Examine how the meaningfulness of religious language has been challenged
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A2 Unit 3 - Studies in Religion
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My Revision Notes AQA A-level Religious Studies: Paper 1 Philosophy of religion and ethics
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Examine how the meaningfulness of religious language has been
challenged (10 Marks)
In the 1930s a philosophical school known as the Logical Positivists,
developed from the Vienna Circle, produced the main basis of the
verification principle. The Logical Positivists were concerned with
observing how language is used to convey knowledge and used this in the
context of God. They limited the range of language which could be seen
as meaningful, by claiming that if it is only verifiable by sense data or if it
is analytically true then the assertion could be seen to heaved meaningful
content, therefore meaning a sentence could be false but meaningful. The
Logical Positivists believed that only statements there are analytic or
synthetic are meaningful, and that religious language does not fit into
either of these so is therefore meaningless. The claim ‘God loves us as a
father loves his children’ is not meaningful, because it cannot be verified.
From this A.J. Ayer was influenced by the Vienna Circle and the Logical
Positivists to develop the idea of a ‘Verification Principle’, and in his book
‘Language, Truth and Logic’(1936) he wrote about the linguistic faults of
religion. Ayer believed a statement only has meaning if it is either analytic
or empirically verifiable. Ayer took the example of the statement ‘God
exists’ and he took from this that we cannot prove ‘God exists’ from a
priori premise (knowledge without reference to experience) by using
deduction, meaning that it is not analytically true. This means ‘God exists’
must be empirically verifiable to be meaningful, however it does not
predict that our experience will be different depending on whether it is
true or false, therefore meaning it is meaningless. This is because
religious language is non-empirical and cannot be proved by sense
experience.
The Falsification Principle came about thereafter the Verification Principle
and looked at the meaningfulness of religious language from a different
angle to the Verification Principle. Falsification Principle proposes that if
something is to be true then it must be able to be proven false, and that if
things are falsifiable then they can be used. In the 1950s, Anthony Flew
applied the falsification principle to religious language and he concluded
that religious statements are meaningless, as they have nothing to count
against them. Religious statements cannot be proved true or false
because religious believers don’t accept any evidence against their belief.
Flew used the parable of the Gardener (where one day two people go to a
garden and it is full of weeds and then they visit the next day and the
weeds are gone and there are plants. One believers a gardener must have
come while everyone was sleeping and the other disagrees because
nobody saw a gardener, so there can’t have been a gardener. The one
who believes there is a gardener believes in god and the other doesn’t
believe in God) and from this Flew stated the constant qualifications make
religious statements meaningless by Christians constantly giving reasons
to as of why “god is good’ causes them to die by ‘death of a thousand
qualifications’.
Philosopher R.M. Hare developed his idea from the idea of the falsification
principle and used it to describe certain beliefs which he called ‘bliks’. He
stated a blik is a non-rational belief which could never be falsified. Hare
stated falsification can be used for cognitive statements but it cannot be
used for non-cognitive statements because religious language cannot be
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