Summary notes for Religious language

The distinction between cognitivism and non-cognitivism about religious language

When words come out of someone’s mouth, they express certain mental states.
Cognitive language expresses beliefs, which can be true or false.
Non-cognitive language expresses non-beliefs, such as emotions or attitudes, which cannot be true or false.
Example of cognitive language: if you say ‘the table is made of wood’, that expresses a belief which can be either true or false.
Example of non-cognitive language: If you are in pain and say “ouch”, that word is not expressing the part of the mind which contains beliefs. It expresses a feeling of pain.
The debate is where religious language fits into this distinction. When a religious person says “God is exists”, it looks like they are expressing a cognitive belief, but some philosophers argue that it is really expressing more of a non-cognitive feeling/attitude.
The question is, when a religious person uses religious language and says ‘God exists’, do they believe that God exists, or are they expressing something like a spiritual feeling/attitude.

Empiricist/logical positive challenges to metaphysical language: the verification principle

Verificationism is the method of the logical positivists, who thought that only scientific language can be meaningful.
Ayer claims language can have all sorts of meanings, for which he used the term ‘significance’.
Verificationism claims that to be factually significant (synthetic), a statement must be empirically verifiable. That is, we must know what observations would verify it as true or false.
If a statement is consistent with any possible empirical observations, then we have no way to verify it.
Another valid means of significance is that a statement is analytic.
If a proposition fails these two tests, it lacks factual significance. Ayer says it may have emotional significance, but no ‘literal’ significance.
Metaphysical language is about things beyond what we experience. So it is meaningless because we don’t know how to verify it.
This includes religious language. Ayer labels ‘God’ a ‘metaphysical term’.
Ayer doesn’t explicitly say religious language is an expression of non-cognitive states as he does with ethical language.
His criticism is that supposed religious-knowledge cannot be put into propositions testable through experience.
He concludes that religious language fails to be cognitively meaningful.
To be empirically verifiable, a statement must be either verifiable in practice (direct), meaning we are able to verify it, or verifiable in principle (indirect), meaning that we know that there is a way to verify it even if we are currently unable. Ayer gave the example of the claim that there are mountains on the dark side of the moon, which they had not been able to observe in his time but they knew in principle that they could.

Hick’s eschatological verification response to Ayer

Ayer argues a synthetic proposition is only factually significant if it can be verified in practice or in principle. He illustrates with the dark side of the moon, unobserved in his time. The claim that there are mountains there was verifiable in principle, because they knew it was a place that in principle one could get to and make the relevant observations.
Rather than challenging the idea of verificationism itself, Hick argues religious language actually is verifiable eschatologically, meaning at the end of life.
He explains this through the parable of the celestial city.
Two travellers are on a road (representing life), one believes a celestial city (representing afterlife) is at the end, but the other doesn’t.
When they reach the end, Hick remarks they will discover that one had been right all along.
So there is a way to verify religious language when we reach the end of the road of life, when we die.
There may be no way to currently verify this in practice while alive, but there is in principle, after death,
So, religious language is eschatologically verifiable in an afterlife.

An issue with Hick’s response

Ayer says that to be meaningful, religious language must be verifiable in practice or principle.
He illustrates with the idea that there are mountains on the dark side of the moon, since they knew that in principle it was a place one could get to and verify that.
Hick responds that it is verifiable in principle, because there is a way to verify it after death
An issue for Hick is that the afterlife is not like the dark side of the moon, which was Ayer’s illustration of in-principle verification. In Ayer’s time they knew the moon was a place that existed where one could make relevant observations.
Conversely, we do not know an afterlife is a place which exists where one might do relevant observations to verify religious language.
If death is annihilation there won’t be a moment of realisation of that. So if there is no afterlife, we won’t be able to verify religious language as either true or false.
Therefore, we cannot justifiably say that there is a way to verify religious language in principle.
It’s not sufficient to simply imagine a scenario where the relevant observation-conditions exist. We need to actually know that they do exist and that in principle there is a way we could access them.
So, Hick hasn’t shown religious language actually meets the requirements for verifiability.

