled out, what possibility is left to apply terms literally to God? A new alternative emerges once we realize that we can use creaturely terms in their literal senses to speak of God, while respecting divine otherness, provided we recognize that these terms cannot be strictly true of God as they stand. But if they are flatly false of God, that will be no help unless we are to fall back into irreducible metaphor. Hence, the present approach will have to be that the literal meaning of the terms bear some analogy to what is true of God, but that we are unable to say explicitly just what the respect(s) of analogy are, for if we could, we would be back in partial univocity. This position goes under the name of an analogical use of terms. 3 I will give brief presentations of several versions of the view.

Historically the analogical position is most prominently associated with Saint Thomas Aquinas. Here is a brief sketch of his treatment (for more details, see Alston 1993 ). It is fundamental to Aquinas's theology that “All the perfections of all things are in God” ( 1964 , pt. I, q. 4, art. 2), and hence that when we deal with what he calls “pure perfection terms,” those that signify properties that have no limitation to creatures, like goodness, power, and life (and unlike bodily strength and temporal everlastingness), the properties in question, if abstractly enough conceived, are common to God and creatures. But still the terms are not completely univocal, nor can they be analyzed into a part that is and a part that is not, just because of the point that the “mode” in which the perfections are realized are radically different in an absolutely simple being like God and composite beings like us. Hence, the upshot is that in saying things like “God knows everything knowable,” we can be saying something true because of the likeness between divine and human knowledge, but we cannot make fully explicit what this likeness amounts to because of the residual inadequacy of all terms used in discursive speech to represent how it is with an absolutely simple being. That doesn't mean that the (pure perfection) terms are not used literally, used to attribute the property their meaning in the language fits them to express. It is, rather, that none of them succeed in making fully explicit just what we are saying about God.

Thus, Aquinas leaves loose ends dangling in talk about God. He thinks this is inevitable because of divine simplicity. But there are other versions of the analogy view that do not accept the divine simplicity doctrine. Here are two examples.

First is the view that talk about God involves the use of “models,” an idea fully developed in Barbour ( 1974 ). A model in science, such as the familiar billiard-ball model of a gas, is “an imagined mechanism or process, postulated by analogy with familiar mechanisms or processes and used to construct a theory to correlate a set of observations ” (30). It is not a “literal picture” of reality, but it can used to suggest a variety of features of the reality under investigation. Religious models have a similar structure and status. They are based on analogies; they too are not literal pictures of reality, though they can serve to suggest and point to important features of God (50). They also serve to express attitudes and direct action. But unlike the situation in science, where once a theory has been suggested by a model, it can eventually be developed so that the model that gave birth to it can be left behind (though still useful for an imaginative grasp), in religion models are the closest we can come to a cognition of God. Barbour does not make fully explicit why he thinks that we cannot adequately grasp truths about God directly. But he seems to think that God is so radically different from any creature that no creaturely terms portray God as he is in himself. Even the most conceptually elaborated theology is dealing with a model by which we can get enough of a grasp of God and of divine-human relations to inform our religious thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and practices. We can never zero in on just where these models fall short of an adequate grasp of God himself.

My final example of these “analogy without a completely explicit specification of the limits thereof” views is taken from two essays by I. M. Crombie ( 1955 , 1957 ). Crombie too feels that even our best efforts fall short of portraying God and his activities just as they are. He, like Barbour, is not very specific as to what he thinks keeps us from going further, but again there is the general sense that God is too infinite, too radically different from creatures, to allow terms taken from talk of creatures, however modified, to be true of him as he is.

Going back to reference for the moment (Crombie is one of the very few who realize that the subject and predicate of statements about God present different problems), Crombie makes the interesting suggestion that reference to God is achieved by directing one's attention out of the natural world “in a certain direction.” The direction is given by, for example, reflecting on the contingency of the world and looking toward a contrasting necessary being (something Crombie thinks one cannot properly conceive), or by reflecting on our imperfections and thinking of an absolutely perfect being that would be wholly without such flaws.

To return to our present concern with predicates, Crombie holds that “when we speak about God, the words we use are intended in their ordinary sense (for we cannot make a transfer, failing familiarity with both ends of it), although we do not suppose that in their ordinary interpretation they can be strictly true of him. We do not even know how much of them applies” ( 1955 , 122). The beginning of this quote implies a literal, indeed univocal use of the predicates, and the end of it rules out analyzing that literal meaning into a part that strictly applies to God and a part that does not. And so, like Aquinas and Barbour, Crombie leaves us wondering how we can suppose we are saying anything reasonably determinate about God. His originality consists in the answer he gives to this challenge: “The things we say about God are said on the authority of the words and acts of Christ, who spoke in human language, using parable; and so we too speak of God in parable—authoritative parable, authorized parable; knowing that the truth is not literally that which our parables representtrusting, because we trust the source of the parables, that in believing them and interpreting them in the light of each other, we shall not be misled, that we shall have such knowledge as we need to possess for the foundation of the religious life” (122–23). This is an extended use of “parable,” in which anything we say of God, even something so simple as “God wants us to have loving communion with him,” counts as a parable. Though the words do not strictly apply, we have the authority of Christ (God incarnate) for taking them to be close enough to the strict truth about God to be an adequate guide to our relations with God and with our fellows. Note that this resolution of the problem holds, at best, only for those who accept the authority of Christ; it is an account of the meaning the statements have for those within the Christian community. As such, it is of narrower application than the views of Aquinas and Barbour on this topic. But within those limits it is worthy of careful consideration.

