Comment on the claim religious language can never be meaningful Answer this question with reference to the Verification principle and the Falsification principle, you may wish to include A.J.Ayer or Ludwig Wittgenstein, also consider the

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Comment on the claim ‘religious language can never be meaningful’ Answer this question with reference to the ‘Verification principle’ and the ‘Falsification principle’, you may wish to include A.J.Ayer or Ludwig Wittgenstein, also consider the relevance of Antony Flew and R.M.Hare whilst addressing some of the criticisms aimed towards the theories.

Religious language is arguably non-cognitive; this means it cannot be checked true or false. According to the verifications principle the only language which is verifiable (checkable) is meaningful. Verifiable language includes analytical statements (things which are always true for example mathematics) and synthetic statements (statements which you can prove true or false). The logical positivists (Vienna circle) believe that any statements which cannot be proved within this world are completely meaningless. A.J Ayer who was part of this group said that the statement ‘God exists’ is meaningless because God is a transient being, who is supposedly infinite whilst we are finite. We cannot possibly talk about this meaningfully as he exists in the supernatural world. A problem of the verification principle is that it means we cannot verify historical accounts; however Ayer addresses this by developing the ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ verification principles. A strong verification is one which is undoubtedly true or can easily be checked personally. A weak verification can be given through accounts of other people past and future. A problem with this is that some religious language is historical in its nature therefore we should allow certain statements such as ‘Jesus rose from the dead’ or even ‘Jesus existed’. Richard Swinburne developed another criticism aimed at the theory, he says that there are certain things which we can never verify but they can still be meaningful, his example is the story of the toys in the toy cupboard coming to life when we go to sleep, we can never verify this claim. John Hick responds to the verification principle saying that perhaps in the after-life God can be verified – this is known as eschatological verification. It seems that this is a weak argument though, as it is not itself verifiable.

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In regards to the falsification principle, religious language again fails. The falsification principle says that a statement is only meaningful if we accept that evidence may count against it. Antony Flew says that religious language can never be meaningful as believers will never let any evidence count against their belief. He uses John Wisdom’s parable of the gardener as follows:

"Two people return to their long neglected garden and find, among the weeds, that a few of the old plants are surprisingly vigorous. One says to the other, 'It must be that a gardener has been coming and doing something ...

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