The university debate: Flew on falsificationism (Wisdom’s Gardener)

Popper argued verificationism was not the right theory of empiricism.
Science doesn’t work by just looking for evidence that verifies a theory. It works through making predictions which are falsifiable.
Antony Flew applied Falsificationism to religious language.
Flew thinks religious language is cognitive as it expresses beliefs which attempt to assert something about the world. But those beliefs are unfalsifiable, and so fails to say anything about the world.
Flew argues:
To assert ‘X’ is equivalent to denying that ‘X’ is not the case.
So, a test of whether a statement really asserts anything is to check whether there is anything it denies that, if true, would falsify it.
If there is nothing which an assertion denies, then there is nothing it asserts
So, falsifiability is a test of whether a statement really asserts anything.
If we can’t imagine what evidence would disprove a belief, then it is unfalsifiable and asserts nothing.
Religious believers can’t say what could prove their belief in God false.
So, religious language is meaningless.
Flew appropriates John Wisdom’s ‘parable of the gardener’ to illustrate how unfalsifiable language fails to assert anything.
Imagine someone claimed a gardener (God) existed, but every time that was tested (through the advance of scientific knowledge), they diluted the original concept to avoid the falsification (by saying it’s not visible, not tangible, etc).
This dilutes the concept of God to the point of failing to assert anything, dying a ‘death of a thousand qualifications’.
There is no difference between a reality in which the gardener/God exists and one in which it doesn’t.
So, unfalsifiable language like religious language, clearly cannot actually be about reality. It attempts to refer to something for which it would make no testable difference to reality whether it exists or not.

An issue with Flew’s approach

Mitchell or Hare!

The university debate: Mitchell’s response to Flew (the Partisan)

Mitchell does not contest falsificationism, but argues Flew was wrong to think religious language is unfalsifiable.
Mitchell argues some believers have unfalsifiable ‘blind’ faith, but most religious people base their belief in God on the evidence of their personal experience and relationship with God.
That evidence can be outweighed by counter-evidence, such as evil. This makes their belief falsifiable.
Supporting evidence for Mitchell is that some believers do abandon faith due to evil, e.g. their child dies. So, their belief was falsifiable.
Mitchell argues the amount or type of evil required will be individual. Believers may not know “in advance” what level of evil would falsify their belief.
So, most religious belief is falsifiable.
Flew’s mistake was to think that we must know in advance how a belief is falsifiable in order for it to be falsifiable.
Mitchell’s parable:
A resistance soldier in a civil war is approached by someone claiming to be their leader.
They talk all night, leaving a deep impression on the soldier, who is convinced the stranger is their leader.
This belief is maintained despite counter-evidence, such as seeing them fighting on the other side for the government. Perhaps they have faith they are acting as a double agent.
Mitchell remarks that there must be some evidence where continuing faith would be ‘ridiculous’ and blind. But the type and amount of evidence may not be known in advance.
The parable illustrates how religious belief is based on the evidence of personal experience and relationship. Evidence against the belief is acknowledged, and for most believers there is some type and amount of evil that would falsify their belief. But they cannot say what it is in advance.

An issue with Mitchell’s response

Mitchell argues…
Flew responds that the logical problem of evil shows that the existence of evil is inconsistent with the God of classical theism.
This means that if there were any evil at all, it would falsify belief in God.
So Mitchell is wrong to focus on the amount or level of evil.
If religious belief were really falsifiable, it would be falsified by any amount of evil, it wouldn’t require some unknown type or amount.

The university debate: Hare’s response to Flew (bliks and lunatic)

Ayer and Flew regard religious language as a failed attempt to describe reality because it’s unverifiable (Ayer) or unfalsifiable (Flew).
Hare says they are wrong in their foundational assumption that religious language actually is an attempt to describe reality at all. Ayer and Flew are wrong to call it a failed attempt, then.
Hare’s view is that religious language is a non-cognitive expression of our ‘Blik’, which involves attitudes, emotions & worldviews.
Our Blik affects our mind and behaviour, which makes it meaningful.
So, religious language is non-cognitively meaningful.
Hare’s illustration involves a student who has an attitude of paranoia about their professors trying to kill them. He meets the professors and sees they are nice, but is paranoid that they are pretending.
This is analogous to the way religious believers continue believing despite lack of or contrary evidence
Ayer and Flew would try to argue that this student, like religious people, just have an unverifiable or unfalsifiable belief.
But Hare’s example illustrates that what seem like unempirical beliefs might be rooted in a non-cognitive attitude. So the foundational cause of the expression is a non-cognitive state.
When the student says ‘my professors are trying to kill me’, they are expressing their attitude of paranoia.
Similarly, when religious people say ‘God be with you’ or ‘God exists’, it looks like an unempirical belief. But it’s really an expression of personal feeling/attitude.
Hare is influenced by Hume’s theory of psychology – that our reason is a slave of our passions.
Even apparently logical arguments for God that seem cognitive are actually rationalisations of our emotions.

An issue with Hare’s response

Hare argued….
Flew criticised Hare, arguing that religious people intend their language to express cognitive beliefs.
Most religious people would agree that they aren’t just expressing their personal feelings/attitudes.
They might be doing a bit of that, but they are also expressing a cognitive belief that god exists.
Flew’s point can be most clearly seen in cases like God argumentation.
Aquinas’ cosmological argument is a logical argument. It’s premises provide reasons for believing the conclusion.
We might think it false, but it’s hard to think that it’s just an expression of Aquinas’ personal feelings/attitudes.
So, religious language seems cognitive.