10. My View of Talk about God

The essay up to this point, and that is almost all of it, is focused on an exposition and critical discussion of various views on the topics with which it deals. Though I have, from time to him, dropped some hints as to where I stand on these issues, it may not be amiss, in conclusion, to put together a brief statement of my take on the field. First of all, as made explicit in section 2, although there is much nonstatemental speech in the practice of religion—petition, confession, thanksgiving, expressions of feelings and attitudes—there are also statements about God that can be assigned (at least approximate) objective truth values. And the statements have a foundational role in the religious life, since they make explicit the rationale for petitionary prayer, confession, thanksgiving, worship, and so on. Second, to refer back to section 8, in opposition to pan-metaphoricism, I hold that many statements about God use (at least some of) their terms literally rather than metaphorically or in any other figurative way. Third, I believe that in some of these cases these terms, all of which are taken from our talk of creatures or derived from terms that are, are used in just the same sense as that in which they are used of creatures. This is fully the case only with very abstract terms like “exists,” “powerful,” and “not dependent on anything.” But with more concrete terms, like action terms, and conative terms, like “intends to bring about his kingdom on earth,” we are not left with a supposition of a divine-human analogy that we cannot make fully explicit, as the thinkers discussed in the previous section suppose. On the contrary, as I illustrated in section 7, such terms can be analyzed into an abstract component that can be applied univocally and that goes some way toward specifying the relevant analogy, and a more concrete part that is not strictly appropriate to God. This partial univocity gives us a secure foundation for the less determinate and explicit portions of our talk of God.

I want to be careful not to claim too much for this partial univocity position. Even where we can find an abstract univocal core, as in my suggestion of a functional account of psychological predicates, that falls far short of saying as much as we would like to be able to say about divine knowledge, intentions, desires, tendencies, and so on. What is left over is left to the realm of the inexplicit “pointing in a certain direction,” to use Crombie's way of putting it, or to metaphorical, symbolic, model-dependent speech. It is no accident that Jesus, when asked by his disciples how to pray, did not begin his answer: “Say ‘Thou who are the source of the being of everything other than himself, in something like the way in which a human father is the source of the being of his offspring’ ” Instead, he unselfconsciously made a metaphorical use of the term “father.” That is itself a “parable” of our need to go beyond partial univocity in religious discourse, even if that is as viable as I take it to be.

For a thorough discussion of this, see Heimbeck ( 1969 ).

Just as all this discussion of reference is conducted without assuming that God exists, so the discussion of experience of God does not assume that what seems like that to the subject is veridical percepton, only that it is, phenomenologically, a case of perception, what seems to the subject like perception.

Of course, the partial univocity position itself implies an analogy between divine and human properties, but I reserve the term “analogical” here for a view that denies the possibility of an explicit literal formulation of the points of analogy.

Works Cited

Alston, William P.   1989 . Divine Nature and Human Language. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

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Alston, William P.   1991 . Perceiving God. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

Alston, William P.   1993 . “Aquinas on Theological Predication: A Look Backward and a Look Forward.” In Reasoned Faith, ed. Eleonore Stump, 145–78. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

Aquinas, Saint Thomas . 1955 . Summa contra gentiles. Trans. A. C. Pegis. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.

Aquinas, Saint Thomas . 1964 . Summa theologiae. Trans. Herbert McCabe. London: Eyre & Spottswoode.

Barbour, Ian G.   1974 . Myths, Models, and Paradigms. New York: Harper & Row.

Beardsworth, Timothy . 1977 . A Sense of Presence. Oxford: Oxford Religious Experience Research Unit.

Braithwaite, R.  B. 1955 . An Empiricist's View of the Nature of Religious Belief. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Crombie, I. M . 1955 . “Arising from the University Discussion.” In New Essays in Philosophical Theology, ed. Antony Flew and Alasdair MacIntyre, 109–30. London: SCM Press.

Crombie, I. M . 1957 . “The Possibility of Theological Statements.” In Faith and Logic, ed. Basil Mitchell, 31–83. London: Allen & Unwin.

Davidson, Donald , and Gilbert Harman , eds. 1972 . Semantics of Natural Language. Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel.

Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagite . 1980 . The Divine Names and Mystical Theology. Trans. John D. Jones. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press.

Griffin, David Ray . 2001 . Reenchantment without Supernaturalism: A Process Philosophy of Religion. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

Hartshorne, Charles . 1941 . Man's Vision of God and the Logic of Theism. New York: Harper & Row.

Heimbeck, Raeburne S.   1969 . Theology and Meaning. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Huxley, Julian . 1957 . Religion Without Revelation. New York: New American Library.

James, William . 1902 . The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Modern Library. 10.1037/10004-000

Kaufman, Gordon . 1993 . In Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Kripke, Saul . 1972 . “Naming and Necessity.” In Semantics of Natural Language, ed. Donald Davidson and Gilbert Harman. Dordrecht: D. Reidel.

McFague, Sallie . 1982 . Metaphorical Theology. Philadelphia: Fortress Press.

Phillips, D. Z . 1970 . Faith and Philosophical Enquiry. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Phillips, D. Z . 1976 . Religion without Explanation. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Santayana, George . 1905 . Reason in Religion. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

Wieman, Henry Nelson , D. C. MacIntosh, and Rudolph Otto. 1932 . Is There a God ? Chicago: Willett, Clark.

For Further Reading

Bevan, Edwin . 1957 . Symbolism and Belief. Boston: Beacon Press.

Ferré, Frederick . 1962 . Language, Logic, and God. London: Eyre & Spottswoode.

Flew, Antony , and Alasdair MacIntyre , eds. 1955 . New Essays in Philosophical Theology. London: SCM Press.

Mitchell, Basil , ed. 1957 . Faith and Logic. London: Allen & Unwin.

Mondin, Battista . 1968 . The Principle of Analogy in Protestant and Catholic Theology. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

Ramsey, Ian T.   1957 . Religious Language: An Empirical Placing of Theological Phrases. London: SCM Press.

