“Critically Assess the Claim That Religious Language Is Meaningless”
“Critically assess the claim that religious language is meaningless” Religious language has been argued about by many philosophers to whether or not the ways in which we speak about religion are relevant or meaningful. This issue of religious language looks at the way we talk about God, debate ideas and communicate our theist or atheist ideologies. For some, religious language is meaningful and full of purpose while others see it to being incomprehensible and pointless. The Vienna Circle was made up of many great philosophers who were against metaphysics due to it leading to illogical thoughts like there being another world to ours. This view transcended onto the philosophical issue of religious language – David Hume for instance – thought that religious language was meaningless due to its irrational diction. A. J. Ayer furthered this point of view within the United Kingdom with a varied response to his ideas. It was through this logical thinking that the verification movement began. Verification claimed that language can only be meaningful if it can be confirmed through sense experience; this movement was based on science, rational thought process and empirical evidence. Simply put, the meaningfulness of a statement is illustrated through the means in which you verify it. An example of sense observation verification is if you were to say “My jumper is red”. Anyone can look at your jumper and see that it is indeed red. Although, if you were to say “my jumper is red and is beautiful” it makes it harder to verify the second half of the statement due to its inability to clarify if it is ‘true’ or ‘false’. To verificationists if it is unable to be verified then it is meaningless. Applying this to religion, if you said “God is good” it is almost impossible to verify its truth or logic. Therefore, religious language is indeed meaningless.
However, the verification movement is full of flaws. Taking the previous explanation into consideration it is impossible to
However, the verification movement is full of flaws. Taking the previous explanation into consideration it is impossible to