Religious language
words used to express beliefs about God or religion
the apophatic way
Via Negativa
- argues only meaningful way to talk about God is to express what God isn’t since we don’t understand him
- Pseudo-Dionysius- since God is beyond our understanding, he is ‘beyond every assertion’
-> God can only be describe through ‘via negativa’
note- negation, in Dionysius terms, doesn’t mean privation but that God is beyond smth
-> e.g. ‘God is not darkness’= God is beyond the light/darkness distinction
-argues trying to understand God is pointless bc it separates us from him
- all the knowledge of God our brains are able to comprehend was given to Moses on Mount Sinai
-> trying to go beyond our intellect will leave us ‘speechless’
- only through accepting the Via Negativa will we be ‘supremely united to the completely unknown’ as this is knowledge gained through ‘unity’ with God
adv- Pseudo-Dionysius’ notion of ‘unity’ resonates with the central theme of Christianity
-> the idea that our desire to know God prevents us from achieving unity with God relates to the theme of the fall
-> Adam and Eve’s disobedience and separation from God was a result of their desire for knowledge
-> means saving humanity from pride which leads to sin is the aim of Christianity (what via negativa does)
positive language
using language to describe what smth is
Negative language
Using language to describe what something is not
Strengths and Weaknesses of Via Negativa
Strength
supports God’s transcendent nature
-> Otto referred to God as the ‘wholly other’, suggesting God is different to anything we have experience or understood.
-> supported by Augustine who states ‘if you understand it is not God’
-> helps us understand the Bible’s descriptions of God’s immanence-> reminds us that even when God is ‘present’ in the universe, his presence is still a mystery
Weakness
The Bible describes God in positive terms
Bible often describes God’s nature e.g. in John where it states ‘God is love’
-> God even describes himself in positive terms, stating he is a ‘jealous God’
-> Bible suggests via postivia language abt God is valid
Ev- Maimodenies responds that the Bible was written in limited human language and thus requires careful interpretation
Ev- how can we worship a God we do not understand-. surely we have to understand his nature to know whether he is truly above humanity and worthy of being served
Maimonides argument
supported via negativa view through the illustration of a ship where someone gains ‘the correct notion of a ‘ship’’ by ‘negative attributes’
-> so argues humans will come ‘nearer’ to the knowledge of God through negative statements
(direct) Criticism of Maimonides
Davies- negative language only allows us to gain knowledge in ‘special cases’
-> e.g. when we know the exact possibilities of the attributes of smth. e.g. if a person is not left-handed they must be right-handed
- However, in most cases, we do not know the possibilities of what the thing could be and so negative language does not give us any further knowledge abt the thing
-> so argues it is simply wrong to say that someone who has all the negations mentioned in it ‘has almost arrived at the correct notion of a “ship”’ as they could possibly be thinking of a ‘wardrobe’ or ‘coffin’
-> so negative language abt God cannot give us any further knowledge abt him
EV- process of elimination is a nonsensical approach to gain knowledge abt God as it does not give us any exact information
Strength and weakness (2)
Strength
- prevents Christians from having a mistaken view of God
-> using human terms to describe God could cause Christians to anthropomorphise God
-> use Pseudo-Dionysius to support
Weakness
- negative language doesn’t express how religious believers intend to speak abt God
-> Aquinas argues negative language is ‘not what people want to say when they talk about God.’
