"'God is life' and 'God is love' are meaningless statements" Examine the reasons why some philosophers might agree with this statement.

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Thomas Taylor

a) “‘God is life’ and ‘God is love’ are meaningless statements” Examine the reasons why some philosophers might agree with this statement.

b) Explain and assess the claim that such statements as ‘God is life’ and ‘God is love’ have meaning for a believer.

A plain factual statement is usually easy to understand for example; ‘my dad is a man’, this is easy to understand because the listener would know what a dad is because they have one as well, and they know what a man is, and it shows that my dad is alive at the time of me speaking about him. People, may however, argue about the concepts behind every word, for speaker and listener, but common sense tells us that the majority of people would know what is meant by this. However, religious concepts are not bound by these rules; there can be no such thing as ‘a plain factual religious statement’. There are two philosophers in particular that wrote about religious language in relation to statements such as; ‘God is life’ and ‘God is love’, these are AJ Ayer and Anthony Flew.

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To answer this question it is necessary to bring in the verification principle. This states that; a meaningful statement can be proven to be so by either being an analytical statement which means it is true by definition, or by being a synthetic statement which has to be verified by experience. If it cannot be subjected to either then it is meaningless.

There are two possible ways in which to look at a statement like; ‘God is love’. The first way is that it is meaningless and therefore a waste of time and effort, or secondly; that ...

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