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Class Notes - Religious Language
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ReligiouLanguag
, 23.11.21
RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE -
SPEAKING ABOUT GOD
1. WHAT IS RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE
o God exists
:
God is love
O There is life after death
Jesus is my saviour
2. HOW ARE SUCH STATEMENTS TO BE UNDERSTOOD?
& Why religious language?
o The concept of a God is:
• Something other, something timeless
We talk of things using our knowledge that is
acquired through our experience
If something is 'other' and 'timeless' it is by
definition not part of our experience
o Meaning, how can we talk about something that
doesn't belong in our world?
X Going back to Hume
He makes a distinction between statements that
convey facts
They express knowledge
,:/
Those that convey values - which don't convey
knowledge, as they are concerned with feelings and
metaphysical claims
From this we can identify two ways of thinking
about religious language
3. TWO WAYS OF UNDERSTANDING RELIGIOUS LANGAUGE
• Cognitive
RL refers to things that can be known about, through
empirical observation
Meaning they can be shown to be false
Religious statements correspond to something that
actually exists
O Cognitive meaning
Univocal, factual, objective, empirically
verifiable, statements about religious
experiences, realist
• RL refers to emotions or subjective states of mind
O They don't correspond to something existing in the
world
O May be understood symbolically or metaphorically
Non-cognitive meaning
Equivocal, not factual, subjective, not empirically
testable, statements are user-defined, anti-realist
WHAT DOES A WORD MEAN?
* Univocal
o Words that have only one meaning
, Words about God must have same meaning in our
world
Black, sky, tree
Words that have more than one meaning
Mouse, web, score
Via negativa
john's mood was BLACK' - not literally, but
metaphorically
:
5. THE MEANING OF 'MEANING
• Theories of knowledge/epistemology
C Cognitive - statements has meaning if it corresponds
with something in the real world
Correspondence theory of
meaning/knowledge/truth
Non-cognitive - statement has meaning if it coheres
with other statements that are part of a person's
world view
Coherence theory of meaning/knowledge/truth
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