Overview of Religious Language (AQA A-Level Religious Studies): Revision Notes
Overview of Religious Language
Introduction
Religious language is language used when talking about God, gods, or ultimate reality. This topic explores a fundamental philosophical question: is religious language meaningful, and if so, how?
The specification requires understanding of:
- Whether religious language should be viewed cognitively or non-cognitively
- The challenges of verification and falsification principles
- Various responses and alternative views of religious language
The debate about religious language isn't about whether religious statements are true or false, but about whether they can be considered meaningful at all. This distinction is crucial for understanding the philosophical challenges that follow.
The problem of religious language
Why is religious language problematic?
For Abrahamic religious traditions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), religious language presents a serious challenge. These faiths make truth claims about God through written texts, commentary and oral teachings. Speech about God is essential to both personal religious faith and organised celebration.
If we cannot adequately understand or use religious language, then the sacred texts and teachings of these traditions become unintelligible. This creates a fundamental crisis for religious belief systems that depend on linguistic expression of their core doctrines.
Similarly, when Hindus speak about Brahman as Ultimate Reality, critics might argue this is merely a collection of words without real meaning.
The challenge from scientific language
In the early twentieth century, a widespread view emerged that the clearest form of language was that of science. Scientific language was:
- Straightforward and literal
- Based on observable facts
- Verifiable through evidence
This created difficulties for religious and moral language, which clearly involves more than just statements of observable facts. The central question became: how can religious statements be shown to be right, wrong, or even meaningful at all, if they are not simple descriptions of observed facts?
The rise of scientific methodology in the early 20th century created a paradigm where only statements that could be empirically tested were considered truly meaningful. This posed a direct challenge to religious discourse, which often makes claims about non-observable realities.
Key terms and concepts
Metaphysical and supernatural claims
Metaphysics refers to the philosophy of concepts beyond the physical world. It deals with abstract questions about the nature of time, space and reality.
Supernatural literally means 'above' what is natural. It refers to that which cannot be described by science or the laws of nature.
The religious claims we are concerned with are metaphysical, such as:
- There is a God
- Miracles happen
- There is life after death
These are general interpretations of life rather than specific bits of information. Many religious claims are also about the supernatural - beliefs about beings and actions that cannot be accounted for in terms of the ordinary physical world. By definition, the supernatural cannot be explained using the natural language of science or empirical facts.
Facts about religion
It is important to distinguish between facts about religion and religious claims themselves. Factual statements about religion present no problems:
- 'The Pope is the Bishop of Rome'
- 'Muslims and Jews are not permitted by their religion to eat pork'
These are simple facts. The first defines what we mean by 'Pope'. The second remains true even if some followers are seen eating bacon, because moral rules are still facts whether or not they are obeyed. The meaningfulness of these statements is not in question because they can be verified through observation and documentation.
Wittgenstein's early approach
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) was a key figure in the philosophy of language. In his early work, he suggested that philosophical problems would be solved if people used more precise language, limited to statements for which there could be evidence.
The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
In his 1921 book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus ('Logico-philosophical Treatise'), Wittgenstein set out a narrow view of what could count as a meaningful proposition. He saw the function of language as being to picture the world. Therefore, every statement needed to correspond to some information about the world itself.
In the opening statement of Tractatus, he identified the world with the sum of true propositions: 'The world is all that is the case'. By this he meant that whatever cannot be shown to correspond to some observable reality cannot be meaningfully spoken about.
The limits of language
Wittgenstein's early approach presented language as a precise but narrowly defined tool for describing the phenomenal world (the world as we experience it). However, even in the Tractatus, he acknowledged that there are certain things of which one cannot speak. One of these is the 'subject self' (the self as a subject of experiences). Another is the mystical sense of the world as a whole.
This led to his famous conclusion: 'Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent'.
The problem for religious believers is that they still want to speak about God and hold their religious claims to be of supreme importance, even though these claims cannot be supported by empirical evidence as scientific language would be.
Logical Positivism and the Vienna Circle
Wittgenstein's ideas were taken up by a group of philosophers who met in Vienna during the 1920s and 1930s. Their approach is known as Logical Positivism.
The 'founding father' of Logical Positivism and leader of the Vienna Circle was Moritz Schlick (1882-1936), a German philosopher and physicist. Schlick was seen as an ideal combination of philosopher and physicist, particularly after publishing a paper on Einstein's theory of Special Relativity in 1915.
Hume's Fork and types of meaningful language
The Logical Positivists took their starting point from Hume's 'Fork' (a two-pronged fork). Hume argued that we can have knowledge of just two sorts of thing:
- Matters of fact
- The relations between ideas (for example in mathematics)
Following this, the Logical Positivists claimed there are only two types of meaningful language:
1. Synthetic propositions
These are propositions that depend upon evidence. For example, the proposition 'the sun will rise tomorrow' is based on the evidence of seeing the sun rise every day. We know exactly what that proposition means, so it is meaningful.
2. Analytic propositions
These are propositions that are true by definition or by the words used. They are meaningful because they are self-evident. Examples include:
- All bachelors are unmarried men
- Frozen water is ice
- (this is a tautology, because in effect it says that , so it is true by the terms used)
The challenge to religious language
Applying this test of meaning to religious language, the Logical Positivists concluded that metaphysics and theology are meaningless because:
- There is no evidence to support them, therefore they are not synthetic
- They are not true by definition or true by the words used
This poses a fundamental challenge: if religious statements are neither synthetic (verifiable by evidence) nor analytic (true by definition), then they fail to meet the criteria for meaningful language altogether. Religious language would therefore be classified as nonsense, regardless of how important believers consider it to be.
