Critically assess the claim that religious language is meaningless?

Many philosophers have argued as to whether or not the ways in which we speak about religion are relevant or meaningful. This issue of religious language looks at the way we talk about God, debate ideas and communicate our theist or atheist ideologies. For some, religious language is meaningful and full of purpose while others see it to being incomprehensible and pointless.

The verification principle a theory proposed by A.J. Ayer is a key argument, which addresses whether religious language is meaningful or not. Ayer was one of the logical positivists, a Viennese group of philosophers who were inspired by the theories of the early Wittgenstein and he sought to answer what makes a statement ‘meaningful’ as opposed to what makes it ‘true’. Ayer begins his thesis with the claim that language is only meaningful if it can be verified by a sense-observation. If you cannot demonstrate with sense-observations how a statement is true, then the statement is factually meaningless.

A ‘putative proposition’ is the name Ayer gives to statements yet to be verified. A putative statement is either verifiable practically or in principle. For instance, a statement such as “that is a red car” is verifiable in practice by looking at the car. However, a statement such as “There is life in another universe” is verifiable in principle but not in practice, as we possess insufficient technology. Therefore Ayer then makes distinctions between strong and weak verification. Strong verification refers to any statement that can be verified as true beyond any doubts through sense experience, and a weakly verifiable proposition is most probable. For example if I picked up a book and stated ‘this book contains 300 pages’ this can be conclusively verified without any doubt and therefore would be a strong verification. On the other hand if I was to say ‘water boils at 100 degrees’, which although we know is most probable it cannot be verified beyond any doubt due to the fact I am unable to boil all the water in the world to test it and so this is a weak verification.

However if we look into the theory deeper fundamental flaws can be identified. It is clearly not consistent with modern science as it was first intended to be. Many scientific statements are not verifiable, such as ‘atoms exist’ or ‘forces exist.’ Science is also theory based, and uses models and analogies to describe concepts not visible to the human eye and therefore under Ayer’s principle this would be ‘meaningless’. In my opinion the biggest flaw of the verification principle is its inability to meet its own criteria. There is no empirical evidence for the verification principle and therefore is should be meaningless.

The failure of the verification principle led to a new challenge. In order for a statement to be meaningful, the Falsification Principle demands that the proposer must account first what might be the case in its falsification.
Influenced by Karl Popper, Antony Flew applied the Falsification Principle to religious language and concluded that religious statements are meaningless. This is because there is nothing that can count against religious statements; they can neither be proved true (verified) or false (falsified). Flew cites his own version of John Wisdom’s parable of the gardener to illustrate how religious believers do not allow for the falsification of their belief. Two explorers come across a clearing in a jungle. It contains a mixture of weeds and flowers. One claims that there must be a gardener who comes to tend the clearing. The other denies it. They sit and wait, but no gardener appears, however they try to detect him. One gardener continues to claim that there is a gardener; one who is invisible, inaudible, intangible and undetectable. Flew argues that, in the same way, if a believer’s statement about God can be made to fit into any circumstance, it is not meaningful and has no empirical implications. He explains how religious believers are reduced to saying ‘God’s love is incomprehensible’ because they cannot explain why God should allow for the death of a child due to an inoperable illness. Flew maintains they are allowing their definition of God to ‘die a death of a thousand qualifications’ and therefore it is this that renders religious statements meaningless.

Although the falsification principle may have fewer flaws than the verification principle it doesn’t come without critique. Realists believe that a statement is true if it corresponds to the state of affairs that it attempts to describe e.g. the statement The Holy Qur’an was dictated by the Archangel is either true or false, depending on whether or not this happened. Most Theists are realist about God. This does not mean that we can necessarily know whether a given statement is true or false but the realist would say there is a truth to be known. Richard Swinburne was also critical of the principle, he believed that the falsification principle does not work for all statements but they are still meaningful. He uses the analogy of the toys in the cupboard, although one cannot prove or falsify that the toys do not leave the cupboard when unsupervised, the concept of their movement still has enough meaning because we can understand it.

The philosopher RM Hare also came up with a response to falsification, called the theory of ‘bliks'. As did many other philosophers, Hare used a parable to illustrate his point. ‘A certain lunatic is convinced that all dons want to murder him. His friends introduce him to all the mildest and most respectable dons that they can find, and after each of them has retired, they say, "You see, he doesn't really want to murder you; he spoke to you in a most cordial manner; surely you are convinced now?" But the lunatic replies "Yes, but that was only his diabolical cunning; he's really plotting against me the whole time, like the rest of them; I know it I tell you." However many kindly dons are produced, the reaction is the same.'
Therefore we can deduce from his parable that a ‘blik' is a particular view about the world that may not be based upon reason or fact and that cannot be verified or falsified; it just is and we don't need to explain why we hold our ‘blik'. Hare talked about trusting in the metal of a car; this ‘blik' about the car meant that we would quite happily drive or be driven in a car, because we have the ‘blik' that the metal is strong and that it is safe to drive at high speed in the car. Hare said that people either have the right or sane ‘blik' or the wrong or insane ‘blik'; the lunatic above has the wrong ‘blik' about dons, whereas his friends have the right ‘blik'.

Hare's theory has been criticized, mainly by John Hick who provides two objections. First of all, Hick argues that religious beliefs or religious ‘bliks' are based upon reason; people believe in God because they may have had a religious experience, or they feel the words of the Bible/Qur'an are true or a variety of other reasons. Secondly, he claims there is an inconsistency, Hare claims that there is a distinction between sane and insane bliks. However, he also claims that bliks are unverifiable and unfalsifiable. If we cannot either prove or disprove religious ‘bliks', we cannot call them right or wrong, sane or insane either.

In conclusion although Ayer’s verification principle is a strong start in deciphering religious language, it is weak in detail. The fact that Ayer has to even write a second edition proves that the argument is fundamentally flawed. Flews’s falsification principle, however, appears stronger as it uses the scientific analysis approach more realistically. So in response to the statement I believe religious language is meaningless as I agree with Flews claim that we try to qualify God so much, he becomes meaningless. It is impossible to reconcile God with issues such as the problem of evil and so God is falsified and therefore meaningless.