4 Evaluate the significance to religious language of the claim "a sentence is factually significant if, and only if, we know how to verify the proposition which it purports to express." (30)
4 Evaluate the claim that ‘Whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent’. (30)
4 Evaluate the claim that ‘The criterion of verifiability is not a conclusive test of meaningfulness, but it is a necessary condition for a statement to be meaningful.’ (30)
4 Evaluate the opinion that Religious language issues in the 21st century are relevant. (30)
4 Evaluate the extent to which it can be claimed that only analytic and synthetic statements are meaningful and God is neither. (30)
4. Evaluate the view that religious language is meaningful if understood correctly. (30) 2018 Q
4 Evaluate the opinion that '‘Religious language is meaningless". (30)
4 Evaluate the significance of the view that verification and falsification raise very difficult if not impossible problems for religious language.' (30)
The problem with religious language arises from the fact that we use ordinary words to describe or talk about extra-ordinary things like God and what He is like or fundamental questions of existence. In doing so we are using what Aquinas called ‘equivocal’ language that is words that have more than one meaning. The problem here lies in that when we speak about God as ‘a good shepherd’ we don’t mean it literally but metaphorically or symbolically. That God is like a shepherd but not like since he is the ‘greatest’ shepherd there could be but we are not sheep! Or when we talk about there being ‘life after death’ we know what life is and we know what death means but ‘life after death’ is an oxymoron, a logical contradiction. This is the nature of religious language – it uses terms we all understand but in a different way. This, the Logical Positivists say, makes religious assertions meaningless for no one can ever agree on the ‘true’ meaning of these assertions.
The Logical Positivists base their claim that religious language is meaningless on their assertion that all assertions should be verifiable by one or more of the five senses. This they call the Verification Principle. This they regard as empirical, concrete, practical evidence; evidence that can be checked and repeated so that all can agree e.g. ‘the table is round.’
They divide statements up into analytic – those which are true by definition like ‘all bachelors are unmarried men’; synthetic – those whose truth can be verified by testing e.g. it is raining outside and mathematical e.g. 1+1=2. All other statements, they claim, are meaningless.
They regard the world as just this one, the realm of the phenomenon, in which only cognitive experiences are meaningful. The problem for them lies in the fact that religious language is non-cognitive and almost by definition non-verifiable. After all how do you verify ‘God loves me’ or even ‘God exists’? However it is not only religious language that is a problem for them. How would they define opinions like ‘I don’t like Mondays’? or emotions like ‘I love you’? or ‘Picasso was a rubbish artist in his blue period,’ or ‘music by Michael Jackson is better than that by Beethoven.’? Or even intentions like ‘I was going to do my homework but had to go to the dentist instead’ or ‘I will do it tomorrow’?’ and what about moral assertions like ‘it is wrong to murder’? All of these are assertions and belong to the affective side of life but few would deny they have meaning for people.
Even a fairly straightforward assertion like ‘King Harold was killed at the Battle of Hastings’ is not directly verifiable. For cases like these AJ Ayer proposed a weak form of the verification principle: so long as we know what it would take to verify an assertion he said that was sufficient to make it meaningful. Presumably, in this case, the Bayeux Tapestry and first-hand accounts would be acceptable.
Antony Flew, recognising that in fact there were many assertions which are not directly verifiable, proposed the Falsification Principle. He suggested that so long as we can know what it would take for something to be proved false and that the claimant accepted the evidence then statements could be said to be meaningful. For example to assert that there is no life on Mars we would have to know what conditions are necessary for life to exist on Mars.
However his argument with the people who made religious claims was that they were very unlikely to accept any evidence that might contradict their claims. He expanded on the Parable of the Gardener. He told of the two explorers who came across a beautiful clearing in a jungle, one of whom ( a theist) claimed that it was so beautiful it must be tended by a gardener. When challenged by his friend (an atheist) they set all sorts of traps but no gardener ever became apparent. The theist argued that the fact that none of the traps had ever been sprung didn’t prove the gardener didn’t exist but that he must be invisible and intangible and inaudible. The atheist wryly commented that he didn’t see the difference between this gardener and no gardener at all. Obviously this is analogical to the situation with theists in general and their claims about God. Despite all evidence to the contrary like evil and suffering, they continue to believe in a good God. This is when religious assertions become meaningless Flew said and God dies the ‘death of a thousand qualifications.’