Ramsey, Ian T.   1964 . Models and Mystery. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rowe, William L.   1968 . Religious Symbols and God. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Soskice, Janet Martin . 1985 . Metaphor and Religious Language. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Tillich, Paul . 1955 . “Theology and Symbolism.” In Religious Symbolism, ed. F. Ernest Johnson . New York: Harper & Bros.

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Religious Language

Religious language: an overview.

• Religious language is the discourse used by individuals to express their faith and spirituality.
• Its comprehension often requires a certain level of immersion in or knowledge of the religious context.
• It generally deals with metaphysical concepts that are beyond empirical verification or falsification.
• Central to the philosophical debate about religious language is its cognitive meaningfulness, symbolic value and its efficacy in conveying profound truths.

Religious Language: Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Theories

• The main debate in religious language is between cognitive and non-cognitive theories.
• Cognitive theories maintain that religious statements have factual or propositional content that can be known to be true or false.
• Non-cognitive theories argue that religious statements aren’t meant to express propositional truths but are expressions of emotions, commands, or moral prescriptions.

Verification Principle and Falsification Principle

• The Verification Principle , proposed by the logical positivists, suggests that a statement is only meaningful if it can be empirically verified or is true by definition.
• The Falsification Principle , championed by Karl Popper, states that a theory is scientific if it can in principle be empirically falsified.
• Both principles pose serious challenges to religious language’s ability to convey meaningful propositions, due to their supernatural claims being beyond empirical scrutiny.

Language Games

• The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein proposed the concept of language games to explain the varied uses of language across different spheres of life.
• Each “language game” has its own rules for meaning and use, making its discourse meaningful within its own sphere, but perhaps not outside it.
• For Wittgenstein, religious language is a specific language game, understood and validated within its own context.

Symbolic and Analogical Language

• Many religious thinkers and philosophers propose that religious language functions symbolically or analogically.
• Symbols possess objective value and convey deep truths. In religious language, symbols represent spiritual realities.
• Analogy suggests our language about God, a transcendent being, is derived from, yet different to, our experience of the world.
• Both approaches regard religious language as a vehicle capable of communicating profound truths, albeit in a non-literal way.

Apophatic and Cataphatic Theology

• Cataphatic theology (also known as positive theology) makes affirmative assertions about God.
• Apophatic theology (also known as negative theology) involves speaking of God only in terms of what He isn’t.
• These approaches recognise the limitations of human language when used to speak about God, given His transcendence.

Critiques of Religious Language

• Criticism of religious language often revolves around its perceived lack of clarity, verifiability and ability to communicate shared meaning.
• Sceptics argue that without empirical verification, religious language lacks meaningful content.
• Critics also express concern about potential misinterpretation, especially given the emotive nature of religious discourse.

I Think Therefore I Teach

Tips for A level students. Lesson ramblings for teachers (helpful ideas too!)

Religious Language-Twentieth Century Perspectives: A2 Philosophy

Preview of Lesson Plans

“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.” Marcus Aurelius Agree/ Disagree

• What does it mean to say something is true or false?
• How can we prove something is true/ false?

Go through the table worksheet answering whether the statements are true/ false or have empirical evidence to support. Discuss answers

Ppt: Slides 1-7 covering the Logical Positivists, Ayer’s Verification and how this goes against the meaningfulness of religious language.

Students write an introduction for:

“Only Cognitive language is meaningful. Discuss”

Student’s work: cut and sticking the views of the different falsification arguments, adding further detail from text book and evaluating.

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A Level Philosophy & Religious Studies

20th century religious language A* grade summary notes

OCR Philosophy

This page contains summary revision notes for the 20th century religious language topic. There are two versions of these notes. Click on the A*-A grade tab, or the B-C grade tab, depending on the grade you are trying to get.

Find the full revision page here.

Verificationism

• Religious language as not cognitive and therefore meaningless
• Verificationism is the method or approach of the logical positivists. Positivist refers to a type of empiricism which claims that only scientific knowledge is valid. Logical refers to focusing on language. So put together, a logical positivist is someone who think that only scientific language can be meaningful – i.e. language which is empirically verifiable.
• The idea is that for language to be meaningful it must be about – refer to – reality. 
• Ayer’s verification principle is that to be meaningful, a statement must be either analytic (true by definition) or empirically verifiable (we can test whether it is true or false through experience)
• To be empirically verifiable, a statement must be either verifiable in practice, meaning we are able to verify it, or verifiable in principle, meaning that we know that there is a way to verify it even if we are currently unable. Ayer gave the example of the claim that there are mountains on the dark side of the moon, which they had not been able to observe in his time but they knew in principle that they could.
• 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.
• When we die, we will see God and then we’ll know
• Parable of the celestial city – two travellers on a road (life), one believes a celestial city (afterlife) is at the end, the other doesn’t.
• When they reach the end, Hick remarks they will discover that one had been right all along.
• Hick is arguing that God is verifiable in principle, because there is a way to verify God even if we are currently unable to do so while alive.

Response to Hick

• However – if there is no afterlife, we won’t know.
• If death is annihilation there won’t be a moment of realisation of that.
• So – Hick has only shown that religious language is possibly verifiable in principle, but not actually verifiable in principle.
• The afterlife is not like the moon – in Ayer’s time they knew the moon existed and that observing its dark side was verifiable in principle. We do not know an afterlife exists and thus we cannot say God is verifiable in principle in an afterlife.

