The distinction between cognitivist and non-cognitivist views of religious language, the verification principle and Hume's fork as challenges to its meaningfulness, the Vienna Circle and Ayer, Hick's eschatological verification, and non-cognitivist analyses of religious language as expressing attitudes or forms of life.

What this dot point is asking

AQA wants you to ask whether language about God is meaningful, to distinguish cognitivist from non-cognitivist views of religious language, to explain the verification principle and Hume's fork as challenges to the meaningfulness of religious claims, and to evaluate responses such as Hick's eschatological verification and non-cognitivist analyses.

Cognitivism and non-cognitivism about religious language

The verification principle

A standard problem is that the verification principle is self-refuting: it is itself neither analytic nor empirically verifiable, so by its own test it is meaningless. Ayer tried to soften the principle into a weak form, requiring only that some observation be relevant to a statement's probability rather than conclusively settling it, but the weak version proved too generous, letting in the very metaphysical and theological claims it was meant to exclude. The history of the principle is therefore a dilemma for the positivist: state it strongly and it is self-refuting and rules out science's universal laws too; state it weakly and it fails to exclude religious language. This internal instability is the single most effective line against verificationism, and a good answer uses it rather than merely asserting that religious people find God meaningful.

Hick's eschatological verification

Non-cognitivist analyses

• Religious language as expressing an attitude or "blik" (R. M. Hare). A religious utterance can express a fundamental, unfalsifiable way of seeing the world (a blik) rather than a factual claim, so it is meaningful without being a verifiable assertion.
• Religious language as a form of life (Wittgensteinian). Religious language has meaning within the practice that uses it; understanding it means understanding the form of life, not testing it against neutral evidence.

These approaches make religious language meaningful but at the cost of conceding it does not state literal facts, which many believers reject.

A useful test case that AQA examiners reward is Antony Flew's adaptation of the parable of the gardener (originally Wisdom's). Two explorers find a clearing that looks tended; one insists an invisible, intangible, undetectable gardener maintains it, the other denies it, yet no test ever distinguishes the two claims. Flew presses that a claim compatible with any possible state of affairs asserts nothing: "God loves us" that is consistent with a child dying of cancer has "died the death of a thousand qualifications" and is no longer a genuine assertion. This is the falsification challenge, and it sharpens the dialectic: Hick answers it by insisting religious claims are falsifiable or verifiable in principle (after death), while Hare's blik response effectively concedes Flew's point and relocates religious language outside the realm of factual assertion altogether. Evaluating which response best preserves what believers actually mean is the heart of a top-band answer.