Assess whether religious language is meaningful.

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Hazel Chudley

Assess whether religious language is meaningful

There have been numerous attempts to prove whether religious language is or is not meaningful.

One of the attempts to prove it meaningful said that religious language is non-cognitive – the words used are not connected to any of kind of mental image.  With normal language, people have fixed, shared ideas as to what words are – everyone will have roughly the same idea of a ‘door’ or a ‘pen’, with only superficial differences.  R. B. Braithwaite said “religious language is like a story:  it is not literally true but it is used to inspire and guide behaviour, i.e. it has practical value”.

One of the weaknesses of this is that it is not used to communicate anything tangible, so there may not be a shared idea – two people could hear the word ‘God’ and have two totally separate concepts, and how can something be meaningful when no two people understand it in the same way?

In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas proposed that religious language could be meaningful provided it was analogous – it used something we know about in order to talk about something we know nothing about by comparing the two.  Univocal words mean in the same in all circumstances, whereas equivocal words can mean different things in different circumstances.  Proportion is when we multiply familiar concepts, i.e. ‘power’ by an infinite amount and apply them to God, while attribution s when we see our attributes, such as goodness, in God.  

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However, God is entirely different from any other human concept - how can there possibly be a comparison?  We can say ‘God is good’ but we can also say ‘a dog is good’.  In order for the model of ‘good’ to be applied to God, the qualifier of ‘infinitely’ must also be applied.

Wittengenstein compared language to a game that we play.  There are many different games, each of which has a different set of rules.  It does not make sense to take the rules of one game and apply them to each other – trying to ...

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