Falsificationism

• Popper invented falsificationism, science doesn’t work by just looking for things which verify a theory – it works through trying to prove itself wrong – looking for falsifications of itself.
• Falsificationism is therefore a better theory of empiricism than verificationism is.
• Flew applied this to religious language
• For a belief to be meaningful, it must be falsifiable, meaning we must be able to imagine how it could be false.
• All our beliefs about reality could be false – so an unfalsifiable belief can’t be about reality – so that would make it meaningless.
• A statement is only meaningful if it is falsifiable – meaning if we can imagine how it could be false.
• Religious believers can’t say what could prove their belief in God false. If you were to ask them what it would take to prove that God wasn’t real – they couldn’t tell you.
• So, religious language is meaningless.
• Flew uses the parable of the gardener to illustrate why unfalsifiable language is meaningless. Imagine someone claimed a gardener existed, but every time that was tested, they diluted the original concept to avoid the possibility of it being proven false (by saying it’s not visible, not tangible, etc).
• Flew claims that the consequence is that the original claim is diluted into saying nothing about reality at all.
• The gardener is an analogy for God, the concept of which has died a ‘death of a thousand qualifications’.
• There is ultimately no difference between a reality in which the gardener exists and one in which it doesn’t.
• So, unfalsifiable language, like religious language, clearly cannot actually be about reality.

Mitchell’s critique of Flew

• Mitchell argues that Flew has unfairly characterised religious belief as irrationally blind to evidence against it.
• However, religious people do accept that there is evidence against their belief – such as the problem of evil.
• Some religious people are indeed blind in their faith – but most actually do struggle with the issue of evil.
• Michell’s story of the partizan – who had faith that a stranger was their leader even when seeing them fighting for the other side. This is an analogy for faith in God despite seeing evil in the world.

Response to Mitchell

• The problem for Mitchell is that he may be right that religious people accept that there is some evidence against their belief (problem of evil)
• However – this is not enough to make religious belief falsifiable. 
• For a belief to be falsifiable it need to be admitted not merely that there is some evidence against it, but what evidence, were we to discover it, would completely disprove the belief.
• Religious people still cannot do that – so their belief is still unfalsifiable and thus meaningless as Flew argued.

Hare’s non-cognitive approach

• Ayer and Flew regard religious language as a failed attempt to describe reality – because it’s unverifiable (Ayer) or unfalsifiable (Flew).
• However, Hare says they are wrong in their foundational assumption that religious language actually is an attempt to describe reality at all. So, they can’t go on to conclude that it is a failed attempt.
• Hare claims instead that religious language expresses non-cognitive attitude/emotion/worldview which he called our ‘Blik’.
• Our attitude is not a cognitive belief about the world.
• Hare claims that religious language affects human behaviour and mentality – so this makes it meaningful to those who have it.
• So, religious language is non-cognitively meaningful.
• Hare illustrated his theory with the story of a student with an attitude of paranoia thinking their professors were trying to kill them.
• Religion is just like that – an expression of personal feeling/attitude.

Evaluation of Hare

• Most religious people would reject Hare’s theory. 
• They would claim that they aren’t just expressing their personal feelings/attitudes. 
• They might be doing a bit of that – but they are also expressing a cognitive belief that god exists.
• E.g. look Aquinas’ cosmological argument – it looks like a logical argument – you can say it’s false, but it’s hard to argue that it’s just an expression of his personal feelings/attitudes. It looks like Aquinas really has a cognitive belief that god exists in reality.

Optional: Defence of Hare:

• Religious people might think they are describing reality – but arguably they are only describing their reality as an expression of their own personal feelings and attitudes (their Blik).

Wittgenstein’s language games

• Wittgenstein thought that Ayer and Flew had misunderstood religious language.
• Ayer and Flew thought that religious language was a failed attempt to describe reality.
• Wittgenstein initially agreed with Ayer’s theory – but later in his life changed his mind.
• Ayer and Flew think that words get their meaning by being scientific – by referring to reality.
• Wittgenstein disagreed with this – claiming instead that words get their meaning by participating in the social reality.
• The social reality is the set of different types of social interaction that exist.
• Every different type of social interaction is like a ‘game’, Wittgenstein argued, because it follows rules.
• The things a person says depends on the social context they are speaking in. We speak very differently when with friends verses family verses at a job interview.
• So, words must get their meaninging from the social context in which they are spoken.
• Religion is its own type of language game – religious language is meaningful within the religious language game to people who are religious – i.e., know the ‘rules’.
• It’s only if someone is socialised into a language game that they find it meaningful.
• Science is a different language game to religion – so religious language is meaningless in the scientific language game.
• However, religious language is meaningful to religious people within the religious language game.
• If you haven’t grown up religious, you’re simply not going to find it meaningful.
• Analogy with Plato’s cave – different language games are like different caves.

Evaluation:  

• Wittgenstein says religion and science are totally different language games.
• This is how he manages to argue that religious meaning may not be cognitively meaningful but still has meaning to religious people.
• The issue is, scientific and religious meaning actually seem to overlap in the case of natural theology.
• For example, some religious scientists think that we can use science to prove God’s existence – e.g. polkinghorne and Swinburne make modern versions of the teleological argument to do that – which actually persuaded Antony Flew to become religious later in his life.
• Wittgensttein is sometimes accused of reducing religious meaning to pure faith, unjustifiably excluding the role reason and natural theology play in Christian meaning & belief.

Optional further evaluation: 

• Most scientists would reject the idea that there is scientific evidence for God. They would argue that polkinghorne is not doing genuine science when he speculates that God could be the explanation of the fine tuning of the universe, for example. 
• In that case, such language is not actually within the scientific language game
• So, Polkinghorne has not fused the religious and scientific language games. He is either merely playing the religious language game or has perhaps created a new language game.
• Either way, his arguments for God are not related to the scientific language game.
• So, Wittgenstein does not have an issue 

Using Aquinas’ theory to criticise Wittgenstein

• Similar to the Hare issue – most religious people would not accept that when using religious language they are just expressing participation in a social game.
• Aquinas didn’t write his cosmological argument just to express participation in a social game. 
• Aquinas clearly believes that God exists – in a scientific sense.
• We can say Aquinas is scientifically wrong – but we can’t say he doesn’t really believe in God in a scientific way.
• So, Aquinas would defend the cognitivism of religious language against Wittgenstein’s theory which claims it is not cognitive.

