IB Philosophy 5.2.2 the Problem of Religious Language Key Definitions

Natural theology is the attempt to establish truths about God's existence and attributes through reason and observation of the natural world, without relying on divine revelation or scripture.

Problem of evil: the argument that the existence of evil and suffering in the world is incompatible with (or makes improbable) the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God.

Religious experience: any experience in which a person believes they have encountered the divine, the sacred, or a transcendent reality; types include mystical experiences, near-death experiences, prayer, visions, and moments of profound awe or transformation.

The verification principle is the criterion of meaning proposed by logical positivists stating that a non-tautological statement is meaningful only if empirical observations could count for or against it, rendering metaphysical and theological claims devoid of propositional content.

The Via Negativa (the negative way), associated with Maimonides and the apophatic tradition, holds that we can speak meaningfully about God only by saying what God is not rather than what God is, since any positive predicate drawn from finite experience would inevitably misrepresent the infinite divine nature. The approach preserves divine transcendence but raises the question of whether a theology composed entirely of negations can yield any substantive understanding of God.