A PRIVATE LANGUAGE?
 Language is about communication and can only take place when
two or more people use words and ideas they have in common.
 We can understand God’s forgiveness because we know what
forgiveness means between humans but can we understand the
word God? Do we understand what other people mean when they
use this word?
KNOWLEDGE & DESCRIPTION
• Statements that are purely descriptive can be verified by checking
the facts.
• EG – the cat sat on the mat can be checked because we agree
with the meaning of the words used.
• But to say, I have just witnessed a miracle is not so easy because
we have different ideas of what constitutes a miracle.
KNOWLEDGE & DESCRIPTION 2
 What is the difference between saying “I believe in God” and “God
exists”?
 The first can be right and the second wrong or vice versa
 Just because someone believes something does not make it true.
 The first is a description of what someone believes and the 2nd is a
claim to knowledge.
FAITH, REASON & BELIEFS
 You can remember something without concepts but you cannot
think about it.
 When religion gets beyond personal religious experience, it
encounters reason. The experience starts to be ‘schematised’ in
terms of concepts, ideas and beliefs.
 Reason looks at the logic of a statement.
 Experience, expressed through language, leads to propositions
which may be accepted as true.
WHAT IS RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE?
 Language is used for particular purposes.
 It describes religious experiences etc.
 If the words did not have a non-religious meaning as well as a
religious one, how could they communicate anything?
 Definitions of religious words must be understood outside the
religious context.
BELIEVING IN & BELIEVING THAT
 If you believe IN something it implies commitment and trust.
 Believing that something is true means that you think the statement
is correct whether or not it is of any personal interest to you.
 Compare “I believe in God” and “I believe that God exists”.
EXPERIENCE ‘AS’
 Whatever we experience, we interpret.
 We experience experiences as something.
 The religious way of interpreting the world is one valid BLIK,
alongside others.
 Why does one person see a beautiful sunset as God saying
goodnight and another person as just a sunset?
 Believing implies commitment & trust.
Rational and Non-Rational
 The Logical Positivists rationalised that only statements that could
be proved or disproved empirically had any meaning.
 To have any meaning, a religious experience must have some
empirical basis
 BUT a religious experience may transcend this empirical basis, but
it nevertheless includes it.
Rational and Non-Rational 2
 BUT for an experience to be religious, it cannot be confined to that
empirical basis, for otherwise it would just be a scientific description
of what is seen and heard, with nothing to make it ‘religious’ or to
convey anything of its importance or power.
 Therefore religion can never be fully explained in terms of what is
rational.
 There must be something to it more that eludes description. It must
go beyond reason, not against
 Religions tend to make a balance between the rational and the
non-rational.
INTERPRETING LANGUAGE
 Straightforward use of language is a means of literally PICTURING
the world. EG The cat sat on the mat - We can verify this
statement.
 ANALYTIC statements simply explain the meaning of its own terms
you don’t have to check any details – EG All spinsters are
unmarried women.
 SYNTHETIC statements refers to external evidence – back to that
cat on the mat!!!
VERIFICATION &FALSIFICATION
 The Logical Positivists stated that statements are
meaningful if they can be proved, empirically, true or false.
Anything else was meaningless.
 So, God exists is a meaningless statement, alongside ‘I
love you’. Only factual statements can be meaningful
AYER & WEAK VERIFICATION
 Historical statements that can no longer be proved by
empirical means - EG William the Conqueror always wore
silk stockings and future statements that may be verified
true or false at a later date - EG there are green men on
Pluto, were accepted by Ayer as verifiable under the weak
form of the Verification Principle.
CRITICISM OF THE VERIFICATION
PRINCIPLE
 “The meaning of a statement is its method of verification”
cannot itself be verified!
 It is not analytic, so cannot be shown to be true on logical
grounds.
 Nor is it synthetic because there is no empirical evidence
that can count for or against the truth.
MORE CRITICISM OF THE VERIFICATION
PRINCIPLE
 From the middle of the 20th century the Logical Positivists
had been bypassed as it was realised that giving a literal
representation of the world was a small part of the task of
language.
 Other functions: Commands, opinions, emotions, symbols,
jokes etc required a very different approach.
THE DEATH OF A 1000 QUALIFICATIONS
 Anthony Flew presents John Wisdom’s parable of the Gardener to
examine the limits to which one could go in qualifying a statement
whilst still claiming that is was true
 2 explorers come across a clearing in a jungle. One says a
gardener must tend it and the other says no. After lengthy tests to
find the invisible, intangible, silent gardener, both gardeners are still
convinced of their original convictions.
PARABLE OF THE GARDENER KEY THEMES
 Experience requires interpretation. Facts alone do not determine
how something is interpreted.
 One’s interpretation leads to commitment. One chooses to see the
world in a particular way (BLIK). A matter of faith.
 The story implies what is real is what can be described literally.
LANGUAGE CAN BE UNIVOCAL, EQUIVOCAL OR
ANALOGICAL 1
 UNIVOCAL or unequivocal: The word or phrase means
exactly the same under different conditions
 EG I wear white shoes and a white hat
 The word white is used univocally – it has exactly the
same meaning
LANGUAGE CAN BE UNIVOCAL, EQUIVOCAL OR
ANALOGICAL 2
 EQUIVOCAL: The word or phrase is ambiguous.
 EG I may describe an apple tart that lacks sweetness as being “a
little tart”, in quite another sense. Neither relates to my description
of certain young ladies in short skirts.
 The word tart is being used univocally with quite different meanings
in these three cases.
LANGUAGE CAN BE UNIVOCAL, EQUIVOCAL OR
ANALOGICAL 3
 ANALOGICAL: Using the example of the tart – the one might be
tasty and the other look tasty, which would be an analogical use of
the word tasty unless you were being cannibalistically univocal.
