Religious language discusses religious and spiritual concepts. It is cognitive and conveys knowledge of what is really there. Religious language offers a correspondence theory of truth if it is thought of as being able to point to the reality that it is trying to convey. It is the language of worship – it is performative and prescriptive. Some philosophers such as Aquinas believe that it is possible to talk meaningfully, truthfully and factually about God whereas others like Ayer believe this to be impossible.
Aquinas rejected univocal and equivocal language when talking about God. Religious language often attempts to describe the attributes or qualities of God. This is hard because God is generally not something we have direct experience of, whereas most of the things that language refers to are things that we can experience e.g. love, walking, hair. So when we say ’God is good’, we need to know that we are using ’good’ in that sentence.
Also, many people do not believe in God. Jung himself countered this argument by stating that atheism itself is a religion. It seems that he will not allow anything to counter his ideas. If his theory is not open to falsification, some would argue that it is meaningless. • Jung’s idea of religious experience – Martin Buber argues that an experience which takes place in the mind, rather than externally to the individual, is not a religious experience.
They treated claims made about God as cognitive, meaning that the assertions made are meant to be taken as facts or universal truth claims rather than non-cognitive meaning on a personal level for believers. They believed that language was only meaningful if it was analytically or synthetically verified. Analytic statements are a priori (based on logic) and synthetic statements are a posteriori (based on empirical evidence). They created a test called verification principle to see if religious language was meaningful; Statements can only be meaningful if it can be demonstrated. One could argue that the logical positivists were unsuccessful in arguing that religious language is meaningless because the verification principle has many weaknesses.
Using these different types of language demonstrates a difficulty; assuming that when we speak of God, we are speaking cognitively- assuming that our statement is something that is either true or false and that it is able to describe an extinct being, God. Philosophers have always had a debate between this. Some say that a statement of God is non-cognitive, statements not subject to true of falsity. This led to a strong trial and tribulation to religious faith and its believers. Some such as Mortiz Schlick claim that religious belief is literally meaningless; religious statements are nonsense and should not be the basis of philosophical discussion.
The falsification principle offers no real challenge to religious belief. (45) There are several principles and arguments which try to challenge religious belief by raising questions about it. One of these principles is the falsification principle which questions the meaningfulness of religious statements by checking if they can be falsified, or not as the cases may be. The thing that must be examined however is whether the challenges made by such a principle are really strong enough to challenge people's beliefs. The Falsification Principle is a similar principle to the verification principle as both states that statements are only meaningful if it can be proven true or false, verified or falsified.
Divine Command Theory Divine Command Theory can be described as what are right are whatever God commands, and whatever God forbids is wrong. Being truthful is what some believe that God says is right, but being truthful is the moral think to do (Rachel’s and 50-53). Not, because God says so but, because society says that people must be truthful to be successful and the reach their goals. The advantages to this Theory is that it gives motive to people to be moral which means people are listening to the sayings of God. God faring people accept the teachings of God and the best way to live.
He believes reason and faith are the two paths to access the truths of God’s existence. Faith is a trusted belief in God through scripture; it does not rest with logic and is beyond reason. But reason is a logical way of making sense of something that is not tangible. St. Thomas realized many people doubt the existence of God because there is no logic to explain God’s existence. For St. Thomas his mission in life was to prove the existence of God through reason.
Richard Swinburne uses his Principle of Credulity and his Principle of Testimony, both of these a posteriori arguments, to enforce the idea that what people believe they have experienced and what they go onto tell us should be believed and taken as truth. However it is clear that although these principles seem somewhat logical from the explanations Swinburne uses to propose them the conclusions he reaches are open to a wide range of criticism and so fail to validate experiences as religious thus making them redundant in being used as evidence for the existence of God. Firstly Swinburne proposes his Principle of Credulity, ‘credulity’ meaning ‘willingness to believe’. The principle states that we should trust what our senses tell us about the world because this is what we do so often every day. If I place my hand on an iron when it is still hot I will get burnt and then know not to do it again, I trust in my experience because it is right in a majority of cases and the only time I should not is if I have good reason not to.
Philosophers, whether they are atheists, or believers have always been eager to discuss the existence of God. Some philosophers, such as St Anselm, and Rene Descartes, that formulated the ontological arguments attempt to prove of God’s existence, believe that we have proven that God exist through our senses, logic, and experiences. “Ontological” literally means talking about being and so in this case, that being is the existence or being of God. Ontological arguments are all have ways to prove the existence of God. This argument is very important for religious believers, but has come under criticism from those who do not believe, who say that it is flawed.