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20th Century RL - Coggle Diagram

- - - - God COULD be verified through religious experiences & the teleological/ cosmological arguments
  - - - Parable of the celestial city:
        
        2 travellers on a rod, one believes a celestial city is at the end of the road whilst the other doesn't. When they reach the end, they will find out who is right and who is wrong, therefore religious language is ESCHATOLOGICALLY verifiable
      - However, the afterlife is not like the dark side of the moon, which was Ayer's argument. Furthermore, we do not know if the afterlife is even a place where verification can occur
        
        If death is annihilation, we will not have that moment of realisation of verified religious language, therefore we cannot justifiably say there is a way to verify religious language in principle
- - - - The things a person says depends on the social context they are speaking in, for example a j*b interview is different to a social gathering. Therefore, words must get their meaning from the social context in which they are spoken
      - A social context or interaction is a language game, if you follow the job interview rules with your mates they're gonna think your weird, inversely, we would not get the job if we used our friendly rules
        
        We learn these rules unconsciously
      - Religion is one of these games, it is meaningful to those in 'the game'. It is only meaningful however if you have learnt the rules and if they have been socialised into it
        
        Science is a different game to religion, so religious language is meaningless in the scientific language game
        
        PLATO'S CAVE, DIFFERENT CAVES DIFFERENT GAMES
  - - - . There are degrees to which someone is part of a langauge game
- - - - Neither popper nor flew are making claims about meaning, so the falsification principle doesn't need to pass its own test, it is just a tool for identifying empirical statements about the world
      - To assert X is to deny that X is not the case.
        
        Religious believers cannot say what could prove their belief in God is false, so religious langauge is meaningless
        
        Imagine someone claimed a gardener (God) existed, but every time that was tested (through the advance of scientific knowledge),they diluted the original concept to avoid the falsification. This dilutes the concept of God to the point of failing to assert anything
  - - - This evidence can be outweighed by counter-evidence such as evil. This makes their belief falsifiable, as evidenced by followers 'losing faith' due to evil (child death)
        
        Flew responds that the logical problem of evil shows that evil is inconsistent with the classic God. therefore any evil would falsify belief in God
        
        However this is assuming the logical problem of evil is a sound argument, even though PLantinga shuts it down with the free will argument
    - - Mitchell remarks there must be SOME evidence where continuing faith would be ridiculous and blind, but we cannot know this in advance
- - - - Even with contradictory evidence (The nice professors), the belief pursues
    - - But is it really just feelings and attitudes?, it's also a cognitive belief that God exists
        
        Cosmological argument is logical, we might think it false however it is tough to pin it as Aquinas' personal feelings & attitudes