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religious language: 20thC perspectives, basic views on symbols, God and…

- - - - so it would seem thatW's non-cognitive approach makes more sense than a cognitive approach. this is because much of the language use dot describe the nature of God is metaphysical and beyond our realm of understanding
      - argued that religious lang isn't just the asserting of fact, but a commitment to a way of life
    - - both argued that religious lang has to be understood un a particular way if it is to have meaning
        
        W: religious lang us best understood by those who are within th e'game' or 'form if life'' of religion. those who use religious lang regularly, within a community of believers, find meaning in the lang, which others outside might think is meaningless
        
        A: religious lang gas to be understood analytically
    - - this fits most believers' understanding of what they are doing when the say God exists - they are asserting a fact
        
        eg when a religious person claims that God is omnipotent, they are aiming to say factually that God is all powerful
      - in his religious lang, he puts forward factual statements about supernatural reality
    - - both held this belief
- - - - criticisms: falsification principle
        
        you could argue that Flew's confidence in empirical evidence as the final test of meaning is, in itself, unfalsifiable
        
        Flew's falsification principle can be criticised for many reasons
      - response to Flew's question
        
        The religious believer might want to respond to him with a similar question, ‘what would have to occur or to have occurred, to constitute for you a disproof of the primacy of empirical evidence?’
        
        Flew’s article finishes with the question, ‘what would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or the existence of God?’
      - 'bliks' can be meaningful
        
        in the same way, a 'blik' could be instensely meaningful to a person who has one
      - Swinburne's view of assertions
        
        he argues we cannot specify what would count against scientific theories of the beginnings of the universe, eg, because we do not know enough about scientific theories involved, but this does not make the scientific theories meaningless to us
        
        argues that we do not have to be able to specify what would count against an assertion to be meaningful
      - Tillich's symbol argument
        
        symbols are not the same as facts. so it is wrong to criticise them as if they were. symbols cannot be verified/ falsified. this doesnt mean symbols are meaningless, even if they are unverifiable: they can be effective ways of drawing religious believers to 'the power of being'
        
        T agreed that God is not 'a being' but 'being itself' and that religious language is not cognitive (it can't be known) but symbolic
  - - - problems with analytic propositions
        
        the idea that all meaningful synthetic statements have to be empirically verifiable also causes practical problems
        
        many of the claims in science, such as the exoistence of black holes, cannot be verified by sense experience
        
        what's more, if the statement is analytic, then it is giving a new sense to the word 'meaningful'; a new definition which we do not necessarily have to accept
      - the theory is not meaningful
        
        the verification cannot be verified by sense experience and so is not a meaningful synthetic proposition
        
        but one of the most significant criticisms is that the statement in the theory itself does not pass the test as a meaningful statement
      - history cannot be tested
        
        Brummer, like D Z Phillips before him believes that scholars such as Hume and Dawkins are wrong to assume that if something is not scientific or measurable then it is somehow not significant
        
        Brummer argues that to treat sentences of faith as if they were scientific sentences is to commit an error of understanding
        
        we should not say that the entire contents of reality can possible be known to science
        
        many historical statements about past events cannot now be tested using the senses
      - weak verification
        
        weak verification means we can make statements about history, scientific theories and human emotion but not religion and ethics
        
        eg if we know in principle how to verify a statement, then it is meaningful . if the probability weighs in favour of the statement, then it is meaningful
        
        Ayer's theory of weak verification states that to be meaningful, a statement does not have to be verifiable but instead must be shown to be true within reasonable doubt
      - Popper's view of verification
        
        instead we can only accept a statement up to the point where it is falsified. thus the verification principle is not successful
        
        was the inspiration behind the falsification principle and he pointed out that if meaning depended upon strong/weak verification, then the whole of science would be wiped out. this is because none of the general laws of science are actually verifiable. we can never accept any statement as verifiable
      - Locke and Hume's support
        
        as empiricists, they argue that truth and knowledge should be known via our sense. this form of reasoning goes back to Aristotle who based his beliefs on scientific evidence
- - - - Flaw: requires conclusive proof
        
        but for many logical positivists, even A.J Ayer himself, the principle is problematic. as it requires conclusive proof through observation or experience, it suggests that obviously meaningful statements are meaningless eg statements that we make such as 'dinosaurs lived on the earth' can't verified through observation/experience, so we cannot accept the statements as meaningful
      - Ayer's view of religion claims
        
        does not say they are just false; it is more that they cannot really tell us anything
        
        are non-cognitive and impossible to verify thus meaningless
      - modifications of the principle
        
        so a weaker version of the verification principle was brought into play. this weaker verification makes two modifications:
        
        conclusive proof is not always possible. so the statements that attempt to say something about the world are factually meaningful if experience and observation can establish statements as probable
        
        statements that attempt to say something about the world ar meaningful if it is possible in principle to gather the evidence i.e do we know how such statements could be verified ?
      - believe that statements can only be meaningful if they can be demonstrated, and these can be divided into 2 types:
        
        synthetic propositions
        
        true by confirmation of the senses eg I can see its raining outside
        
        analytic propositions
        
        true by definition, either because of the word used rg 'this circle is not a square' or its mathematical eg '2+2=4'
  - - - Ayer on the word 'God'
        
