A2 Roy Jackson - Religious Language

8/2/2019 A2 Roy Jackson - Religious Language

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Religious Language - Roy Jackson

'What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.'Ludwig Wittgenstein

What Is Religious Language?

We often refer to 'everyday language'. For example, having a conversation in acafé about the weather is nothing unusual; it is a topic directly related to everydayexperience. If, however, the conversation was to turn and I started to talk aboutGod, then the language drifts from the everyday to the 'mysterious', the'metaphysical'. If I were then to go on to make an assertion about God - forexample, 'God exists' - then the listener might well begin to question the validityof the assertion.

To assert is to insist that something is true. When we talk of the 'mysterious' thenmany doubt the truth of such statements. For a variety of reasons, many of usquestion the validity of such statements as 'God exists', 'God is timeless', 'God islove' and so on. We know such statements are made all the time, and yet wewonder whether they have any real meaning. That is, what does it mean to say'God is timeless' and how is this different from saying 'The sky is blue'?

Verification and Falsification

In order to be able to say whether or not language is meaningful it might behelpful to have rules by which words can be judged. The rules of language weredebated by the Vienna Circle: a group of philosophers - influenced byWittgenstein's early philosophy - and scientists who met periodically fordiscussions in Vienna during the 1920s and 30s. The Circle rejected the need formetaphysics (the 'transcendental science' that examines the transition inphilosophy from the physical world to a world beyond sense perception). For them,

a sentence could only be meaningful if it could be related to experience: it had tobe positive, and it had to be logical; hence the term 'logical positivism'.

The same however, could not be said of religious language. Here, it is not a caseof whether a statement is true or not, it is rather that they cannot be proven oneway or the other (i.e. they are not verifiable) and are, therefore, meaningless. Thestatement 'God exists and He is good' is, for the logical positivist, beyond senseexperience, unverifiable and, therefore, meaningless.

Of course, there are different degrees of verification. For example, you mightargue that the statement 'Julius Caesar led an expedition to Britain in 55 BC' issomewhat difficult to verify in the sense that there are no living witnesses to the

event and, also, that documents relating to the event are rather scanty.Nonetheless, pick up just about any encyclopaedia and it would likely confirm thestatement. Therefore, the evidence - such as it is - is weighed in favour of thehistorical statement being true; at least until evidence to the contrary is revealed.This, in the words of A.J. Ayer, is a form of 'weak verification': there is muchevidence, but not conclusive evidence.

Ayer was later to state that his earlier work was 'mostly false', and we can seewhy he came to that conclusion. By weakening verification you are opening theback door to religious language again. For example, in what respect does thestatement 'there are atoms' differ from 'God watches over me'? Both are difficultto verify in the strong sense (have you ever seen an atom?), but could be verified

in the weaker sense. In fact, if nothing else, the existence of God could be verifiedwhen you die (what John Hick called 'eschatological verification').

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In the 1950s a debate - led by Anthony Flew - on falsification ensued. It is onething to say that a religious statement cannot be true because it cannot beverified, but what if we say that a statement is presumed to be true until falsified.This way, science accepts that statements can be proven to be false (i.e. the sun -in given circumstance - may not rise tomorrow) but the statement is stillmeaningful because it admits it! In other words, scientific statements make an

assertion about the world and then challenges us to prove it to be untrue.

In this sense we can at least say that scientific statements are saying somethingpositive and, therefore, meaningful, whereas - the theory goes - religiousstatements assert nothing! For example, if I were to say that 'God watches overme' then I am making an assertion that cannot be falsified; especially if I alsostate that God is invisible! Of course, if I then get run over by a bus that mightsuggest that God was distracted momentarily, but equally I could retort that it waspart of God's plan that I get flattened by a double-decker. The point is that I willnot allow for anything to count against my belief that He is watching over me.Quite simply, the statement I am making is 'unscientific' because I am notallowing for the possibility of falsification. The statement, therefore, is really not

asserting anything at all and must be meaningless.

There are, however, two major problems with falsification. Firstly, it could beargued (and, indeed, has by R.M. Hare) that religious language could still havemeaning without being factual. Here, it depends on what is meant by 'meaning'!Does a statement that affects a person's life have meaning or not? For the personaffected it certainly does. Although not falsifiable, they still have significance.Secondly, religious adherents often admit - in a scientific way - that statementscan be falsified by conflicting evidence (for example, the evidence of evil conflictswith the idea of a good God), but that faith in 'God's plan' is of greater validity.

