In this essay, I will strongly argue that religious language can be seen as being meaningful,
but only when considered in a non-cognitive (not truth-apt) sense. I will discuss and reject
Ayer and Flew’s arguments for why religious language is meaningless on the basis that they
are cognitive in their approach. Whilst I will consider Hick’s ‘eschatological verification’ as an
argument for why religious language is meaningful, I will reject it in favour of Hare’s
non-cognitive argument, which is a more successful approach because it implies that
religious claims can be both unfalsifiable and still meaningful.
The main factor which distinguishes Hare’s successful argument from the weaker arguments
of Ayer and Flew is that it is non-cognitive. Cognitivist accounts of religious language argue
that expressions of beliefs about the world can be true or false (are truth-apt), whilst
non-cognitivist accounts argue that expressions of mental states are not making a claim
about the world (and are neither true or false) and so only meaningful in that they express
some other type of mental state, such as values, attitudes or ways of seeing. For example, a
cognitivist would argue that ‘God exists’ is the claim that there is a God that exists
independently in the world, and reasons can be given to support this claim. In contrast, a
non-cognitivist may interpret ‘God exists’ as an expression of a commitment to a certain set
of values and a way of living, which I would argue is more suitable considering the personal
and subjective experiences of religious believers.
One issue with religious language is that of the logical positivists (of the Vienna Circle in the
twentieth century), who argued that knowledge should be built on a basis of verifiable facts.
Ayer developed his own version of logical positivism and applied his 'verification principle' to
religious language in order to show that it is meaningless. The verification principle states
that a sentence is meaningful if and only if: it is an analytic truth (it is true by definition) or if it
is empirically verifiable (in practice according to the strong version of the principle, or in
principle according to the weak version). Armed with his Verification Principle, Ayer argues
that although claims of religious language such as ‘God loves me’ or ‘God answers my
prayers’ appear to be meaningful, they are not - they are pseudo-statements lacking any
factual significance (a sentence is factually significant if we know what observations in the
world would lead us to accept the proposition as true, or false). This is because religious
language makes claims about metaphysical entities like ‘God’ and ‘Heaven’ which lie beyond
experience and observation, and these claims cannot be verified, nor are they true by
definition. In this way, Ayer suggests that religious language is meaningless because it does
not meet the two conditions which he sets out, and thus fails the verification principle.
However, I would argue the immediate issues with Ayer’s verification principle mean that we
cannot coherently use it to test whether religious language is meaningful or meaningless.
Ayer’s principle fails its own criteria of meaning because his claim that "a statement is only
meaningful if it is analytic or empirically verifiable" is not true by definition and it is not
empirically verifiable, therefore, according to its own conditions, it is itself meaningless. If the
principle upon which Ayer bases his argument is in itself flawed, then this would imply that
his reasoning for why religious language is meaningful is also flawed, and thus should be
rejected.
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