Evaluation:

• We could defend Wittgenstein by arguing that actually, Aquinas had a religious interpretation of reality.
• Aquinas thought he was describing reality with his cosmological argument, but arguably it was only the religious view of reality within the religious language game that he was describing.
• In the scientific language game, they wouldn’t recognise the concepts Aquinas uses like ‘necessary being’.
• Cognitive language expresses beliefs that can be true or false.
• Ayer accepts that religious language expresses beliefs, so he doesn’t say it’s non-cognitive. 
• But, Ayer argues they are unverifiable and thus meaningless, so they can’t be true or false. 
• So, religious language cannot have full cognitive meaning. It is therefore ‘not cognitive’.
• Verificationism is the method or approach of the logical positivists. Positivist refers to a type of empiricism which claims that only scientific knowledge is valid. Logical refers to focusing on language. So put together, a logical positivist is someone who think that only scientific language can be meaningful – i.e. language which is empirically verifiable.
• The idea is that for language to be meaningful it must be about – refer to – reality. 
• If we don’t know how to test whether a statement is true or false, then it is meaningless. It’s not false – it can’t be true or false.
• ‘God’ is a being supposedly beyond the empirical world we can experience – Ayer calls it a ‘metaphysical term’. There’s no way to verify it.

Hick’s critique – eschatological verification

• Religious language is empirically verifiable – in an afterlife.
• Parable of the celestial city – two travellers on a road (life), one believes a celestial city (afterlife) is at the end, the other doesn’t.
• However – if there is no afterlife, we won’t know.
• So – Hick has only shown that religious language is possibly verifiable in principle, but not actually verifiable in principle.
• The afterlife is not like the moon – in Ayer’s time they knew the moon existed and that observing its dark side was verifiable in principle. We do not know an afterlife exists and thus we cannot say God is verifiable in principle in an afterlife.
• Popper rejected verificationism and invented falsificationism. Verificationism says meaning must be scientific – but Popper argued that science doesn’t work by just looking for things which verify a theory – it works through trying to prove its theories wrong – looking for falsifications.
• Antony Flew applied Falsificationism to religious language
• Religious language as not cognitive and therefore failing to assert anything
• Flew accepts that religious language expresses beliefs, so he doesn’t say it’s non-cognitive. 
• But, Flew argues they are unfalsifiable and thus fail to assert anything, so they can’t be true or false. 
• Asserting that ‘X’ is the case is equivalent to asserting that ‘not X’ is not the case.
• We could imagine that X is not the case, which would be imagining how our assertion ‘X’ could be false.
• So, all assertions must be falsifiable.
• Falsifiability is thus a test of whether a belief asserts anything. We must be able to imagine how a belief could be false.
• All our beliefs about reality could be false.
• So, an unfalsifiable belief can’t be about reality and is thus fails to assert anything
• Religious believers can’t say what could prove their belief in God false.
• Parable of the gardener illustrates why unfalsifiable language fails to assert anything. Imagine someone claimed a gardener (God) existed, but every time that was tested (through the advance of scientific knowledge), they diluted the original concept to avoid the falsification (by saying it’s not visible, not tangible, etc).
• This dilutes the concept of God to the point of failing to assert anything, Flew saying it dies a ‘death of a thousand qualifications’.
• There is no difference between a reality in which the gardener/God exists and one in which it doesn’t.
• So, unfalsifiable language like religious language, clearly cannot actually be about reality.

Counter: Mitchell

• Mitchell does not contest falsificationism itself, but argues Flew was wrong to think religious language is unfalsifiable.
• Mitchell first accepts that Flew is right about some religious people who have blind faith that is not anchored to reality.
• However, most religious people base their belief in God on the evidence of their personal experience and relationship with God.
• Furthermore, their belief can actually be countered by evidence (is falsifiable) because of the problem of evil.
• To support Mitchell’s argument, imagine a religious person’s child dies. Some of them might abandon their faith in God as a result. That shows that their belief was actually falsifiable – the evidence of their relationship with God could be outweighed by the evidence of evil in the world.
• However, before the terrible thing happened to them – if you were you ask them whether anything could disprove their belief in God – they might not be able to tell you. 
• Mitchell concludes – most religious belief is falsifiable, the issue is just that people may not be able to know in advance what level of evil would falsify their belief.
• So, Flew’s mistake was to think that we must know in advance how a belief is falsifiable in order for it to be falsifiable.
• Mitchell illustrates with a parable – imagine a soldier fighting against the government in a civil war is approached by someone claiming to be the leader of the resistance. They stay up all night talking and a deep impression is left on the soldier. They believe this person is their leader – even when seeing counter-evidence such as seeing them fighting on the other side for the government – they have faith they are acting as a double agent etc.
• Similarly – religious belief gain evidence for God through their relationship – and they accept there is evidence against God (problem of evil) but cannot say in advance how much evil (evidence) it takes to disprove their belief. But in principle there is some level of evil which would persuade most religious belief – only those with blind faith would be unpersuadable and thus have unfalsifiable and meaningless beliefs.
• We could try to criticise Mitchell by arguing that the personal relationship with God doesn’t really count as proper evidence.
• So, religious belief is not created on the basis of evidence.
• However, it still seems some religious people have had their mind changed by the evidence of evil.
• So, Mitchell doesn’t even need the premise that religious belief is based on evidence.
• Mitchell’s argument is successful because it is based on an observable fact about religious psychology, that belief in God can be countered by evidence.
• So, religious language is cognitively meaningful as it expresses falsifiable beliefs.