Religious language model essay plan

Note that this model essay plan is merely one possible way to write an essay on this topic.

Points highlighted in light blue are integration points
Points highlighted in green are weighting points

This essay will argue…

Verificationism

For Ayer language can have all sorts of meanings which he called ‘significance’.
Verificationism claims that to be factually significant (synthetic), a statement must be empirically verifiable. That is, we must know what observations would verify it as true or false.
A statement can also be significant if it is analytic.
If a proposition fails these two tests, it lacks significance, i.e., meaning. Ayer says it might have emotional but not ‘literal’ significance.
Metaphysical language is meaningless as it is about things beyond what we experience, so cannot be verified.
Ayer says ‘God’ is a ‘metaphysical term’.
So, religious language is meaningless, it fails to be cognitively meaningful.
Ayer allows meaning to a statement even if it’s only verifiable in principle. Heillustrates with the dark side of the moon, unobserved in his time. The claim that there are mountains there was verifiable in principle, because they knew it was a place that in principle one could get to and make the relevant observations.

Counter:

Rather than challenging the idea of verificationism itself, Hick argues religious language actually is verifiable in principle eschatologically (at the end of earthly life). Even if we can’t currently do so while alive, there are ways to verify God in principle, which Ayer seemed to say was sufficient.
Hick’s parable of the celestial city illustrates this.
Two travellers are on a road (representing life), one believes a celestial city (representing afterlife) is at the end, but the other doesn’t.
When they reach the end, Hick remarks they will discover that one had been right all along.
So there is a way to verify religious language when we reach the end of the road of life, when we die.
There may be no way to currently verify this in practice while alive, but there is in principle, after death,
So, religious language is eschatologically verifiable in an afterlife.

Evaluation

An issue for Hick is that the afterlife is not verifiable in principle.
Ayer knew the dark side of the moon existed and that a rocket could go there to make observations.
Conversely, we do not know an afterlife is a place which exists where one might do relevant observations to verify religious language.
If there is no afterlife and death is annihilation, there won’t be a moment of realisation of that. Religious language would then be unverifiable.
It’s not sufficient to merely imagine relevant observation-conditions. We need to know how in principle we could access them which requires we know they exist.
So, we do not know that there is a way to verify religious language in principle.
A stronger criticism of Ayer which attacks the verification principle itself is that it cannot pass its own test. The VP can’t be analytic, because it can be denied without contradiction. If we take it as empirical, it’s clearly false since people find all sorts of non-verifiable language meaningful.
Ayer tried to respond by claiming the VP wasn’t meant to be a meaningful statement, just a tool of empiricism to root out unempirical language.
However, in that case Ayer can’t say religious language is categorically meaningless, only meaningless to the tools of empiricism. His original claim has been diluted.
Ayer was trying to find a way to bring the debate between rationalism and empiricism to an end by rejecting rationalist metaphysical language as meaningless. However now all he can do is fall back on empiricism rather than prove it superior.
Religious philosophers can simply reject empiricism and thereby reject its tools.

Falsificationism

Popper rejected verificationism and invented falsificationism. Verificationism says meaning must be scientific – but Popper argued that science doesn’t work by just looking for things which verify a theory – it works through trying to prove its theories wrong – looking for falsifications.
Falsificationism is therefore a better theory of empiricism than verificationism is.
Antony Flew applied Falsificationism to religious language.
Neither Popper nor Flew are logical positivists, they avoid making categorical claims about the criteria for meaning. This allows the falsification principle to be stronger as it doesn’t need to pass its own test. It’s just a tool for identifying empirical statements.
Flew thinks religious language expresses beliefs, so it is attempting to be cognitive, but those beliefs are unfalsifiable and so fail to assert anything.
If we assert ‘X’, that is equivalent to denying ‘not X’.
So all assertions could be imagined false – because we can imagine discovering that what they deny is true.
If a statement can’t be imagined false, then it can’t be an assertion.
So, unfalsifiable language fails to assert anything about reality.
Religious believers can’t imagine what could prove their belief in God false.
So, religious language is meaningless.
Flew appropriates John Wisdom’s ‘parable of the gardener’ to illustrate how unfalsifiable language fails to assert anything.
Imagine someone claimed a gardener (God) existed, but every time that was tested (through the advance of scientific knowledge), they diluted the original concept to avoid the falsification (by saying it’s not visible, not tangible, etc).
This dilutes the concept of God to the point of failing to assert anything, dying a ‘death of a thousand qualifications’.
So, unfalsifiable language like religious language, clearly cannot actually be about reality. It attempts to refer to something for which it would make no testable difference to reality whether it exists or not.

