Religious language: the verification and falsification challenges, the via negativa, analogy (Aquinas), symbol (Tillich), and language games (Wittgenstein), as responses to whether talk of God is meaningful.

What this dot point is asking

You need to explain the problem of religious language: the verification and falsification challenges to its meaningfulness, and the main responses, the via negativa, analogy (Aquinas), symbol (Tillich) and language games (Wittgenstein), and then evaluate them. This is a major theme of A2 8: if statements about God cannot even be meaningful, the arguments about God's existence may not get off the ground.

The verification challenge

The falsification challenge

The via negativa and analogy

Symbol and language games

Two further responses locate the meaning of religious language differently.

• Tillich: symbol. Paul Tillich argued that religious language is symbolic, not literal. Unlike a mere sign, a symbol participates in the reality it points to and "opens up levels of reality" otherwise closed to us; statements about "God" point to being-itself, the ground of all being, and cannot be taken as literal description.
• Wittgenstein: language games. The later Wittgenstein held that meaning is use, and that language operates in different language games, each part of a form of life with its own rules. Religious language is meaningful within the religious form of life and should not be judged by the criteria of science.

Evaluating the responses

A model evaluation paragraph might run: "The verification and falsification challenges are powerful in pressing whether religious statements really assert anything, and Flew's point that a claim ruling nothing out says nothing is searching. Yet both rest on a contested criterion of meaning: the verification principle is famously self-refuting, since it is itself neither analytic nor empirically verifiable, and Hare's 'bliks' and Mitchell's partisan reply show that religious claims can be meaningful convictions even if not straightforwardly falsifiable. Among the positive accounts, Aquinas's analogy is a strong middle way, avoiding both meaningless equivocation and the idolatry of univocal language, though it must explain how the likeness between God and creatures is known; Tillich's symbol captures the depth of religious language but risks vagueness; and Wittgenstein's language games protect religious meaning but may cut it off from truth-claims about reality. The judgement, therefore, is that the challenges fail to show religious language meaningless, and that analogy, supplemented by symbol and the via negativa, offers the most convincing account of how finite language can speak truly of a transcendent God."

Try this

Q1. State the verification principle. [2 marks]

• Cue. A statement is meaningful only if it is analytic (true by definition) or empirically verifiable by sense experience.

Q2. Explain Aquinas's doctrine of analogy. [6 marks]

• Cue. Words apply to God neither univocally nor equivocally but analogically, by attribution and proper proportion, so we can call God good or wise truly while preserving God's transcendence.

Q3. "The falsification challenge shows that religious language is meaningless." Discuss. [20 marks]

• Cue. Explain Flew's challenge, then weigh it against the replies of Hare (bliks) and Mitchell and the contested criterion of meaning. Reach a judgement.