IB Philosophy 5.2.2 the Problem of Religious Language Notes

Is Religious Language Meaningful?

1. Topic 5.2.1 examined the nature of religious language, exploring how metaphor, symbol, analogy, and myth function in religious discourse. This topic examines the problem: is religious language genuinely meaningful, and can religious statements ever be shown to be true or false?
2. The IB syllabus poses three interconnected questions.
   1. First, can religious statements be shown to be true or false?
   2. Second, is religious language meaningful at all?
   3. Third, can the language of finite beings be used to talk about an infinite being?
3. These questions go to the very heart of religious talk about God, and connect directly to the meta-ethical debates about ethical language examined in 4.2.3.
4. The most radical challenge to the meaningfulness of religious language comes from logical positivism, the philosophical movement associated with the Vienna Circle in the 1920s and 1930s. Logical positivists held that a statement is meaningful only if it is either analytically true (true by definition, like "All bachelors are unmarried") or empirically verifiable (testable by observation, like "Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius").
5. A.J. Ayer applied the verification principle to religious language in Language, Truth and Logic (1936). Ayer argued that statements like "God exists" and "God is love" are neither analytic truths nor empirically verifiable claims.
6. Since they fail both tests of meaningfulness, they are literally meaningless: not false, but without any cognitive content at all. They do not assert anything about the world.
7. They merely express the speaker's emotions, not facts about the world.

Flew's Falsification Principle

1. Ayer's position has sweeping consequences for philosophy of religion. If religious statements are meaningless, then the arguments for and against God's existence (5.1.2 and 5.1.3) are equally pointless: both sides are debating whether a claim is true when that claim does not even qualify as the kind of thing that can be true or false.
2. The problem of evil, the ontological argument, and the teleological argument all presuppose that "God exists" is a meaningful proposition. Ayer denies this presupposition.
3. Ayer's critique will be examined in depth in the prescribed text on Language, Truth and Logic (10.1.1). Students should note that Ayer's position represents the strongest possible version of the problem of religious language: it does not merely claim that religious statements are difficult to verify but that they fail to make any factual claim at all.
4. Antony Flew extended the positivist challenge in a different direction with the falsification principle. In "Theology and Falsification" (1950), Flew argued that a statement is meaningful only if there is some conceivable observation that would count against it.
5. He challenged theists to say what would have to occur to disprove the existence of God. If nothing could count as evidence against God's existence, then the claim "God exists" is unfalsifiable and therefore empty of content.
6. Flew's parable of the gardener illustrates the point. Two explorers find a clearing in the jungle and disagree about whether a gardener tends it.
7. They set traps and cameras, but no gardener is ever detected. One explorer continues to insist that an invisible, intangible gardener exists.
8. Flew asks: how does this "gardener" differ from no gardener at all? A claim that can be endlessly qualified to avoid refutation has died the death of a thousand qualifications.
9. The overarching Unit 5 question, "What is the nature and scope of religious language?", receives its sharpest formulation here. If Ayer and Flew are right, the scope of religious language is zero: it says nothing about reality.
10. The responses to this challenge (including those of Alston, Maimonides, Hick, and Wittgenstein) will determine whether philosophy of religion can survive the positivist critique.

Maimonides and the Via Negativa

1. Moses Maimonides (1138-1204), the greatest medieval Jewish philosopher, addressed the problem of religious language in The Guide for the Perplexed (*Moreh Nevukhim*). Maimonides argued that positive descriptions of God ("God is wise," "God is powerful") inevitably distort the divine nature because they impose human categories on a being that transcends all categories.
2. Maimonides' solution is the Via Negativa (the negative way): we can speak meaningfully about God only by saying what God is not. God is not ignorant (which is different from saying God is wise in any human sense).
3. God is not weak (which is different from saying God is powerful in any human sense). Each negative statement removes a false conception without imposing a positive characterization that would reduce God to a human-scale entity.
4. The Via Negativa preserves the transcendence of God (discussed in 5.1.1) while still making meaningful religious discourse possible. It accepts that human language has built-in limits, and that any positive description of God is, at best, an approximation that can never fully capture the divine reality.
5. This connects to the tradition of apophatic theology (negative theology) mentioned in 5.2.1.
6. However, the Via Negativa faces a significant objection: if we can only say what God is not, do we actually know anything positive about God at all? A being described only by negatives (not ignorant, not weak, not limited) could fit an enormous number of very different things, and piling up negations does not necessarily point us toward a single, coherent concept of God.
7. Critics argue that pure negative theology leaves us with an entity so indeterminate that it ceases to be an object of worship or relationship.