Hare’s non-cognitive ‘Bliks’

• Ayer and Flew regard religious language as a failed attempt to describe reality – because it’s unverifiable (Ayer) or unfalsifiable (Flew).
• Hare claims that religious language affects human behaviour and mentality – so this makes it meaningful to those who have it.
• Hare illustrated his theory with the story of a student with an attitude of paranoia thinking their professors were trying to kill them. He meets the professors and sees they are nice – but keeps thinking that’s just their devilish manipulation.
• It’s tempting to think this student ‘believes’ their professors are trying to kill them – but Hare says that it’s not really a belief – because ultimately it is rooted in their non-cognitive attitude (blik) – this student has a paranoid attitude and when they say ‘my professors are trying to kill me’ they are just expressing their attitude.
• Similarly – religious people have a religious attitude towards their world – when they say ‘God be with you’ or ‘God exists’ – that looks a belief but isn’t really.
• Religious language is an expression of personal feeling/attitude.
• They might be doing a bit of that – but they are also expressing a cognitive belief that god exists.
• E.g. look Aquinas’ cosmological argument – it looks like a logical argument – you can say it’s false, but it’s hard to argue that it’s just an expression of his personal feelings/attitudes. It looks like Aquinas really has a cognitive belief that god exists in reality as the unmoved mover of the universe.
• The cosmological argument is indeed a logical argument.
• However, Aquinas’ reasons for creating it could just be to rationalise his emotions and attitudes. It could still be to serve his unconscious feelings. So even though it’s a logical argument, when Aquinas made the argument, it was ultimately rooted in his personal feelings – his desire for God – as Freud would say – his fear of death.
• Religious people try to speak about reality when talking about God – but since their language is unverifiable (Ayer) or unfalsifiable (Flew), their belief actually fails to be about reality.
• Wittgenstein initially agreed with Ayer’s theory – but later in his life changed his mind and created the language games theory.
• Ayer and Flew think that words get their meaning by being scientific – by referring to reality.
• Wittgenstein disagreed with this – claiming instead that words get their meaning by participating in the social reality.
• A social context or type of social interaction is a language game. Wittgenstein means game in a broad sense – an activity governed by rules. If we started speaking at a job interview the way we spoke to friends, we would probably not get the job. This is because there are rules to behaviour and speech in a job interview. The same is true for all social interaction – there are things is normal and not normal to say. 
• Most of the time we learn rules unconsciously.
• Religion is its own type of language game – religious language is meaningful within the religious language game to people who are religious – i.e., know (consciously or unconsciously) the ‘rules’.
• Science is a different language game to religion – so religious language is meaningless in the scientific language game.
• Analogy with Plato’s cave – different language games are like different caves.
• Many religious philosophers think they can use empirical reasoning to know things about God (Paley & Aquinas).
• For example, some religious scientists think that we can use science (the complexity of the world) to prove God’s existence – e.g. Polkinghorne (religious scientist) and Swinburne make modern versions of the teleological argument to do that – which actually persuaded Antony Flew to become religious later in his life.
• Wittgenstein claimed religion and science are totally separate – but they actually seem to overlap.
• Similar to the Hare issue – most religious people would not accept that when using religious language they are just expressing participation in a social game.
• Most religious people would object that they are doing more than that when talking about God. They intend to actually describe reality.
• Aquinas clearly believes that God exists.
• We can say Aquinas’ arguments are fallacious, but we can’t say they don’t express belief in God.

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Religious Language Essay Philosophy AQA A-Level

Subject: Philosophy and ethics

Age range: 16+

Resource type: Assessment and revision

Last updated

5 July 2022

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This essay tackles the question “is religious language meaningful”. It was awarded 24/25 by an examiner under the AQA marking guidelines. The essay evaluates the distinction between cognitivist and non-cognitivist quantifiers of meaning, going on to look at the philosophies of Ayer; Hick; Flew; Mitchell and Hare in order to reach a well reasoned conclusion.

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Religious Language

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Is religious language meaningful? (25 marks)

This question is asking you to argue either that religious language (e.g. ‘God exists’ and ‘God loves us’) is meaningful, or that it is meaningless.

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Religious language is meaningless, Discuss

Caryl Williams 13E

“Religious language is meaningless.”    

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. Yet, for some philosophers, religious language is meaningful and serves a purpose.  

Some deem religious language meaningless as there is no way of verifying the language. Others see the language from a different perspective to religious believers, and this allows non believers to have an open mind about religious 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 and 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 hood 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.

Many philosophers challenged the verification principle and rejected it. A main critic was John Hick. He said the principle itself is not meaningful because it cannot be verified using the verification principle. Hick argued when we die the truth of God’s existence will be verified either true or false. This is known as the eschatological verification. It can only be verified the day we die.

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Anthony Flew put forward the falsification principle. Falsification means to prove something true or false. The falsification principle accepts a statement is verifiable if it is known what empirical evidence could count against it and prove it wrong. Anthony Flew concluded statements are meaningless as there is nothing to count against religious statements. Religious statements cannot be proved true or false because religious believers don’t accept any evidence against their belief.  Flew argued that Christians hold to their belief that God is good. The believers give reasons why God remains good and Flew stated these constant qualifications render religious statements meaningless because they die the “death of a thousand qualifications.” He used John Wisdom’s the Parable of the Gardener to back up his argument. The parable is about two people viewing the results of one garden. The garden is full of weeds as it has lacked attention for a very long time. One day, two people see that the garden has been cared for and the weeds have gone and been replaced with plants. One says a gardener must have come into the garden during the night when everybody was sleeping and cared for the weeds as they had now turned into plants. The other man disagreed and stated there couldn’t have been a gardener because no one had seen or heard him in the garden. If there had been a gardener he would have cared for all of the weeds and not left some. The first man who believes there had been a gardener believes there is a God whereas the man who believed there had been no gardener doesn’t believe in God.  

