Religious language: the cognitive/non-cognitive debate, verification (Ayer) and falsification (Flew, Hare, Mitchell), and the positive approaches of analogy (Aquinas), symbol (Tillich) and language games (Wittgenstein).

What this dot point is asking

This WJEC theme asks you to explain and evaluate debates about whether religious language is meaningful. You need the cognitive/non-cognitive distinction, the verification principle (Ayer) and the falsification challenge (Flew, with the replies of Hare and Mitchell), and the positive approaches of analogy (Aquinas), symbol (Tillich) and language games (Wittgenstein). AO1 wants accurate exposition of these positions; AO2 wants a reasoned judgement on whether God-talk is meaningful.

The answer

The cognitive/non-cognitive distinction

Verification and falsification

• Verification (Ayer). Drawing on Logical Positivism (the Vienna Circle), A. J. Ayer held that a statement is meaningful only if it is analytic (true by definition) or empirically verifiable. Religious statements ("God exists", "God loves us") are neither, so they are literally meaningless, not even false. Even the "weak" form (what observation could render probable) is held to leave talk of a transcendent God empty.
• Falsification (Flew). Antony Flew, using John Wisdom's parable of the invisible gardener, argued that a genuine assertion must deny something; if nothing could count against "God loves us" (the believer always adds a qualification), then it asserts nothing and "dies the death of a thousand qualifications".

Replies to falsification: Hare and Mitchell

• Hare's bliks. R. M. Hare agreed religious statements are not ordinary assertions but argued they are meaningful bliks: unfalsifiable but life-shaping ways of seeing the world (his example is the student convinced the dons want to kill him). Bliks matter even though nothing falsifies them.
• Mitchell's partisan. Basil Mitchell argued that the believer is like a partisan who trusts a mysterious Stranger in wartime: counter-evidence does count, but the believer's trust, grounded in the relationship, is not thereby irrational. Religious statements are genuine assertions held in faith.

Analogy, symbol and language games

• Analogy (Aquinas). We speak of God neither univocally (the same sense as creatures, which denies his transcendence) nor equivocally (a wholly different sense, which makes God-talk empty) but by analogy. By the analogy of attribution, God's goodness is the source of creaturely goodness; by the analogy of proportion, "good" applies to God in proportion to his nature.
• Symbol (Tillich). Paul Tillich held that religious language is symbolic: unlike signs, symbols participate in the reality they point to and open up levels of being and of the soul that literal language cannot. "God" is the symbol of "being-itself", the "ground of being".
• Language games (Wittgenstein). The later Wittgenstein held that the meaning of a word is its use within a "language game", embedded in a "form of life". Religious language is meaningful within the religious form of life; it is a mistake to judge it by the rules of science. Hick added eschatological verification: the parable of the Celestial City shows religious claims are verifiable in principle, after death.

Examples in context

Model paragraph (does saving meaning cost truth?). The deepest tension in this topic is between rescuing religious language from the charge of meaninglessness and preserving its claim to be true. The verification and falsification challenges press a cognitive standard: to be meaningful, "God loves us" must make a fact-claim that observation could in principle bear on. Some defences meet this standard directly: Mitchell insists religious statements are genuine assertions, and Hick's eschatological verification holds they will be confirmed after death, keeping them cognitive. Other defences save meaning by abandoning the standard: Hare's bliks and Wittgenstein's language games make religious language meaningful precisely because it is not a fact-claim answerable to evidence, which protects it from falsification at the price of no longer asserting that God really exists. Aquinas' analogy and Tillich's symbol try to occupy a middle position, allowing genuine reference to God while denying that God-talk works like ordinary description. A strong evaluation therefore distinguishes cognitive defences, which keep truth but face the evidential challenge, from non-cognitive defences, which escape the challenge but may surrender the believer's claim that God exists.

Try this

Q1. State Ayer's verification principle. [2 marks]

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

Q2. What did Flew mean by "death by a thousand qualifications"? [2 marks]

• Cue. If believers let nothing count against "God loves us", the statement asserts nothing and is empty.

Q3. Evaluate the view that religious language is meaningful. [20 marks]

• What the marker wants. A balanced argument weighing verification and falsification against analogy, symbol and language games, with a reasoned judgement that distinguishes cognitive from non-cognitive defences.