Religious Language

Religious Language

1. Antony Flew

   • Religious People do not allow their beliefs to be disproven
     • GOD IS OMNIBENEVOLENT despite the evidence of evil and suffering
   • "Death by a thousand qualifications"

2. A. J. Ayer

   • Verification Principal
   • A belief is only meaningful is it can be empirically verified (synthetic) or is True by definition (Analytic)

3. John Hick

   • Statements like "Jesus rose from the dead" are historical and therefore verifyable
   • Eschatological Verification
     • Knowledge about God and the metaphysical are verifyable in principal postmortem
   • Faith and Knowledge, 1978

4. Keith Ward

   • If I were God, I would be able to verify my own existence

5. Basil Mitchel

   • People won't allow their beliefs to be altered because a religious belief is a relaitionship with God, not an acceptance of fact

6. Swinburne

   • Toy Sory Analogy
     • It cannot be verified that the toys get up and dance at night

7. R. M. Hare

   • Blik - Believers have WORLDVIEWS which express deeply held opinions and are cognitive in that they affect a person

8. Wittgenstein

   • LANGUAGE Games - A fish cannot talk about things outside of their pond - it is a different realm of language
   • Philosophical Investigations, 1952

9. Aquinas

   • Against the VIA NEGATIVA
   • Summa Theologica
     • Unequivocal Language is wrong as it leads to anthropomorphisism of God
     • Analogical Language - WE experience God through human qualities as they came from him, burt are not equivolent

10. Peter Cole

    • VIA NEGATIVA - By saying what God is not, we can discover what he is due to the pitfalls of human language
    • By denying all description of God, you gain insight, not skepticism

11. Vienna Circle

    • Logical Possivitism
      • Influenced by Hume - Hume's fork of synthetic and analytic

12. Braithwaith

    • Meaning is through use of language
    • Declaration of believer is knowledge

13. Michelles

    • You can't abandon belief, even if it is false
    • It is up to the individual to decide when their belief has been falsified