Compare and Contrast 2 Different Approaches to Religious Language

Compare and contrast 2 approaches to religious language (18)

If we wish to speak about God we must employ religious language to do so. In order to speak about one’s religious beliefs, worships, practice, morality, dogma and doctrine, it is religious language we must use to do so. The problem is that ordinary language is inadequate to speak about a transcendent God, beyond human experience. Ordinary words such as love and goodness are given a religious significance. Technical terms such as sin and grace may be employed, or words like omnipotent made up to describe God. Nevertheless despite scholars attempts through the ages to apply language effectively to describe God and religious experience, confusion and misunderstandings have still resulted. This has led to the suspicion in some quarters that it may not be possible to speak meaningfully about God at all. There are broadly two types of religious language: cognitive or realist language which deals with statements which may be true or false and non-cognitive or anti-realist language which consists of statements which are not meant to be taken factually but perhaps be understood in other ways for example symbols, metaphors, myths or moral commands. Generally this type of language attempts to express a truth within the religious community to which it belongs.  

Any statement which claims to express a matter of fact, including a religious statement, uses cognitive language. A group of philosophers in the 1920’s called the ‘Vienna Circle’ developed what they called the verification principle. This said that any cognitive statement was meaningful only if it was analytic, true by definition, for example ‘John is an unmarried bachelor’, mathematical or synthetic, that is they express some idea that is true or false by empirical testing, for example ‘oak leaves are green’. According to this principle, since religious statements do not fall into any of these categories they are meaningless. A J Ayre said ‘The notion of a being whose essential attributes are non-empirical is not an intelligible notion at all.’ This principle, though useful led to problems when applied to certain cognitive statements, for example, expressions of emotion or ethical and moral statements.

Another approach to finding meaning in cognitive language is the falsification principle suggested by philosophers such as Karl Popper and Anthony Flew. This principle stated that for a statement to be meaningful it had to be at least in principle be capable of falsification. According to this principle, religious statements are meaningless because they are not capable of falsification by any empirical tests or rational argument for example Flew claimed ‘believers say God is all-loving and all-powerful and continue to believe this despite the evidence of great suffering in the world.’ He asked religious believers, ‘What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or the existence of, God?’ The philosopher R.M. Hare put an alternative view to verification or falsification, he suggested in his notion of a ‘blik’ that statements may have meaning and significance according to how much difference it has made to that person’s life. This difference may be empirically observed.

For most religious people, however, religious claims have a greater and deeper significance than simply attempting to express an empirical fact, as if religion was another branch of science. For many, the most significant and important religious statements cannot be expressed in cognitive language. Much non-cognitive religious language is expressed in symbols and myths; they are capable of communicating subtle meanings which go beyond mere facts. Erika Dinkler-von Schubert defined a symbol as a ‘pattern or object which points to a metaphysical reality and participates in it.’ A simple example of a symbol would be the Christian Cross or the Jewish Star of David. Symbolic language may be in the form of metaphors, similes, signs and most commonly myths. It is not absolutely necessary for a myth to tell a true story, but they should express some religious truth. For example, the virgin birth reminds us of the purity of Christ’s birth and origin and Noah’s ark highlights the sinful nature of humanity and the love of God for those who are righteous. Paul Tillich describes the usefulness of symbolic language in expressing the nature of God ‘symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate because it transcends the capacity of any finite reality to express it directly.