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