Examine the contribution that two of the following may make to the study of religious language * Analogy * Symbol and myth * Language games
Religious language has been around for years and two of the contributions that relate to this are analogy and language games. Religious language is used to talk about religious ideas for example the existence of god. The Vienna circle can up with the idea of the verification principle and they believed that unless something can be empirically proven then it doesn’t exist meaning that it has no meaning. However one issue with this theory is that you cannot prove something that isn’t of sight for example historical statements and emotional statements. This also applies to religious statements because god cannot be proven meaning his is not a physical being making him meaningless. However Ayer creates the weak verification principle and argues you can have statements like ‘I love you’ and historical statements but he argues that along as it can be proven as some point then it is not meaningless.
Analogy is another way of describing things in religious language for example Paley’s idea of the world being like a watch. Univocal language is good when describing god because you can relate to it for example saying ‘god is good’ and saying ‘that was good’ gives you a measure of how good god really is because you understand what good means, meaning it is easy to relate and understand because it can be related to anything including god. However it can be argued that this means that you’re making god a human and assuming his standards are the same as yours. This is call anthropomorphism. Aquinas said that we shouldn’t use language univocally in relation to god because no name belongs to god and you cannot put him in the category with creatures. Equivocal language avoids anthropomorphism and lets god be held to a higher standard than humans. It means that when you say god is good you don’t really understand it because he is the highest good and no human understand what that means. However Aquinas said that we shouldn’t use this either because it doesn’t show or demonstrate anything from god. He argues that there are two types of analogy first the analogy of attribution meaning that god is the creator and the world reflects him he uses the example of bull’s urine and says although we can see something about the bull we can never fully understand and he relates this to god and says although we can see the world we will never understand god fully. The second type is the analogy of proportion he argues that while studying the world we learn and understand something about god but when we the features need to understand that we are seeing the lesser proportion of it and although it reflects god we don’t see perfect but god is the only perfect being. One strength of this is that he knew that it’s not literal and it’s a way of explaining the world around us. This also means we can talk meaningfully about god and avoids saying we know nothing about him. However this theory doesn’t pass the verification principle and is based on the acceptance there is a god.
Wittgenstein came up with the idea of language games and didn’t agree with the verification principle as words can have meaning dependent upon their use and function agreed within a group. Language can be particular to certain areas. In a particular game you have an agreed use of language so that each of you understands the language that you use. When the language game starts to have and develop rules it then starts to make sense. Often people will use the word incorrectly and misunderstand the game it is applied to. I.e. once you apply the rules of the game to another you then misunderstand the language. - using ‘God‘; the game is wrong when you are applying empirical evidence in order to explain however you can’t do this as you are applying the rules of one game to a completely different game. However it can be argued that religious belief is an activity. It involves sharing a way of life, a language and a manner of speaking about the world and our place within it. It can also be argued that it agrees that religious statements cannot be understood in a literal manner but still have a profound meaning for those who make them.
Discuss the view that religious language is devoid of meaning.
As mentioned before the Vienna circle decided that for things to have meaning they needed to be able to be proved for example ‘my hair is brown’ it is a provable fact and for this the circle said that this had meaning however saying that god is real or god is good doesn’t have meaning because it is improvable for the circle this meaning that the statement is meaningless and that god doesn’t exist in the physical realm so that he may be real but he cannot be proved. The circle discards any statement which cannot be proved and it needs to be proved empirically for it to be real.
However for Ayer he said that things can have meaning and for something to have meaning it needs to be proved at some point. Unlike the circle he doesn’t disregard statements such as the battle of hasting took place in 1066 because for Ayer this could be proven at some point down the line. To look at the bother verification principles it is clear that Ayers is strong because it doesn’t rule out major statements however both of the principle fails its own test because it can’t be proven empirically true meaning that it is meaningless by its own criteria.
The falsification principle was proposed by flew but popper said that it aims to prove something false instead of true. This means that for something to be meaningful then it needs to meet the criteria by which is can be proved false, but if something is never allowed to be proven false then it is meaningless for example god. Flew supported this idea and said that it needs to ‘die the death of a thousand qualifications’. You could use the parable of the gardener to support this view because if you try and disprove something enough and someone doesn’t want to believe it’s false then you will never prove to them it is.
To conclude the way in which different theories contribute to the idea of religious language is varied and no theory is the same this means that there is conflict and no theory is every right. However one thing the theories have in common is that they agree that you need to either prove or disprove something for it to meaningful without that then it is meaningless.