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Religious Language (Verification Principle (Ayer and Verification (Ayer…
Religious Language
Verification Principle
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"My cat is black"- meaningful, can be verified but statements like "I am beautiful" - meaningless, different people think different things.
Ayer and Verification
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He distinguished 'practical verifiability' = a statement which can be checked and tested in reality. And 'Verifiability in principle'
Strong Verification = anything that can be checked definitely and Weak Verification = can be shown to be probable by observation
Religious believers would argue you can prove God's existence but they don't tell us anything about the world and so are meaningless
Ayer's second edition
Changed the definition of verification; his distinction between strong and weak verification was not a real distinction.
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AO2
It in itself is unverifiable - You can't demonstrate this rule through observation. Hick suggested that Religious talk isn't meaningless as its verifiable in principle (can verify after death)**
Strong Verification - Not possible to talk about history because its excluded - you can't say water boils at 100 degrees because you could repeat this and it would change
Meaningful but unverifiable - possible for a statement to be meaningful but unverifiable e.g. toys in the cupboard (Swinburne)
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Symbol
A sign is something which points you in a certain direction while a symbol is something which communicates a deeper understanding than just words
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Tillich says God is the 'ground of being' - he is the reason everything exists and the meaning behind everything. This being cannot be understood personally but can be shown through symbols.
- Symbols can lose their meaning, e.g. Hindu symbol was adopted by the Natzis
- They can be interpreted differently through generations
- Many Christians don't think religious language is symbolic, it has more than just symbolic meaning.
Aquinas and Analogy
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According to Aquinas, saying 'God is good' is not the same as saying 'Humans are good' because God's goodness is higher than ours
Univocal language is when one word means the same thing, e.g. son or warrior.
Aquinas said we should use Equivocal language to describe God, e.g. 'God is good' doesn't refer to goodness in what we think it means
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Via Negativa
Dionysus
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No matter how rational we are, he argued we cannot rationalize God
Maimonides
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Uses the example of a ship - by describing what a ship isn't, we learn what it is
Strengths and Weaknesses
Sometimes it doesn't help at all, saying a ant isn't a lion, doesn't help us understand what an ant actually is.
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