A more modern analogy was related by RM Hare in his parable of the paranoid student and the dons in which a student becomes convinced, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the dons at his university are out to kill him. He coined the term ‘blik‘ to describe these apparently meaningless viewpoints which nevertheless have powerful influences on the behaviour of the people who believe them. Rather like being afraid of spiders or enclosed spaces – these ‘bliks’ cannot be verified but are not meaningless.
A real stumbling block for believers when making assertions about the nature of their God is that so often He is described either in negative terms – what is called the Via Negativa or Apophatic Way; God is not: visible, touchable, smellable, hearable etc. or in superlatives ‘all good’ ‘all loving’ ‘all powerful’ or the ‘good‘ shepherd etc. but none of these actually says anything about what He is like.
It is of distinct interest that Ayer later retracted his position and acknowledged that the Verification Principle itself was meaningless because it could not be verified! However despite all the problems with understanding religious language it is clear that to believers it is not meaningless and anything which affects life and lives so profoundly cannot be dismissed without making some attempt to understand it.
[And I haven’t even mentioned Wittgenstein and Language Games.]
4 Evaluate the view “Antony Flew’s falsification principle presents a significant challenge to religious language.” (30)
Antony Flew’s falsification principle stems from Karl Popper’s ideas which questions the meaningfulness of religious statements by checking if they can be falsified. Flew applied this to religious language, concluding it is nothing more than silly, meaningless words. Whilst it could be argued Antony Flew’s falsification principle presents a significant challenge to religious language, this essay will argue that it does not.
It can be argued that Flew does present a significant challenge to religious language because a religious belief is changed to fit any circumstance. Flew says that this means the statement is not meaningful and has no empirical implications. Flew uses his own version of the Parable of the Gardener to explain this: two explorers find a clearing in the jungle, one says a gardener must tend to it but the other denies it. They wait but no gardener appears – but they try to detect them. One says the gardener is invisible and undetectable. This shows how religious believers do not allow for the falsification of their belief and turn to saying that God is incomprehensible. Flew said that God ‘died a death of a thousand qualification’, explaining that religious beliefs are continuously modified to meet the challenges. Eventually, the beliefs fall far from the original claims of God. Flew therefore does challenge religious language as he notes it lacks meaning and has no empirical evidence.
However, Richard Swinburne says that the falsification principle does not work for all statements, but they still have meaning. He uses the analogy of the cupboard of toys to explain this. It says that you cannot prove or falsify that the toys cannot leave the cupboard when it is unsupervised, but the concept of their movement still has enough meaning as it is something we can understand. This argument identifies a fatal flaw in the principle Flew puts forward as it suggests that some statements are meaningless just because they cannot be falsified. This therefore suggests that Flew’s falsification principle does not provide a significant challenge to religious language as it cannot be applied universally and has to be done systematically to make his principle seem strong.
Flew’s falsification principle can be argued to significantly challenge religious language because Ayer agrees. A.J. Ayer even takes it a step further, denying the possibility of God’s existence altogether on the grounds that there is no way of empirically verifying his existence. He believed that ethical statements fell short of the verification principle because they cannot be verified empirically. This provides a significant challenge to the idea of religious language because it concludes that it lacks any meaning or worth due to its lack of evidence. This is a significant challenge because it is impossible to provide any solid, empirical evidence in favour of God’s existence, meaning it is easy to take Ayer’s conclusion at face value and say that religious language is meaningless.
R.M. Hare combats this, arguing that religious language is meaningful because it is non-cognitive, and so cannot have the falsification principle applied to it. Religious statements do not make factual claims and so cannot be considered cognitive, thus making the application of the falsification principle wrong. Hare says that religious language is meaningful because they have great influence in believers’ lives, illustrating some sense of meaning to that person. He also proposed that a believer’s statements were ‘bliks’ – ways of regarding the world that may not based on reason or fact and are neither falsifiable nor verifiable. This eliminates any sense of challenge put forward by the falsification principle as it further reinforces the idea that religious statements are unfalsifiable.