 The literal meaning of the word tasty when applied to the food is
transposed to the young lady in an attempt at description.
ANALOGY IN REASON
 You can say God is good univocally in the same way as you can
say a person is good.
 But if ‘good’ was being used equivocally about God it would convey
no meaning.
 Using ‘good’ analogically means there is a similarity to the
goodness of men and God but man’s goodness is a pale reflection
of God’s
ANALOGY IN RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
 Univocal language cannot do justice to the ‘otherness’ and
inspirational nature of a religious experience.
 But, people want to convey meaning of what they have
experienced.
 Otto’s experience of the numinous becomes ‘schematised’. Just as
the experience goes beyond the circumstances in which it arose,
so must the language to describe it go beyond the literal. Hence
the need for analogy.
 EG Imagine describing the vision at Lourdes!
MODELS & QUALIFIERS 1
 Ian Ramsey uses these terms to explain the way in which religious
language differs from literal, empirically based language.
 The model is a form of analogy – an image that helps a person
express an experience.
 The qualifier extends the model.
 EG God is an Eternal Father. Father is the model but Eternal as the
qualifier totally transcends the human nature of fatherhood.
MODELS & QUALIFIERS 2
 Without models, nothing would be communicated.
 Without qualifiers, nothing would get beyond a literal
description of what is seen; it would not be religious.
SIGNS & SYMBOLS
 A sign is something that points to something else
 EG a road sign – you can change one sign for another as long as
we all agree what it stands for.
 A symbol is something that expresses the power of what it
symbolises; it participates in it and makes it real, Symbols evoke
the power of that which they symbolise.
 EG A country’s national flag or emblem
METAPHOR & SYMBOL 1
 We can understand God through these.
 Tillich states that it is through symbols that Religious Language
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communicates Religious Experiences.
RL tries to interpret RE & it is therefore:
1/ Closer to poetry than prose
2/ Mythical, heroic & imaginable
3/ Evocative of the experience that it seeks to describe
METAPHOR & SYMBOL 2
 Tillich believed RL is symbolic because it opens up new levels of
reality.
 He says symbols go beyond the external world to what he
described as their ‘inner reality’.
 Religious symbols open up levels of reality which otherwise were
closed to us. EG – Kingdom of God – the symbol of Kingdom lets
us get a glimpse of ultimate reality thats God.
 The power of symbols changes because the impact & meaning of
words change, and the symbol is no longer able to direct us
towards ultimate reality.
METAPHOR & SYMBOL 3
 OPPOSITION TO R L AS SYMBOLIC
 Paul Edwards stated symbols were meaningless and conveyed no
factual knowledge.
 Tillich argued symbols could not be verified using empirical
evidence.
 It is not possible for religious symbols successfully to represent that
which is beyond human experience.
 There is no way of knowing if the symbols give wrong insights.
 Tillich does not seem to apply symbols to the real world – to
objective reality.
LANGUAGE GAMES 1
 LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN (1889-1951)
 He originally supported the Logical Positivists, but later
rejected the Verification principle.
 He said the meaning of words is in their use – the function
they perform as agreed by a particular group or society
LANGUAGE GAMES 2
 LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN 2
 Each group or society has its own language, be it a nation or a
small group of like minded individuals.
 On a localised scale Wittgenstein likened it to a group of people
playing games & each different game had a different set of rules.
 Language games are played by people within all forms of human
activity & life.
 People not ‘in the game’ will not understand the language any more
than someone listening to an unknown foreign language.
LANGUAGE GAMES 3
 LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN 3
 Religious belief has its own language which an ‘outsider’
may find meaningless because he is not in the ‘religious
game’.
 But it does not mean the language is meaningless just
because some people don’t understand it.
LANGUAGE GAMES 4
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LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN 4
Descartes proved to himself that he existed because he could
think – ‘Cogito ergo sum’ but Wittgenstein argued that you could
not create a private language – how would we know they were
using the words correctly?
Language must be communication between at least two people!
Thoughts are in a socially agreed public language in the same
way as speech is.
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Wittgenstein denied Descartes’ 1st person approach to philosophy
as meaningless.
LANGUAGE GAMES 5
 ANALYSIS 1
 But can we be sure that each player in a ‘game’ completely
understands what another player is talking about.
 On a simple scale, cricketers can all agree on the meaning of
‘Owsat’ as it is the cricketers that have defined the word, but with
concepts, as in religion, are we sure that all believers believe the
same thing when we talk about: Salvation, Forgiveness or even
God herself?
LANGUAGE GAMES 6
 ANALYSIS 2
 How can different faith traditions discuss concepts if they
each have different definitions? or, on an opposite tack,
maybe people are talking about the same thing, but they
cannot know it as they cannot express it to others.
 Is the God of Islam and the Christian God the same?
 Is the OT God the same as in the NT?
LANGUAGE GAMES 7
 ANALYSIS 3
 Players of different ‘games’ are not entirely isolated as there will be
some crossover in games as in all aspects of life.
 So Religious language is not completely isolated.
 There is some common ground between religious language games
& other language games.
 This common ground gives non-believers a chance to understand
at least some of the language and decide whether it has meaning.
LANGUAGE GAMES 8
 ANALYSIS 4
 Non- believers sometimes can get insights into the
religious believers own language game more than the
actual believer as the non-believer has a more objective
view of religion and will not be swayed by unreasonable
faith claims.
 But can anyone who does not believe ever truly
understand what a believer is trying to convey with his
language game
LANGUAGE GAMES 9
 CONCLUSION
 Believers agree it is difficult to talk of God because God is
‘unreasonable’ – he is beyond human understanding.
 Believers realise ANY discussion of God, amongst
themselves or with non-believers, will be limited.
 But they argue Religious language can have valid meaning
and purpose.