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! religious language ! - Coggle Diagram

- - - - e.g God’s beauty is like the beauty of flowers
  - - - like us & God
  - - - Darwin’s theory of evolution & Dawkins
    - - Mill
      - counter arg - (Aquinas) if evil is a privation of good then decay, disease, etc cannot be an attribute of God cause its not a thing he created
    - - Ayer
    - - Swinburne
- - - - 'i am the good shepard'
        
        i am - Moses at the burning bush, essence of God Yahweh, claim to be divine
        
        Shepard - kind, caring, guiding, protecting
      - 'the Christ'
        
        means anointed one - messiah, priests anointed with oil to mark them as messiah but there'll be one true messiah chosen by God to save the people
      - 'logos'
        
        the word, Jewish meaning of wisdom, God created with word Genesis
      - 'I am the true vine'
        
        True vine - eucharistic significance
        
        I am - Moses at the burning bush, essence of God Yahweh, claim to be divine
      - all these are symbols & have symbolic meanings about Jesus & hence God
    - - Gospels = offered theology in story form, teachings about Jesus in C1st language of symbolic myth. Not cognitive language (facts)
      - Symbolic stories which communicate truths beyond themselves - may have many meanings that can change over time & communicate cultural world views
      - Jesus quelling the storm - Jesus calmed a storm on the Sea of Galilee, symbolic as C1st world view was that the underworld was beneath the world & you could fall trough the sea into the underworld, storms were caused by devils. So Jesus quelling the storm is symbolic of his power over both the natural & spiritual world.
  - - - social - binds people together
      - motivate & inspire
      - Communicate beliefs
      - 'vison' of god
  - - - Cognitive language (factual) cannot communicate about these deeper levels
    - - E.g. a flag participates in the power of a nation
    - - God is beyond physical/factual world world, therefore only symbolic language can be used to talk about him
- - - - Take a common senses approach, e.g. if there are multiple sources of 2nd hand evidence, I can be weakly verified & is not devoid of meaning
  - - - God talk might be verifiable in principle, convincing evidence isn’t available now but it could be in the future; the whole idea of final judgement & end times
    - - Dancing toy example - toys dance when you leave the room but you can’t observe this, you can’t establish it as truth but its not meaningless, could be true but can’t prove it
    - - The claim a statement is only meaningless if it can be verified analytically or synthetically cannot itself be verified analytically or synthetically
- - - - It’s not reasonable to compare these 2 types of language (crit - a value judgement (opinion))
  - - - ‘Died a death of a thousand qualifications’
- - - - Scripture, religious experience & A Posteriori evidence like design. To say that it’s like a lunatics ravings is unfair & disanalogeous
    - - Are all Bliks equally valid - even if they are sexist/racist etc?
- - - - Different meanings for different people
    - - “It’s raining”
    - - “It’s a round triangle”
    - - E.g. ‘there is an invisible God’
  - - - The rules of scientific language are very different to rules of religious language - Verification & Falsification
      - = Category error
    - - Religion is its own language game
      - It cannot be criticised or justified in reason (rational args, e.g. design arg, cosmo arg, ontological arg, etc)
        
        This is a different language game
      - The reality of God lie within the words & practice of religion & the form of the life of believes
    - - Wittgenstein is too negative in his views of philosophical discussion
        
        we can discover truths about our self & understand more about ethics & logical reasoning
        
        they underpin faith
      - If religion cannot be judged by those outside the language game, it could lead to blind faith, irrationalism or atrocities such as female genital mutilation
      - Wittgenstein implies that language cannot convey objective truth, even scientific & mathematical language
        
        Many disagree - despite the limits of out human brain & language some ‘facts’ can be known & express & exist outside human experience, e.g. 2+2=4