-> Christian religious language about God is not be limited to denials as scripture and traditions assert positive attributes about God e.g. goodness so we cannot just limit religious language to negative statements
-> Aquinas’ analogy of attribution describes religious language better (expand)
Ev- via negativa aims to strengthen our relationship with God not gain knowledge about him
Aquinas’ argument
the cataphatic way (via positiva)
theory of Analogy
argued we can talk about God meaningfully in positive terms (cataphatic way) if we speak analogically
-explain the standard cataphatic approach fails bc God cannot be described through human concepts (univocal language) since he is above human comprehension
-> e.g. ‘God is love’ cannot mean that God is loving in the same way humans are loving
-instead we should accept words have a different meaning when applied to God and so Equivocal language should be used when describing him
-> e.g. ‘God is love’ has a different meaning from when humans are described as loving
-> since we don’t know what God is we don’t know what loving means when applied to God
- believes we are like God since Genesist states we are created in God’s image and likeness
-> so ‘God is love’ can be understood analogically as God’s quality of love is like the human quality of love
Analogy of attribution
-> believes we attribute qualities to the creator of a thing through the things that are analogous to its creation
-> illustration of seeing the healthy urine of a Bull and so being able to conclude that the Bull has an analogous quality of health
-> similarly we can see human possess qualities like love and knowledge and so we can conclude our creator also has analogous qualities of love and power
Analogy of Proportion
- a being has a quality proportionate to its nature
-> e.g. since the nature of humans and God are different, when we refer to the quality of love in humans and God they are significantly different in degree and kind
-> the same words can be applied to humans and God but meant to a greater degree when applied to God
Criticism of Aquinas
- natural theology places dangerous overreliance on human reason
-> Barth argues our ability to reason became corrupted by original sin after the Fall
-> so it is dangerous to rely on human reason to know anything of God
-> ‘the finite has no capacity for the infinite’
-> our finite minds cannot understand God’s infinite nature so by attempting to understand God’s nature using our limited intellect we do not gain an idea of God but create a mental idol- a humanly conceived image of God
-> commit the sin of idolatry
Ev- with God’s grace we can discover knowledge about God
Ev- humanity’s believe they have the ability to know things abt God is the same arrogance that led Adam an Eve further from God
strength of Aquinas
- basis in natural theology
-> accepts human reason cannot understand God’s infinite devine nature but argued human can gain lesser knowledge of God - supports faith in God
- Matt 19:28- with God all things are possible
Strength of Aquinas
finds a middle ground between positive and negative language so avoids to problems with cataphatic language
-> establishes we r like God and so God has qualities like ours but proportionally greater
-> supported by Bible-Genesis- made in God’s ‘image and likeness’
Criticism of Aquinas (2)
Brummer- analogy of proportion fails bc we don’t know God’s nature so can’t know the way in which God is loving
-> “The analogy of proportionality thus takes us no further than a negative theology”
-> it simply says God isn’t loving the same way humans are loving
says the same with attribution-> we can attribute qualities to God but we still don’t know in what way God has those qualities
Ev- Aquinas’ goal is to assert likeness between God’s and humans’ qualities not in what way they r like ours
Ev- analogies are only meaningful if we know both things being analogised- since we have no knowledge of God, analogies abt God cannot be meaningful as they aren’t accurate
Tillich argument
theory of symbolic language
-most religious language has a symbolic rather than literal meaning
- a symbol is smth that identifies a concept tht it’s referring to and participates in the meaning of that concept
- language which has literal meaning are like signs and are arbitrary symbols create to refer to things
- religious symbols are created
through the culture and collective minds of a religious tradition. religious symbols are part of religion
-> uses example of a flag-> participates in the power and dignity of a nation
- God is a symbol for ‘being-itself’-> God is existence itself and so is the reason anything else can exist
- Tillich’s theory of participation is that there are four elements to symbolic meaning:
- Pointing to something beyond itself. The crucifix ‘points’ to Christianity, religious language ‘points’ to religion or God.
- Participation: symbolic language participates in what it points to. The crucifix is part of Christianity, it doesn’t just point to it. Religious language participates in the being of God, or in being-itself.
- Reality: To be symbolic has to reveal a deeper meaning, they open up spiritual levels of reality that are otherwise closed to us.
- Soul: Symbols open up the levels of dimensions of the soul that correspond to those levels of reality.
Randall’s theory of symbolic language
views symbols as completely subjective in our mind and thus non-cognitive
symbols should not be understood as symbolising some external thing, they should be understood by what they do; by their “function”. Randall argues that symbols do four things:
- Arouse emotions and motivate action
- Stimulate cooperative action, bind community together
- Communicate aspects of experience that cannot be expressed with literal language.
- Evoke, foster and clarify human experience of the divine.
