This then brought about the verification principle, which meant that a proposition had meaning if we knew what it would take to prove it true or false. According to the Logical Positivists anything that could not be verified had no meaning and therefore would regard anything to do with God, art, emotions etc. as meaningless.
This opened a heated discussion on the purpose of religious language.
Differing to the verification principle came about the ‘falsification principle’. This was formulated by the philosopher Anthony Flew and meant that a proposition had meaning if it could be proved false. Due to this he then went onto state that religious statements were meaningless because religious believers were not willing to count anything against their beliefs or let anything prove their beliefs false e.g. Flew says that Christians still hold that God is all good despite the existence of evil in the world. He then goes on to state that they make reasons for why God remains good, and this constant back up makes religious language meaningless. He used John Wisdom’s parable of the gardener to explain. He tells that two men were walking through a forest which was over grown, un kept etc. when they came across a garden that was clearly kept well. There was no evidence of a gardener but one man still maintained that there must be one due to the state of the garden, while the other man dismissed the idea without evidence of the gardener. We can relate this to Christian’s faith in God, that even though we have no evidence of God we know due to the design of the world that God must exist.
A differing aspect in the verification principle compared to the falsification principle is that to falsify a something is not based on the language itself but on the basic insight that to state something is to deny something else. So fundamentally Flew is asking that the proof for Gods existence has to be supported by what the believer is willing to know and not just to believe.
Due to this arising of trying to prove religious language meaningless, this stirred other philosophers to prove religious language did have meaning and that it did not have to rely on falsification or verification.
R.Swinburne is one of these philosophers that aimed to do this and came up with the formulation of the toys in the cupboard. This being that we all know the idea that when toys are in the closed cupboard they come alive but we never see it because they become still as soon as w open the cupboard. What he meant by this is that this idea still has meaning yet we cannot prove it true or false.
Basil Mitchell also came up with a claim and stated that Flew had missed the point when he said that believers wouldn’t let anything falsify their beliefs. The fact that believers prior commitment was to have faith in God gives reason to not want anything to prove their belief’s wrong.
The difference between cognitive and non-cognitive statements also arose one particular philosopher, R. M. Hare. He stated that cognitive statements could be determined meaningless or meaningful with verification but not non-cognitive ones such as religious statements. He said that they are not factual but still have meaning because it influences the way we look at things. He gave an example of a student who was convinced that his teacher was trying to kill him, yet in reality this was complete nonsense, you could say it had no meaning but it influenced heavily this students outlook on life and had very real meaning to him.
According to a man named Ludwig Wittgenstein the meaning of words was in their use. He formulated what is known as language games. This means that we all have different areas of life or activities and each has its own language e.g. a footballer knows best what the rules of this game are. People outside the group may not know the first thing about e.g. football. This would explain the same thing between non-believers and believers. Believers know the language game, that God is a God of classical theism for example but non-believers may dismiss the idea of God completely because they don’t understand it. Therefore just because a non-believer does not believe in the idea does not mean they can clam it meaningless. Criticisms of this theory is that religious language is not totally isolated in one language game, for non-believers to criticise religious ideas they need to know something about the ideas themselves. For example in the rules of football it is not totally isolated because we know what some terms are or have a brief idea about what they are so it is not isolated to just the people who play the game. We can still understand the game without knowing everything about it.
Believers themselves recognize that any discussion of God is limited but they argue it does have meaning and purpose.
In my opinion I agree mostly with R.M.Hare who made the difference between cognitive and non-cognitive statements. The fact that ideas of God may not be able to be verified but they still give meaning to the believer. A proposition in my opinion cannot be proved to have meaning just by being proved true or false, it is much to restricted for my liking. The idea of love for example, everyone will feel it at some point and it will have immense meaning to him or her but they cannot prove it true or false. They still influence the way we look at things whether it has solid evidence or not.
Religious language in my opinion does have meaning because it is influential on peoples lives, it does not necessarily need evidence to prove it.