How Can We Talk About God?

As it is generally considered that neither falsification nor verification provides anadequate criterion for establishing meaning, other ways of talking about God havebeen approached. One can use simile. For example, 'God is like a watchmaker':One can picture a watchmaker, making his device and getting it to tick awaynicely and can extract from that an image of God creating the world and getting itrolling. An extension of this is the use of metaphor. A metaphor is frequently usedin literature as it is regarded as an imaginative way of trying to express something(for example, 'his poetry is a metaphor for spiritual hunger.') Metaphor isfrequently used in religious language, such as 'heaven is a land of milk andhoney'. Note here that, unlike a simile, we are not saying that heaven is like milkand honey; rather, the image conjured up is an association of sweetness, warmth,

security, plenty, and so on.

There is a danger, however, about saying that all talk of God is metaphorical. Weknow the remark 'I only meant that metaphorically'; in other words, it has anelement of 'untruth' about it. All very poetic and everything, but not real.

Alternatively, we can use negatives. The Jewish philosopher Maimonides (1135-1204) argued that God is unknowable and that the only way one can talk aboutGod is by saying what He is not. However, by saying He is not physical, not finite,not knowable and so on, does that tell us any more about what He is other thanthe opposite? In which case, why not simply say that He is infinite, spiritual andunknowable? Sometimes it seems more comprehensible to say 'God is good' or

'God is the creator'.

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The Dominican monk, St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) thought that it was indeedpossible to talk about God in a meaningful way: by using analogy. For example,the word 'good' can be used in two different ways. It can be used univocally(meaning exactly the same thing; for example, 'good' morally) or equivocally (thesame word, but having different meanings; for example, 'good' morally andtechnically). However, Aquinas said there is a third way of applying the same word

to mean different things: analogy.

For example, when the believer says 'God is good' he or she doesn't mean it in theunivocal sense (not good in the sense little Johnny is good because he ate all hisgreens), nor in the equivocal sense (having a completely different meaning and,therefore, still not telling us anything about God). Rather, by analogy, we can saythere is some basis of comparison, because we have an idea of what good is andour ideas derive ultimately from God in the first place (it is worth bearing in mindthat, for Aquinas, causes and their effects are intimately connected). God's worldis a reflection of what God is; it contains his 'signature'. So, when we use wordslike 'good', 'wise' and 'all-knowing', we already have a reference point: ourlanguage ultimately stems from an attempt to interpret the world and the world,

in turn, reflects God's nature. Language both frees us and restricts us; it is all wehave. Yet it takes us some of the way in understanding, in the same way as usingthe analogy of the human heart as a mechanical pump; it obviously isn't amechanical pump, but it helps us to understand its operation.

However, do statements such as 'God is good' or 'God is wise' really tell youanything more about what God is like? That is, do they have anything significant to say? For example, to say that the attributes of Polly the Parrot is that she has apair of wings, a beak, a red tail and likes to say 'Polly wants a cracker' repeatedlytells us quite a lot about Polly. That is, we are presented with a series of predicates (wings, beak, etc.) that tell us more about the subject (Polly). Thequestion you have to ask yourself is: does saying that God is 'wise by analogy' tell

us anything more about God?

Conclusion

Philosophers have shown that there are different ways by which language is givenmeaning: through the method of verification and falsification, or by determiningmeaning through symbol and comparison. Ultimately, the debate rests on thevalidity of statements that seem outside of experience, although more recent workhas argued that religious language is, in fact, part of our experience. Influenced(and, perhaps, misinterpreting) the later works of Wittgenstein, writers such asDon Cupitt and D.Z. Phillips have argued that religious language is not about the'metaphysical' at all, but is actually more directly related to our experience. Those

within a faith community have their own way of using languages; their own'religious language' that can only really be understood by being a part of the'language game'. In this way, religious language can be seen as adapting to howour view of the world alters.

This view, however, is not acceptable for those religious believers who are realists.For them, God is real and 'out there'. The existence of God is seen as a factualclaim and is, therefore, not subject to reinterpretation. The concern for the realistis that the more that religious claims become a matter of the environment andpsychology, the less significant religious assertions are seen to be.

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A2 Roy Jackson - Religious Language