Religious Language - Quotes

Question 1

Verificationism

Answer 1

• ‘to say that ‘God exists’ is to make a metaphysical utterance which cannot be either true or false’
• ‘We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express’
• ‘it is necessary to draw a distinction between practical verifiability, and verifiability in principle’

Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic

Question 2

The Picture Theory of Meaning

Answer 2

‘The picture has the logical form of representation in common with what it pictures’
- Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Question 3

Evaluating verificationism - eschatological verification

Answer 3

‘Two people are travelling together along a road. One of them believes that it leads to the Celestial City, the other that it leads nowhere’
- Hick, Theology and Verification

Question 4

Evaluating verificationism - Swinburne

Answer 4

‘Some of the toys which… stay in the toy cupboard while people are asleep and no one is watching, actually get up and dance in the middle of the night’
- Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism

Question 5

Falsification - Flew

Answer 5

‘a fine brash hypothesis may thus be killed by inches, the death by a thousand qualifications’
- Flew, Theology & Falsification: A Symposium

Question 6

Falsification criticism - Hare

Answer 6

• ‘A certain lunatic is convinced that all dons want to murder him’
• ‘he has an insane blik about dons’
  Hare, Theology & Falsification: A Symposium

Question 7

Falsification criticism - Mitchell

Answer 7

• ‘a member of the resistance meets one night a stranger who deeply impresses him’
• ‘God loves men’ resembles ‘the Stranger is on our side’
• significant statements that are not falsifiable can be ‘significant articles of faith’
  Mitchell, Theology & Falsification: A Symposium

Question 8

Language-games - Wittgenstein

Answer 8

• ‘the functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects’
• ‘how many kinds of sentence are there… There are countless kinds’
• ‘the meaning of a word is its use in the language’
• ‘If a lion could talk, we could not understand him’
  Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

Question 9

Language-games - D.Z. Phillips

Answer 9

• ‘to understand God-talk, one needs to learn the language of religious communities’

Question 10

Symbols

Answer 10

• a symbol ‘participates in that to which it points’
• ‘unlock hidden elements of our soul [and] open up levels of reality which otherwise are closed to us’
  Paul Tillich
• ‘religious language requires a symbolic foundation’
  Rowan Williams
• ‘God is that mysterious depth which is mediated in certain symbols’
  Keith Ward

Question 11

Symbols criticism

Answer 11

‘Tillich does not fully define or clarify this central notion of participation’
- John Hick

Question 12

Univocal language

Answer 12

• ‘it is evident that this term “wise” is not applied in the same way to God and to man’
• ‘no name is predicated univocally of God and of creatures’

Aquinas, Summa Theologica

Question 13

Equivocal language

Answer 13

• ‘nothing could be known or demonstrated about God at all’
• ‘the reasoning would always be exposed to the fallacy of equivocation’

Aquinas, Summa Theologica

Question 14

Analogical language

Answer 14

‘for in analogies the idea is not, as it is in univocals, one and the same, yet it is not totally diverse as in equivocals’
- Aquinas, Summa Theologica

Question 15

Via Negativa

Answer 15

• God is ‘not soul or mind, not greatness or smallness, not equality or inequality, not movable, moving or at rest…’
  Pseudo-Dionysius, The Mystical Theology
• ‘we can only employ inadequate language’
• ‘God has no positive attribute whatever’
  Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed

Question 16

Via Negativa criticism

Answer 16

• ‘For only saying what something is not gives no indication of what it actually is’
• ‘he could equally well be thinking of a wardrobe’
  Brian Davies