Is religious language meaningful?
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To frame the question, it is necessary to invoke the existence two possible categories of language –
that of cognitively meaningful language and cognitively meaningless language. Religious language is
used to refer to God, for the purposes of this essay the god of Perfect Being Theology. This essay will
explore whether the claim that “religious language is meaningful” is true. Though Ayer’s Verification
Principle is not a helpful way, as it turns out, to evaluate whether religious language is Cognitively
Meaningful due to its own flaws, a more sympathetic approach is taken by Hare who also attempts to
categorise religious language as Cognitively Meaningless through interpretation of it as a ‘worldview’,
or, in his words, a blik. While Hare’s approach does not withstand criticism, Mitchell’s understanding of
religious language as Cognitively Meaningful (but in a somewhat unconventional way) succeeds,
successfully answering the presented question.
A test for whether a sentence is cognitively meaningful may be to see whether it either is analytic, or
empirically verifiable. A semantic conversion of Hume’s fork (which instead has epistemic concerns),
the argument AJ Ayer makes here is that we must “commit to the flames” any claim that does not fulfil
these criteria. To test religious language thus we must subject it to the Verification Principle (VP), as
outlined above. When we do, we find that religious language is neither empirically verifiable nor
analytic and thus is cognitively meaningless. The God of Perfect Being Theology will never be
empirically verifiable as he is a transcendent being, and ergo outside of the world; this means that we
will never be able to observe him or sense his existence, i.e. never be able to empirically verify his
existence. Ayer argues that since we cannot see or observe God, we cannot make claims like “God is
good”, “God is great” or “God is love”. Equally, atheistic language is, according to the VP, just as
cognitively meaningless. The claim “God does not exist” also is not empirically verifiable, nor can it be
known analytically. Thus, all religious language, regardless of whether it denounces or invokes God’s
existence, is a “pseudo-statement” according to Ayer and his Verification Principle.
An initial weak objection can be made to this argument, referencing arguments for God’s existence
which rely on empirically verifiable premises and thus succeed the VP, seemingly demonstrating
religious language to be Cognitively Meaningful. Namely, the Design Argument’s key premise is that
“there is order and apparent design in nature”, which through inductive reasoning demonstrates that a
designer – for Hume, the God of PBT – is likely to exist.
However, a reformulation of part of the Verification Principle escapes this criticism. This can be phrased
as “the empirical verification conditions of a sentence constitute is meaning”, and the application of
this new definition to the Design Argument renders it Cognitively Meaningless. The evidence employed
the Design Argument is that ‘there is order and apparent design to nature’; in other words, these are its
verification conditions. According to this reformulation, all that we can infer from this evidence is it
, itself, rather than the conclusion that “god exists”. The fact that the Design Argument’s verification
conditions are ‘there is order and apparent design to nature’ results in its meaning being “constituted”
by ‘there is order and apparent design to nature’, not any claims about God’s existence. Moreover, this
reformulation demonstrates that the reason the meanings of our sentences are bound to life within the
universe (and thus don’t extend to a transcendent god of PBT) is because our verification attempts are
thus bound; and prevents the objection that seemingly empirically verifiable arguments for God
succeed the VP and are thus Cognitively Meaningful from going through.
While the criticism which employs the Design argument’s empirical premises is a weak one and does
not succeed against a reformulation, one regarding counterfactual statements does. The VP categorises
Counterfactual statements as being Cognitively Meaningless despite them seeming intuitively sensible
and truth-apt. The statement “If I’d worn sunscreen yesterday, I wouldn’t have burnt” technically refers
to another possible world rather than this one, and thus is not empirically verifiable. It is not analytically
verifiable, either. Despite it appearing thus, it is intuitively clear that such statements are perfectly
meaningful, and an integral part of human understanding of the world through causation and analysis
of past and present trends. For example, when a city is faced with a natural disaster, it prepares for the
future possibility of one by thinking along the lines of “We could have stopped it if only we’d...” and
then implementing the produced measures. Ayer would consider this process to be evidentially
unfounded and thus meaningless and pointless, but it is clear that it is not.
Despite this seeming to be a sound criticism, Ayer can produce a response. A Weak version of the VP is
more practically applicable than the Strong, as it permits statements which are verifiable in principle or
otherwise have some empirical evidence to support them. It does, thus, permits counterfactual
statements. Despite us being unable to immediately and directly empirically verify the statement “If I’d
worn sunscreen yesterday, I wouldn’t have burnt”, we can provide indirect evidential support for it by
testing it in the present. Apply sunscreen today and if you don’t burn then it is reasonable to assume
that wearing sunscreen yesterday would have prevented you from burning. Thus, indirect empirical
verification can be provided for counterfactual statements through generalisation from causal
connections observed in the present. Moreover, according to the Weak VP counterfactual statements
are cognitively meaningful, seemingly rendering the above criticism unsuccessful.
Even though this sounds like a strong response, the truth is that it is unsuccessful due to an even more
glaring issue regarding counterfactual statements, an objection which proves fatal for the VP. If we
employ Ayer’s aforementioned reformulation of the VP – namely that “the verification conditions of a
sentence constitute its meaning” – counterfactual statements become tautology, even though
intuitively they are very much useful. The statement “I wore sunscreen today and didn’t burn, therefore
if I’d worn sunscreen yesterday, I wouldn’t have burnt”, despite seeming entirely sensible and
coherent, is equivalent to “I wore sunscreen today and didn’t burn, therefore I wore sunscreen today
and didn’t burn.”, which is a meaningless tautology. Thus, the major problem for Ayer is that his