        ' the term 'god' is a metaphysical term and if 'god' is a metaphysical term, then it cannot even be probe that God exists'
      - influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein
        
        early in his career, W suggested that meaningful lang is connected with things we know from our senses
        
        logical positivists caught on to this idea and used it to challenge religion: how could religion lang link with sense experience?
      - Ayer on the existence of God
        
        because of this, Ayer would disagree with all the traditional argument for the existence of God as none of them conclusively and empirically prove the existence of God
        
        doesn't just deny God's existence: he denies the possibility of Gods existence altogether on the grounds that there is no way of empirically verifying his existence
      - beliefs and the Vienna Circle
        
        the meetings regularly took place in Vienna and as such they became commonly known as the Vienna Circle
        
        logical positivists were concerned with the relationship between the use of lang and knowledge, rejecting as meaningless what they saw as non-cognitive (fact-free) claims
- - - - his classic eg was the game of chess. you have might be told that a piece is called a 'king', but without understanding the rules of chess, you could never use the piece
      - also stated that to argue about how lang is used is meaningless. if you want to play the game, you must accept the rules. you cannot play chess if your opponent is trying to play checkers
      - the use of language was like partaking in a game. to use a word, you have to first understand how it works
    - - W suggested that lang and therefore the rules of that language, can be seen from two sides:
        
        those who are outside the game and therefore do not know the rules
        
        those who are inside the game and therefore know the rules
    - - suggested that the meaning of words is determined by the language game that the words are part of (so meaning of a word would depend on the scenario it was used in)
      - for W, awards perform a function in a language; they do. not signify an object
    - - believe that there are different contexts in which language is used. these he calls language games. religion is one and science is another
      - main point is that the meaning of a statement is not to be understood by the steps you would take to verify/ falsify it, but context in which it is used
    - - in sort, while we may not be able to sense or conceptualise some things, they may still have truth ot reality. but to conjecture on such points is ultimately meaningless
      - advocated that we should not talk about what we cannot understand, famously saying: 'whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent'
- - - - 'blik'
        
        and yet Hare argues that his belief remains very meaningful
        
        so a 'blik' is a particular view about the world that may not be based upon reason or fact and that cannot be verified or falsified: it just is and we don't need to explain why we hold our 'blik'
        
        the paranoid student cannot imagine being wrong; his statement 'all dons want to murder him' is unfalsifiable'
        
        H said that people eater have the right/sane 'blik' or wrong/insane 'blik'; the 'lunatic; in his quotation has thew wrong 'blik' about dones, whereas his friends have the right 'blik'
      - Hare's conclusions
        
        according to H, we all have fundamental beliefs/principles on which we base our actions and which we will never give up
        
        so H argues that it is possible to agree to a propostion which is falsifiable but is nonetheless meaningful
      - quote from H
        
        ''A certain lunatic is convinced that all dons want to murder him. His friends introduce him to all the mildest and most respectable dons that they can find, and after each of them has retired, they say, "You see, he doesn't really want to murder you; he spoke to you in a most cordial manner; surely you are convinced now?" But the lunatic replies "Yes, but that was only his diabolical cunning; he's really plotting against me the whole time, like the rest of them; I know it I tell you." However, many kindly dons are produced, the reaction is the same.''
  - - - on religious beliefs
        
        they will not allow evidence to discredit their beliefs and so their statements are meaningless
        
        F is protesting about a tendency he observed amongst religious believers to shift the goalposts of statements about God
        
        F argued that religious people tend to refuse the possibility of their statement being false and so make their statements meaningless
      - 'God loves all humans' example
        
        F observed that believers would retort '... but God loves humans in an inscrutable way, in a different way to the way we love.'
        
        is that person were to witness a child dying of inoperable cancer of the throat, they would be right to use that as evidence that the claim 'God loves all humans' is false
        
        in F's opinion, this second statement has no meaning beca8se it doesn't allow for anything to falsify it
        
        eg someone mights start by saying that 'God loves all humans'
      - white swan example
        
        the statement that 'all swans are white'n is often used to show how a proposition can be false. we may see hundreds of white swans but this does not prove the statment. however, when we see one black swan, we know that the proposition is false
        
        statement such as that are meaningful because they can be shown to be false. this statement is synthetic and empirically testable
        
        he applied this idea to religious language
  - - - difference M and Hare
        
        M's fighter, however, is a) willing to admit that things count against his belief in the leader (a symbol of God) and b) ground his belief in reason and fact: he trusts this man who claims to be the leader and has example of him fighting for the resistance
        
        H's 'lunatic' has a) no reason for mistrusting dons and b) won't allow anything to count against his belief
      - M's criticism of Flew
        
        claimed that F missed the point that believers have a prior commitment to trust in God based on faith. for this reason, they do not allow evidence to undermine their faith
      - used the idea of a resistance fighter to make his point
        
        'A member of the resistance movement is met one day by a man claiming to be the leader of the resistance movement. The fighter is suitably impressed and pledges his loyalty to the stranger. As time goes on, the fighter sees the 'leader' helping out the resistance, but at other times he is apparently helping out the enemy. The fighter nevertheless carries on in his belief that the stranger is, in fact, the leader of the resistance movement'.
      - M's conclusions
        
        of course, the stranger in the story will be able to reveal his true allegiance after the war and explain his mysterious behaviour, in the same way that all the peculiar and problematic parts of religious belief will be revealed at the end of time according to traditional belief
        
        M's point is that religious belief is based upon facts, but that belief cannot be verified/falsified in the simplistic way that the logical positivists demand
      - belief and language based on fact
        
        claimed religious belief, and thus religious lang, is based upon fact, although they are not straightforwardly verifiable/falsifiable