There are several critics of the falsification principle. Richard Swinburne says religious statements are non cognitive, and there are statements we cannot falsify but we have the ability to understand the meaning behind the statement. He used the example of the toy in the cupboard. He said we can never prove that the toys come out of the cupboard at night and move around when we are not watching them. Even though we cannot falsify the fact as to whether to toys move or not, we can still understand the ideas of the toys moving. Even though we haven’t seen God we have the knowledge to believe God does exist. Therefore the statements are meaningful as we know how to falsify them. Basil Mitchell wanted to show how religious statements are meaningful even if they are not straight forward to verify or falsify. He said Flew missed the point that believers have a commitment to trust in God based on their faith, and for this reason they do not allow evidence to undermine their faith. Mitchell says they look for answers to prove to themselves God exists. He also mentioned the death of a thousand qualifications.

R. M. Hare stated falsification can be used for cognitive statements but it cannot be used for non cognitive statements because religious language cannot be falsified but it doesn’t mean it has no meaning. He used the example of the student. The student was convinced dons were going to kill him and he wouldn’t accept any evidence against them not wanting to kill him. Even though he wouldn’t accept any evidence against his belief, it is meaningful to him because of what he thought.  Hare also went on to say that looking at the world in this way is seen as a “blik.” Religious beliefs are bliks because of the impact they have on every individual’s life and the way believers look at their lives that is different to somebody else’s.          

R. B. Braithwaite wanted to prove religious language has a purpose because it has the function of conveying ideas and in itself makes it meaningful. He said the errors of the Verification and Falsification Principles had been to treat religious language as cognitive language when it is actually non cognitive. As it is based on our emotions, it can be very hard to prove something meaningful based on emotions as everyone’s emotions are different.

Saint Thomas Aquinas argued that we only have our day to day language which we can use to talk about God. We understand when a word is applied to God; it has a different meaning from its everyday use as we understand God is perfect. Therefore we are using analogies.  

There have been some critics who argued there has to be a comparative element to any human language used to describe God. This is impossible as God is beyond any true human understanding. Analogies are meaningless in describing God as they are limiting God to what he actually is. Aquinas disagreed. He argued there is a relationship between the world and God. God created the world and sustains it so there is a clear comparison. He went on to develop two forms of analogy to talk about God. Analogy of proportion and analogy of attribution.  Analogy of proportion is where the analogy is understood in each case as proportional to the nature of the being. We have to put God in proportion to ourselves to understand how everything works. Analogy of attribution relates to the belief that God created and sustains the world. It is because of this belief we can talk of human qualities. In some way those qualities can be applied back to God. We can talk up to God using the same language. The only problem about the two analogies is they only work if you have previous knowledge of God. If you believe God is omnipotent, omniscience etc, it makes perfect sense to use an analogy. However, without these assumptions it becomes less convincing.

Ian Ramsey developed the term analogy using terms: model and qualifier. Model has a straight forward meaning when it is applied to ordinary things which we experience but it is also used to describe God. We know what the term creator means and by an analogy we can use this word it to god and describe him. However, under no circumstances should no model be taken literal or univocal about God. Qualifier is the way in which the model is developed. Therefore a qualifier is essential. This is a word in which it shows how the word is applied to God. The qualifier is to make clear it is enhanced infinitely when applied to God. It demonstrates greatness in the quality when applied to God.

Paul Tillich and J. R. Randall had similar ideas concerning religious language. Tillich used ordinary language to point to God but spoke of the words used as symbols. He distinguished between a sign and a symbol. A sign is a conventional way of pointing to something, e.g. a road sign. A symbol is something that stands or is used in place of something else. Tillich held God could only be described using symbols but never literally. He said the symbol is transcending meaning something in it’s own sense which points to something greater of higher in reality.

 J. R. Randall sees religious language as a human activity which makes a special contribution to human culture. Religious language has a very unique function. It is able to stir strong emotion and to bind communities together through a common response to their faith.

Ludwig Wittgenstein argued that the meaning of words is in their use, the function they use as agreed by a particular group or society using them. He said every activity has their own unique language and Wittgenstein regarded this rather like a game with its own set of rules. Language games exist within all forms of human activities and lives.

He said people who are not in the game will not understand the use of the language and will find it meaningless to them. Religious belief has its own language and non believers will find religious language meaningless as they are not in the religious “game.” Problems develop when the language “goes on holiday.” This is when words are used outside of their context and we use ordinary language to describe God. This should never happen.

Wittgenstein has acquired some critics to his theory. The first is that different faiths have a different language game and it is extremely difficult to share those differences between the religions. Secondly, all religious believers are involved in different language games in one way or another. Religious language has not become totally isolated so there must be a common ground between religious language and other language games. If there is a common ground, non believers are able to understand religious language and decide whether or not it has a meaning for them. Thirdly, non believers might be able to understand the language better than a religious believer as they have an objective view on the use of the religious language. Believers take the language for what it is and cannot be subject to anything else.

In conclusion, believers would agree it is difficult to talk about God. The meaning of the word God applies to a being beyond human understanding. Believers recognise that any discussion of God is limited, but they would argue religious language does have meaning and purpose.  