Maimonides in Context and Influence

1. Aquinas responded to the Via Negativa's limitations by developing the doctrine of analogy (discussed in 5.2.1), arguing that analogical language can convey genuine though imperfect knowledge of God.
2. The Via Negativa also responds to the problem raised by the third IB question: "Can the language of finite beings be used to talk about an infinite being?" Maimonides' answer is that positive language cannot, but negative language can.
3. By stripping away what God is not, we approach (without ever reaching) an understanding of what God is. This is a form of intellectual humility. It admits that we cannot fully understand God, while still insisting that religious language is not completely empty.
4. Maimonides' Via Negativa has influenced mystical traditions across Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
   1. The Kabbalistic tradition in Judaism, Meister Eckhart in Christian mysticism, and Sufi thinkers in Islam all drew on the insight that the deepest knowledge of God involves recognising what lies beyond the reach of language.
5. This cross-traditional resonance suggests that the Via Negativa captures something fundamental about the human encounter with the divine.

Alston and the Use of Ordinary Language About the Divine

1. William Alston (1921-2009) directly addressed the question of whether ordinary human language can be used to talk about God. In works including Divine Nature and Human Language (1989), Alston argued against the view that religious language requires entirely special treatment.
2. His position represents a defence of theological realism: religious statements make genuine truth claims about a mind-independent divine reality.
3. Alston challenged the assumption, shared by both Maimonides and the logical positivists, that the gap between finite and infinite makes positive religious language impossible. He argued that if God created human beings with the capacity for language and thought, then human language should be able to capture at least some truths about God.
4. The alternative, that God is entirely beyond human comprehension, would make revelation, prayer, and religious experience unintelligible.
5. Alston drew on speech act theory and ordinary language philosophy to argue that religious statements function in the same way as other truth claims.
   1. When a believer says "God is loving," they are making a factual assertion about a property of God, just as saying "The sun is hot" is a factual assertion about a property of the sun.
6. The assertion may be analogical (as Aquinas argued), but it is still genuinely truth-apt: it can be true or false.
7. This position directly challenges Ayer's claim that religious statements are meaningless.
8. Alston argued that the verification principle is itself neither analytic nor empirically verifiable, and therefore fails its own test of meaningfulness.
   1. If the verification principle is rejected, then the positivist argument against religious language is also necessarily rejected.
   2. Therefore, religious statements can be evaluated by the same standards of evidence and reasoning as any other factual claim.
9. Alston also developed the concept of 'perceiving God': the idea that religious experience can give us epistemic justification (a good reason to believe) for claims about God, in the same way that seeing and touching things gives us reason to believe in the physical world.
   1. If we trust our senses as a source of knowledge (as discussed in 3.2.2), we may need to take equally seriously the accounts of people who report a direct experience of the divine.

Objections to Alston and the Positivist Debate

1. Objections to Alston include the concern that religious experience is too subjective and culturally variable to count as reliable evidence for theological claims. Different religions report very different experiences, and there is no agreed-upon way to decide which, if any, are accurate (a point connected to the argument from inconsistent revelations in 5.1.3).
2. Additionally, the analogy between sensory perception and religious perception may be strained, since sensory perception is publicly verifiable in a way that religious experience typically is not.
3. The debate between Ayer, Maimonides, and Alston represents three fundamentally different positions on religious language: meaninglessness (Ayer), negative meaning only (Maimonides), and genuine positive meaning (Alston).
4. R.M. Hare responded to Flew with the concept of a 'blik', a fundamental orientation toward the world that shapes how a person interprets all experience.
   1. Hare illustrated this with a lunatic who believes all university dons want to murder him.
   2. No amount of evidence (friendly dons, helpful dons, smiling dons) can shake his conviction, because his blik determines how he reads the evidence.
   3. Hare argued that religious belief functions similarly.
   4. It is not a falsifiable hypothesis but a framework that determines what counts as evidence in the first place.
5. It could be argued that Flew's falsification challenge misses the point.
   1. It treats religious belief as a factual hypothesis waiting to be tested, when it is actually a framework through which a person interprets all experience.

Mitchell, Braithwaite, and the Debate's Legacy

1. Basil Mitchell offered a different response to Flew through the parable of the Stranger.
   1. A member of the resistance meets a Stranger who claims to be on the side of the resistance.
   2. Sometimes the Stranger is seen helping resistance members.
   3. Other times he is seen in the company of the enemy.
2. The partisan does not abandon trust at the first sign of contrary evidence, but neither does he ignore it.
3. He holds trust as a commitment that can be tested cumulatively over time.
4. For Mitchell, religious believers similarly acknowledge that suffering and evil count as evidence against God, but weigh this against the total body of their religious experience.
5. Faith is not immune to evidence (contra Hare) but it is not destroyed by any single counter-instance (contra Flew).
6. R.B. Braithwaite took a different approach entirely, treating religious statements as expressions of moral commitment rather than factual claims.