Can we speak of God?

If God is infinite and transcendent, how can finite, human language describe him? Cognitivists hold religious statements make factual claims that are true or false; non-cognitivists hold they do something else (express attitudes, guide life).

Three classic positive strategies: the via negativa, analogy, and symbol.

The via negativa

The via negativa (apophatic way) says we can only state what God is not — not that he is limited, not that he is a body — because positive terms drag in human limitation.

• Associated with Pseudo-Dionysius and, in Jewish thought, Maimonides, who argued negation avoids compromising God's unity and transcendence.
• Strength: preserves God's otherness and guards against idolatry.
• Weakness: a string of negations may leave us with too thin a concept to worship or a knowledge that is merely empty.

Aquinas and analogy

Aquinas rejects speaking of God univocally (words mean exactly the same as for us) and equivocally (totally different meanings). Instead, language works by analogy:

• Analogy of attribution — God is the source of a quality found in creatures (as a healthy diet is called "healthy" because it causes health in the body).
• Analogy of proportion(ality) — a term applies to God in proportion to his nature: God's goodness is to God as human goodness is to a human.

Analogy keeps talk of God meaningful without making him just a big human, because creatures resemble their Creator as effects resemble their cause.

Univocal, equivocal or analogical?

Tillich: religious language as symbol

Paul Tillich argues religious language is symbolic, not literal. A sign merely points; a symbol participates in the reality it points to and opens up levels of reality (and of the soul) that are otherwise closed.

• God is not a being but being-itself, the object of our ultimate concern.
• Only the statement that "God is being-itself" is non-symbolic; everything else about God is symbol.

Challenge (J. H. Randall / others): how do we know what a symbol reveals, or verify it? Symbols can also "die" and lose their power.

Ayer and the verification principle

The logical positivists (Vienna Circle) and A. J. Ayer (Language, Truth and Logic) held the verification principle: a statement is meaningful only if it is (a) a tautology or (b) empirically verifiable.

• Ayer distinguishes strong verification (conclusively provable) from weak verification (observations can count towards it).
• On this test, "God exists" is neither a tautology nor empirically testable, so it is judged factually meaningless — as are ethics and aesthetics.

Objections: the principle fails its own test (it is neither analytic nor verifiable); it also rules out unverifiable scientific and historical statements.

Whose principle?

The falsification debate

Antony Flew reframed the challenge using John Wisdom's parable of the invisible gardener: a believer keeps qualifying the claim ("an invisible, intangible gardener") until it is compatible with any evidence and so "dies the death of a thousand qualifications". If nothing could count against "God loves us", the claim asserts nothing.

Two theistic replies in the same symposium:

• R. M. Hare — introduces bliks: unfalsifiable but meaningful ways of seeing the world (his paranoid student convinced the dons want to kill him). Religious belief is a blik that shapes life.
• Basil Mitchell — the parable of the partisan and the stranger: the believer admits evidence can count against faith yet trusts anyway; assertions are not vacuous, they are held as commitments.

Whose parable?

Wittgenstein: language games

The later Wittgenstein held that "the meaning of a word is its use" within a language game embedded in a form of life. Different games (science, humour, religion) have their own rules.

On this view, religious language is meaningful within its own game; it is a category mistake for outsiders (like Ayer) to demand it meet the rules of empirical science. Critics (e.g. that this makes religion a self-sealing "fideism") worry it cuts religion off from truth-claims about reality.

Sort each idea by approach

Tap a claim, then drop it under the approach it belongs to.

Match the theory

Tap a description, then the thinker it belongs to.

The big ideas to hold together

You can now explain each theory of religious language and weigh the cognitive/non-cognitive divide. Press Finish to see your score.