IB Philosophy 5.2 Religious Language Key Definitions

Aesthetic experience: a distinctive mode of perception in which a subject attends to an object for its sensory, formal, and expressive qualities, valued for their own sake rather than for instrumental purposes.

The epistemic value of religious experience concerns whether such experiences provide genuine knowledge about the existence and nature of God, or whether they can be fully explained by psychological, neurological, or social factors without invoking a divine cause.

Eschatological verification: John Hick's proposal that religious statements are verifiable in principle because they will be confirmed or disconfirmed by post-mortem experience; this accepts the verificationist requirement of testability while arguing that the test occurs after death rather than during life.

Ineffability is a characteristic of religious (especially mystical) experience identified by William James, referring to the quality of being beyond adequate verbal expression.

A language game is Wittgenstein's term for a distinct form of linguistic activity governed by its own internal rules and purposes, reflecting his argument that language is used in many different ways (describing, commanding, praying, joking), each with its own criteria for meaning.

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.

Religious language: the words, statements, and linguistic forms used to express beliefs about God, the sacred, and the transcendent.

Philosophy of religion asks whether religious language is literal, symbolic, metaphorical, analogical, or mythological, and whether it can convey genuine knowledge.

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.