Logical Positivism
Comte coined the term positivism to refer to the use of empirical data and empirical generalisations with explanatory power
Ayer’s argument
Verification Principle
religious language is only meaningful if it can be verified through empirical evidence
-> metaphysical language is useless bc it cannot be verified through empirical evidence
-> ‘God’ is a metaphysical term as it is abt smth beyond the empirical world
Strength of Ayer
fits with a scientific understanding of reality
- positivism suggests power and success of science shows it is the only valid source of knowledge so it makes sense to clarify our language by removing unscientific notions
- could argue Ayer’s theory would make all statements about history meaningless because they can’t be empirically verified
-> Ayer responds with idea of weak verification
->We can weakly verify anything for which there is some evidence which provides probability for it being the case. E.g. Historical documents and archaeological findings can be verified, and on the basis of those we can weakly verify that there were certain civilisations in the past with certain histories to them
Hick’s argument
Eschatological verification
-religious claims can be verified or falsified after death
- illustrates this with parable of the celestial city where 2 travellers, 1 atheist and 1 theist, will know who was right about whether there’s a celestial city (representing afterlife with God) at the end of the road once they reach the end
-> Hick is arguing that religious language is also verifiable in principle because we also know that in principle it is possible to die and ‘see’ God
Flew’s argument
argues religious language fails to meet the requirements of an assertion
-> “to assert that such and such is the case is necessarily equivalent to denying that such and such is not the case”
-> since religious language cannot be falsified it does not assert anything and so is non-cognitive and meaningless
- illustrates this through parable of the gardener where the claim of the presence gardener is impossible to disprove as the believer continuously adds qualifications to the gardener to avoid empirical testing
-> argues this is what religious language does which causes tge concept of God to ‘die a death of a thousand qualifications’
Weaknesses of Flew
Religious belief is actually falsifiable.
St Paul claimed that if Jesus did not rise from the dead then faith is ‘pointless’ (1 Corinthians 15:14). This means that Christianity could be proven false if we find evidence that Jesus did not rise from the dead, such as finding Jesus’ body. This suggests Flew is incorrect to think religious language is always unfalsifiable as there are at least some believers whose belief is incompatible with some logically possible state of affairs. Paul’s religious language passes Flew’s test of falsification and so would be meaningful.
Ev- John Frame turns the parable of the gardener on its head, imagining a scenario where the gardener is visible and claims to be a royal gardener, and the sceptic refuses to believe that regardless of the evidence.
This shows that Flew’s approach fails because his belief in atheism is also unfalsifiable. Atheists believe there isn’t sufficient evidence to justify belief in God. The issue is, they cannot say what could prove that belief false.
Mitchell’s argument
argued religious language is cognitively meaningful as it is rationally weighed
-> most people have evidence for God in the form of their relationship with God, experience of God or experience of the effect of religion on their lives. also recognise that there is evidence against God’s existence in the form of evil but weighs the evidence for God greater than the evidence against and so become a believer
illustrates this through parable of a soldier having faith a person is the leader of resistance even when they see them fighting for the govt in the civil war
-> analogous to the way Christians have an initial experience/relationship with God which justifies their faith
Hare’s argument
non-cognitive
- disagreed with Verificationism and Falsificationism
argues that religious language does not express an attempt to describe reality but is instead a non-cognitive expression of a person’s ‘Blik’ (form of life)
-> since Bliks affect our beliefs and behaviour, they are meaningful
-> illustrated this with example of a paranoid student who still believed his professors were trying to kill him even when shown evidence his belief was false
-> hows that what seem like rational beliefs attempting to describe reality can sometimes really be an expression of an irrational Blik
Wittgenstein argument
- picture theory- words get their meaning by connecting the world similarly to how a picture presents reality
- later developed picture theory into the theory of language games
-> meaning is contextual as it depends on the social context, ‘language game’, in which we are speaking
e.g. it would be contextually strange if we spoke to our family in the same way we would speak in an interview
-> different language games are differentiated by their rules
-> religious people play the religious language game. Scientists play the scientific language game. Uprooting a word from the religious language game and try to analyse it within the context of the scientific language game is to misunderstand how meaning works. Words get their meaning from the language game in which they are spoken
-> so Ayer and Flew find religious language meaningless as they are not participating in the religious language game
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teleological argument22
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Cosmological argument16
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Utilitarianism20
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Euthanasia21
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Soul, mind and body25
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Ancient Philosophical influences20
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Ontological argument12
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Religious experience19
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situation ethics22
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business ethics36
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Meta-ethics20
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kantian ethics14
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Religious language27
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sexual ethics52
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The problem of evil27
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Christian Moral Action25
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Death and Afterlife24
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Gender and society30
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Natural Moral Law25
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Liberation theology21
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Nature / Attributes of God19
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The Person of Jesus Christ21
