Religious language 1:
verification, falsification and language
games
The material in this section is relevant to questions on:
(i)
religious language
(ii)
the existence of God
(iii)
atheism
(iv)
the problem of evil
(v)
the nature of God
Religious language has long been something of a Cinderella topic on philosophy of
religion papers. Candidates are showing an increasing interest in it - and well
they might, since it is a relatively straightforward topic at A-level. Even if you
have sidelined the issue in the past, it is worth looking at now. The subject
overlaps with other, more immediately popular, areas and can give you a new
perspective when looking at these more familiar areas.
1. The problem of religious language
This multifaceted problem has many angles:
(i)
How do we use human language about the transcendent, unlimited God?
(ii)
If we use other forms of language, how can they be meaningful or
comprehensible?
(iii)
Should religious language be understandable to those outside the
religious community?
(iv)
Are those outside the religious community entitled to evaluate
religious language critically?
(v)
What use do analogy, symbol, myth, metaphor and other noncognitive forms of language have?
(vi)
Does religious language depend on making factual assertions, or does it serve some other,
non-factual, function?
If believers make claims about God, his existence, nature, purposes and relationship with man, then
presumably they intend those claims, or assertions, to be meaningful, true and in some way
verifiable. For the most part, believers' claims are traditionally cognitive - that is, they are intended
to be factual assertions about an objective reality, and as such can be proved true or false (verified or
falsified): 'God exists'; 'God loves us'; 'God will execute a final judgement'. Such claims are usually
made on the understanding that the believer is not uttering 'crypto-commands, expressions of
wishes, disguised exclamations, concealed ethics, or anything but assertions' (Anthony Flew,
Theology and Falsification, cited in Basil Mitchell (ed.), The Philosophy of Religion, OUP, 1971, pp.
13-22).
Non-cognitive language is of value for debates about the nature of biblical material, particularly
miracles and Old Testament myths such as the creation narratives.
Non-cognitive language serves some other function - it may be pictorial, or express an emotion or other abstract, subjective
feeling: 'God is my rock'; 'Jesus' death washes me clean'; The angels will sound the final trumpet'.
2. The verification principle
Although believers may take for granted the factual reliability of their statements, the school of thought
known as logical positivism, which originated in Vienna in post-war era, was concerned to find a
distinction between sense and nonsense. The issue regarding statements such as 'God exists' was
not just a case of person A disagreeing with person B on a matter of objective reality, but rather it
became an issue of meaningfulness. Truth and meaning were regarded as distinct concepts by the
logical positivists, since it is possible to make a meaningful statement that is not true, for example
'Elephants are red'. This is meaningful, since we can test it by sense experience, although it is
false because elephants are not red.
The logical positivists established three criteria of meaningfulness:
(i) synthetic statements that could be checked by the use of sense experience
or empirical testing, e.g. The sky is blue'
(ii) mathematics: 2 + 2 = 4
(iii) tautological or analytic statements, e.g. 'All circles are round'
This should ring a bell from the Ontological Argument: Anselm’s definition of God as ‘That than which nothing greater can
be conceived' is assumed to be analytically true, and it is only on this basis that the argument succeeds.
The verification principle thus demanded that:
Only assertions that were in principle verifiable by observation or experience could convey
factual information. Assertions that there could be no imaginable way of verifying must either be
analytic or meaningless.
The members of the Vienna Circle were essentially scientists and mathematians, and the world
view which lay behind the principle was a scientific one.
Analytic statements we know by definition to be meaningful, since their meaning is precisely
defined. We know that it is meaningless to say 'The man who lives next door to me is a bachelor
with a wife and three children' because bachelor means unmarried man. Synthetic statements
must be checked, however, by reference to the evidence available to us; they are not true in
themselves, and therefore, by the logical positivists' definition, not meaningful unless they can be
tested. This demands that the evidence is there to be tested. Essentially, the effect of the demand is
that either something is scientific or it is capable of becoming a science.
2.1
IMPLICATIONS FOR RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE
Statements about God cannot be subject to the verification that the logical positivists demanded:
his physical, empirical presence cannot be confirmed existentially and - the ontological
argument aside - 'God exists' is not analytically true. Experience of God may be vividly real to the
believer, but that experience is subjective - it is not universally shared, not subject to scientific
testing, and there are no reliable grounds for establishing a way to verify such claims. Thus all
religious language was considered meaningless.
2.2
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WEAKNESSES OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM
The verification principle renders invalid all statements which express opinions
or emotions.
In its strongest form, historical statements are also invalidated by the principle.
The statement The Great Fire of London took place in 1666' can only be
verified by sense experience, as there is no one alive who could claim to have
experienced it.
Even scientific statements cannot be verified according to the terms of the
principle. 'All water boils at 100°C' cannot technically be verified since we
cannot possibly test all water.
Most importantly, the verification principle itself does not fulfil its own criteria.
Religious statements could be verified. Keith Ward argued that God can verify
his own existence, and John Hick observed that religious claims will be verified
eschatologically.
Hick's principle of eschatological verification is very useful for other topics also: the existence of God and the nature of
theological proofs, and life after death.
So, whereas the principle was initially very popular in philosophical circles, soon 'People began to
realise that this glittering new scalpel was, in one operation after another, killing the patient' (Bryan
McGee, Confessions of a Philosopher, Phoenix, 1997, p. 55). Furthermore, it was appreciated that
there were 'many different and useful ways of talking about the world and our experience of it, each
one of which had a raison d'etre of its own' (ibid., p. 56).
In other words, there are many kinds of meaningful language - not just that which can be verified
according to the terms of the verification principle.