It can be argued that the falsification principle does provide a significant challenge to religious language. Karl Popper writes that “science is more concerned with falsification of hypothesis than verification”, and so created the falsification principle as the verification principle was deemed too flawed to be valid. He figured that a scientific statement is one that is falsifiable, meaning that it would accept evidence, if it existed to prove the statement false. This presents a significant challenge to religious language as it highlights the need for evidence which believers cannot offer; Popper and other philosopher consider non-factual statements to be meaningless. As religious statements are not based on fact and rather a belief, it makes sense for them to be called meaningless.
Despite this, Basil Mitchell puts forward the argument that religious statements are meaningful even if they are neither straightforwardly verifiable, nor falsifiable. Mitchell said that Flew was wrong in his supposition that believers never allow anything to count against their beliefs. He used the Parable of the Partisan and the Strange to explore it. A Partisan meets a stranger who claims to be a resistance leader. The stranger urges the Partisan to have faith in him, even if he is seen to be acting against Partisan interests. The Partisan is committed to a belief in the stranger’s integrity, but his friends think he is a fool to do so. The original encounter with the stranger gives the Partisan sufficient confidence to hold onto his faith in him even when there is evidence to the contrary. This is important as it illustrates the concept of non-propositional faith, which is a trust in God which may be held even when things suggest otherwise. Flew missed this point, and Mitchell argues that believers do not allow anything to conclusively falsify their belief in God, but this does not mean it is meaningless. This knocks the falsification principle as it gives an explanation as to why religious statements can be seem as meaningful despite being attempted to be proven differently; the peculiar and problematic parts of religious belief will be revealed at the end of time according to religious belief.
In conclusion, the falsification principle does manage to put forward some points about the meaningfulness of religious language, but the arguments against Flew’s proposition set it back. The falsification principle’s strengths rely on a number of factors which are difficult to apply to religious language, and in some cases, have been proven impossible to apply as the components are not present. It is important to recognise that Flew’s confidence in empirical evidence as a final test of meaning is also unfalsifiable. If he couldn’t think of circumstances where he would say empirical evidence wasn’t necessary, him saying we need this evidence is also empty. The falsification principle therefore falls apart, making it very hard to say that it presents a significant challenge to religious language.
4 Evaluate the claim that ' the statement “God exists” – is unfalsifiable, and therefore meaningless:.’ (30)
4 Evaluate the relative importance of the view 'The falsification principle offers no real challenge to religious belief'. (30)
4 Evaluate the view “the falsification principle presents no real challenge to religious belief.” (30)
4 Evaluate the significance for religious language of Flews parable conclusion that there is 'no difference between an invisible, intangible gardener and no gardener at all. (30)
4 Evaluate the importance of the “Antony Flew’s falsification principle presents a significant challenge to religious language." (30)
4 Evaluate the view that RM Hare's non-realist idea of Blik's is a better defence of religious Language that Basil Michell's realism. (30)
4 Evaluate the view that R Hare’s account of religious language is correct. (30)
4 Evaluate the importance of Ayers claim ' no statement with God in it is little significant' as a challenge to religious language. (30)
4 Evaluate the view that ‘the view that religious language is indispensable for an understanding of religious belief.’ (30)
4. Evaluate the implications of the claim that the proposition ‘the meaning of a statement is its method of verification’ cannot be verified. (30)
4 Evaluate the view 'logical positivism offers a persuasive criterion for meaningful language.' (30)
4 Evaluate the extent to which realist about religious langauge are more pursasive than non-realists". (30)
4 Evaluate Hick's claim "Ayer’s verification in principle makes religious statements meaningful". (30)
4 Evaluate the strengths and weakness of the ideas of AJ Ayer about religious language. (30)
4 Evaluate the strengths and weakness of Basil Mitchell’s response to Flew’s use of the Parable of the Gardener. (30)
4 Evaluate the strengths and weakness of R M Hares Parable of the Mad Dean as a defence of non-realist religious language. (30)