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Religious Language cannot be proved, therefore it is meaningless

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  • Essay length: 1601 words
  • Submitted: 18/02/2010
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'Religious Language cannot be proved, therefore it is meaningless'

On balance, I believe that religious language cannot be proved, therefore it is meaningless. Religious language is the communication of ideas about God, faith, belief and practice. Religious language poses a distinct and complicated problem for philosophers. At our disposal we only have human language and transient terms, which we use as tools to describe the world around us. How then do we use these tools, which relate to the temporary and spatial world, to describe that which is beyond the limits of space and time? Believers have strived for ways to talk meaningfully about God and many theories have been put forward to attempt at enabling us to discuss the transcendent, yet we are often at risk of anthropomorphising God with statements such as 'God Loves me' and even if we do not attribute human description to God there are still problems, the most prominent is whether any thing we say can actually be 'meaningful'.

We can look at language, especially religious language, from one of two stand points; the realist and the anti-realist. The realist understands truth as verification transcendent; a statement can only be held to

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