Discuss the claim that religious language is meaningless

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Discuss the claim that religious language is meaningless

One possible description of Religious language is that it is a form of communication about God, faith, belief and practice. The fact that the things discussed can have many different meanings to different people causes a problem. This being that it can never be easy to discuss e.g. ‘the meaning of God’ without some conflicting ideas. The reason for this is that we can never really know the truth. Philosopher’s say that we use religious language in everyday life e.g. when expressing a faith to a religion. The problem is that religious language is not univocal (it does not have one agreed meaning). There are two forms of verification of the language, strong or weak. If it is strong we have proved it true or false by experience or if it were weak there are some observations that are relevant to proving a proposition true or false.

There have been many claims that religious language has no meaning, and these claims have been backed up with a theory. Perhaps the most recognized is from the members of a group called the ‘Vienna Circle’ in the 1920’s.

These two members, Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap, were troubled by how we gain knowledge and how we use language to express it. These two men later became known as the’ Logical Positivists’ due t their theory of the meaning in language. Their belief was that only those propersicians that “Can be verified empirically” have meaning. The Logical Positivists therefore only agreed that two types of language were verifiable, these being analitical (A priori) this being language that is obtained through logical reasoning and gives knowledge. The other verifiable language was synthetic (A posteriori) this being propositians that were obtained through experience or experiment.

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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 ...

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