The Verification Principle
Schlick argued that the meaning of a statement is its method of verification. This became known as the Verification Principle.
Example: Understanding Verification
Consider the statement: 'My car is parked on the road outside the house.'
The meaning of this statement is that, if you go outside the house and look towards the road, you will see my car. This is the way you can verify the statement as being true.
If it is impossible to verify the truth of a statement in this way - in other words, if there is no way to give an account of it in terms of sense experience - then it is meaningless.
Verification is by sense experience, such as sight.
A.J. Ayer and Language, Truth and Logic
Logical Positivism was promoted in Britain by the philosopher A.J. Ayer (1910-89) in his 1936 book Language, Truth and Logic. This was a radical and controversial work, written when Ayer was young and had just returned from spending time in Vienna engaging with the Logical Positivists.
Ayer's version of the Verification Principle
According to Ayer, a statement is meaningful if and only if it is:
- Analytic (true by definition or a tautology), or
- Empirically verifiable
Critical distinction: The Verification Principle is not about whether a statement is true or false. It is about whether a statement is meaningful.
This means a false statement can still be meaningful as long as it can be verified through sense experience. Similarly, a statement that seems intuitively significant might be classified as meaningless if it cannot be verified.
Application to religious language
In terms of religious language, Ayer made the striking point that theism and atheism are equally nonsense, since neither can be shown to be true on the basis of evidence. The statements 'God exists' and 'God does not exist' are both meaningless because there is no sensory evidence to support them. 'God' is a metaphysical being, so is not discoverable by sensory experience or describable using scientific language.
Verification in practice and in principle
Ayer distinguished between two ways a statement can be meaningful:
Verification in practice happens when there is direct sense experience to support a statement.
Example: Verification in Practice
Consider the statement: 'There is a purple fire-breathing dragon next door wearing green tights and a red scarf, smoking a cigar and drinking beer.'
This statement is meaningful (even though it sounds silly) because it can be checked by going next door and having a look. The statement describes specific observable characteristics that could be verified through sense experience.
Verification in principle would apply to statements that cannot currently be verified but could theoretically be verified (we will explore this concept more in later sections).
The distinction between verification in practice and in principle is important because it allows for statements about things we cannot currently observe (such as the far side of the moon before space exploration) to still be considered meaningful, as long as they could in principle be verified through sense experience.
Cognitive versus non-cognitive language
Much of the debate about religious language since Ayer has been an attempt to avoid his conclusion by showing that religious language does have meaning, even if not the sort of factual, literal, empirical meaning that Ayer was seeking.
This brings us to an important distinction between two approaches to religious language.
Cognitive language
Cognitive language conveys factual information. Most cognitive statements are synthetic - they can be shown to be true or false depending upon evidence.
Example: Cognitive Statement
'The Houses of Parliament are located in Westminster.'
This is a cognitive statement because it claims to give factual information. It is synthetic because its truth depends on evidence - if you go to Westminster, you will either find the Houses of Parliament there or you will not.
Similarly, 'There is a green dragon eating toast in the room next to you' is a cognitive statement. If you look next door, you will either find a green dragon eating toast or you will not. The statement is cognitive irrespective of whether it is true or false - it is testable by sense experience.
Non-cognitive language
A non-cognitive statement may:
- Convey emotion
- Give an order
- Make a moral claim
- Express a wish
- Offer an insight
It is inappropriate to ask whether a non-cognitive statement is factual. Its truth does not depend upon its correspondence to empirical facts.
Examples: Non-cognitive Statements
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'I am happy because I love this place and find it beautiful' - contains three non-cognitive assertions. These express emotional states and aesthetic judgments rather than verifiable facts.
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'With this ring I thee wed' - might be the most important statement a person ever makes, but it is not proved true or false with reference to facts. It is a 'performative utterance', meaning it makes something happen rather than describing something that exists.
The central question
The debate about religious language centres on whether it should be viewed cognitively (as making factual claims that can be verified) or non-cognitively (as expressing something other than verifiable facts).
This distinction is crucial because if religious language is cognitive, it must meet the verification criteria and would be classified as meaningless by Ayer. However, if religious language is non-cognitive, it might escape this challenge by serving a different function altogether.
Exam tips
Essential Points for Exam Success:
- Be clear about the difference between whether a statement is meaningful and whether it is true or false
- Understand that the Verification Principle challenges the meaningfulness of religious language, not just its truth
- Be able to distinguish between synthetic and analytic propositions with examples
- Know the difference between cognitive and non-cognitive language and be able to apply these categories to religious statements
- Remember that Logical Positivism sees both 'God exists' and 'God does not exist' as equally meaningless
- Be prepared to explain why religious believers would find Ayer's conclusion problematic
Remember!
Key Points to Remember:
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Religious language is problematic because it makes claims about God and the supernatural that cannot be verified through empirical observation
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Wittgenstein's early work suggested we should remain silent about things we cannot speak about meaningfully - creating a problem for religious believers
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Logical Positivists argued that only two types of language are meaningful: synthetic (verifiable by evidence) and analytic (true by definition)
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The Verification Principle states that the meaning of a statement is its method of verification - religious statements fail this test
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A.J. Ayer argued that both 'God exists' and 'God does not exist' are meaningless because neither can be supported by sensory evidence
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The debate centres on whether religious language should be viewed cognitively (as factual claims) or non-cognitively (as expressing emotions, attitudes or performing other functions)