Document Details

• Word Count 1983
• Page Count 4
• Level AS and A Level
• Subject Religious Studies & Philosophy

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Religious Language AO2 and Essay Plans Flashcards

The verification principle offers no real challenge to religious belief AGREE

• Swinburne- things that we cannot verify are not necessarily meaningless e.g. love Can’t prove that one person loves another but “I love you” is not a meaningless statement.
• Keith Ward- If i were God i could verify myself
• Hicks Celestial City- something may be verifiable in the afterlife (Counter- that’s presupposing there is an afterlife)
• Strong/weak verification - AJ Ayer’s strong verification rules historical facts as meaningless- makes allowances for some things but not religion. ( raises and issue of bias - setting out to disprove religion.)
• Highly subjective theory with a clear and specific goal to eradicate religious language. Support’s Flew’s attack of religious believers- “death of a thousand qualifications” (same criticism Flew makes of religious believers with falsification could be made here)

The verification principle offers no real challenge to religious belief DISAGREE

• Verification tries to provide a clear criteria for determining what is and what is not to count as a meaningful use of religious language.
• It allows us to say what use of religious language points to objective truths and what use of language gives merely subjective opinion.
• Revised- Ayer adapted it so that a statement can carry meaning it’s claim can be verified in principle. (counter with Flew and a death of a thousand qualifications.)

The falsification principle offers no real challenge to religious belief AGREE

-RM Hare ‘Bliks’ -Mitchell’s parable of the partisan soldier- Flew has not correctly understood how religious belief operates. -Wittgenstein’s language games theory. -Wisdom - God is outside of our human understanding -Flew’s conversion to theism in final years of life. -Ahluwalia suggests that Flew’s ‘confidence in empirical evidence as the final rest of meaning in itself, unfalsifiable’ -What can be falsified? Swinburne argues that factual statements can be falsified. However, some existential statements cannot be falsified but thus does not stop these statements meaningful. Swinburne uses the statement of the toys in the cupboard to attack the theory. He says that if toys came alive in your bedroom , you wouldn’t know so it cannot be falsified. Perhaps we can’t falsify God because we don’t know enough about him. -RB Braithwaite criticises the principle, arguing that religious language is meaningful because it is prescriptive- it recommends a course of action. So, for example, the phrase ‘God loves me’ has meaning because it advises you to live your life in a living life.

The falsification principle offers no real challenge to religious belief DISAGREE

• Falsification tries to provide a clear criteria for determining what is and what is not to count as a meaningful use of religious language.
• It offers an alternative to the failed principle of verification.
• It polices the boundaries between scientific and non- scientific use of language rather than the boundaries of linguistic meaning.
• It makes no sense by responding to criticism that we might qualify our beliefs so much that they no longer express the truths that we initially though they did.

We can only talk about God meaning fully , If we say what he is not (VIA NEGATIVA) DISAGREE

• Brian Davies criticises this point, by saying that eliminating negatives we have no idea whether what remains is God or not.
• The via negativa is what Aquinas originally attacked with his use of analogy in religious language.
• The via negative may implicitly assume an idea of God.
• The via negative becomes a new way of speaking positively about God when, for example, we take the attributes of immutability, infinity, impassability etc. Literally.
• We would never be able to identify an object if we were only able to talk of it in negative terms.
• The via negative may lead some people to conclude that the reason why our language cannot describe God is because there is nothing to describe.
• Religious people wish to say something positive about God. e.e St. Thomas Aquinas suggest that our language about God should be analogical.

We can only talk about God meaning fully , If we say what he is not (VIA NEGATIVA) AGREE

• Poetic or anthropomorphic language creates potential pitfalls in our understanding of God. Can cause confusion. Via Negative avoids these potential mistakes.
• Highlights the ineffable qualities of God. He is transcendent and there is an epistemic distance - The Via Negativa attempts to recognise this.
• Saying positive statements about God such as ‘God is good’ or ‘God is our father’ seems to raise questions about God’s nature and the problem of evil.
• Induvidually we may do good, but we are corrupted in a group.

To what extent can Wittgenstein’s theory of language games help to resolve the issues raised by religious language? YES

• Language games helps to a larger extent because it recognises that meaning does not happen in a vacuum bu that people in their contexts find words and concepts meaningful or meaningless.
• The analogy between language and games is useful because it highlights features such as understanding rules, practical applications and sharing goals.
• It highlights the non-cognitive nature of religious language.
• It provides boundaries for the use of religious language
• Statements are judged within their context- they are not inherently true or false

To what extent can Wittgenstein’s theory of language games help to resolve the issues raised by religious language? NO

• the theory is not successful because it does not take into account the important issues of the factual quality of religious truth claims, concentrating on meaning rather than truth.
• Wittgenstein ignores the importance of empirical evidence for supporting religious and other truth claims
• Wittgenstein overstates the problems of understanding the language games of belief systems that are different from one’s own,
• Believers claims cannot be empirically tested.
• It alienates people not initiated into the rules of the game

Strengths of analogy

-Analogy is used in many contexts to aid explanation which suggests that it is found to be effective. -It can help understanding by finding similar examples with which the listener is familiar with in order to support the understanding of the unfamiliar. -Analogy can provide vivid examples of which aid memory and gives insights. -The Bible uses analogy to communicate religious ideas, suggesting that it is appropriate for Christians to do the same. -Aquinas argued that religious language is best understood through the use of analogy. Presented analogy as a ‘middle way’ ANALOGY OF ATTRIBUTION AND ANALOGY OF PROPORTION -We understand plants as being alive in a sense, but that doesn’t compare to how we define ourselves as alive.Similarly, Gods’ life is greater than ours; all things must be understood as in proportion to one another. -Ian Ramsey supports Aquinas’ idea of using analogies in religious language.

Weaknesses of Analogy

• Swinburne questions what is wrong with univocal language for God. We can legitimately speak of God’s goodness and our own goodness univocally.
• We know too little about God for analogical language to have any meaning.
• Analogy operates in a context of what is completely known. Yet, in the case of God, we are dealing with the unknown.
• We have no idea what it might mean to attribute infinite wisdom to God. Human language must fall silent in the mystery of God. (the view of the via negativa)

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