Counter

Mitchell does not contest falsificationism, but argues Flew was wrong to think religious language is unfalsifiable.
Mitchell argues some believers have unfalsifiable ‘blind’ faith, but most religious people base their belief in God on the evidence of their personal experience and relationship with God.
That evidence can be outweighed by counter-evidence, such as evil. This makes their belief falsifiable.
Supporting evidence for Mitchell is that some believers do abandon faith due to evil, e.g. their child dies. So, their belief was falsifiable.
Mitchell argues the amount or type of evil required will be individual. Believers may not know “in advance” what level of evil would falsify their belief.
So, most religious belief is falsifiable.
Flew’s mistake was to think that we must know in advance how a belief is falsifiable in order for it to be falsifiable.

Evaluation

Flew responds that the logical problem of evil shows that the existence of evil is inconsistent with the God of classical theism.
This implies that any amount of evil falsifies belief in God.
This attempts to overrule Mitchell’s claim that the falsification of theistic belief depends on the person and thus a potentially unknown amount or type of evil.
If theists continue to believe while knowing any evil exists, they fail to acknowledge falsification of their belief, which is thus unfalsifiable.
However, Flew relies on the logical problem of evil being a sound argument. At the very least, that is debatable.
Plantinga’s free will defence claims it is not logically possible for God to remove evil without removing the greater good of free will. Most philosophers, including the atheistic ones, think Plantinga defeated the logical problem of evil. They typically turn instead to the evidential problem which says the distribution or amount of evil is evidence against God.
That doesn’t damage Mitchell’s argument though, since he accepts the distribution of evil could falsify belief, though argues the level required will be very individual.
Flew’s response to Mitchell relies on the logical problem, and is thus unpersuasive.
Mitchell seems right that most religious belief is based on evidence and some individual yet unknown level of evil could amount to enough evidence to counter it.
So, Mitchell is right that religious language expresses falsifiable beliefs and is cognitively meaningful.

Hare’s non-cognitive ‘Bliks’

Ayer and Flew regard religious language as a failed attempt to describe reality because it’s unverifiable (Ayer) or unfalsifiable (Flew).
Hare counters that religious language is a non-cognitive expression of our ‘Blik’, which involves attitudes, emotions & worldviews.
It doesn’t attempt to describe reality, so it can’t be a failed attempt then.
Hare’s critique of Ayer & Flew seems more foundational than Mitchell and Hick’s because it attacks their fundamental assumption about the way religious language operates.
If successful Hare would also show Mitchell and Hick to be wrong, since they thought religious language was cognitive.
Hare illustrates: a student with an attitude of paranoia about their professors trying to kill them. He meets the professors and sees they are nice, but is paranoid that they are pretending.
Similarly, religious belief occurs despite lack of, or contrary, evidence.
Ayer/Flew would argue that this student, like religious people, have an unverifiable/unfalsifiable belief.
But Hare’s illustration shows how seemingly unempirical beliefs can be rooted in non-cognitive attitudes. The student ultimately expresses their attitude of paranoia.
Similarly, when religious people say ‘God be with you’ or ‘God exists’, it looks like an unempirical belief. But the foundational cause of the expression are non-cognitive states like feelings/attitudes.
Hare claims that religious language affects human behaviour and mentality – so this makes it meaningful to those who have it.
Hare is influenced by Hume’s theory of psychology, that our reason is a slave of our passions.
Hare concludes religious language is non-cognitively meaningful.

Counter

Flew criticised Hare, arguing that theists intend to express cognitive beliefs.
They might be expressing some attitudes, but they are also expressing a cognitive belief that God exists.
Flew’s point can be most clearly seen in God argumentation.
Aquinas’ cosmological argument involves premises based on observation which are reasons for believing the conclusion that God exists.
We could doubt the soundness of the argument, but it’s hard to think that it’s just an expression of Aquinas’ personal feelings/attitudes.
So, religious language seems cognitive.

Evaluation

Hume’s psychology certainly has a point about the way emotions control our reason.
However it’s going too far to call reason a ‘slave’ of the passions. Aristotle pointed out that we can clearly sometimes control and change our emotional habits to align them with our reason through the development of virtue.
More recently, psychologist Jonathan Haidt has argued similarly that Hume went too far. Our reason, like the rider of an elephant, is often dragged around by emotions but in the long run and overall can exert influence over them.
So, Hume & Hare are wrong about non-cognitive emotional influence being the root of our beliefs.
This means religious language, especially in cases of reasoned philosophical argumentation, is better explained as cognitive expressions of beliefs formed through reason.
So, religious language is cognitive.

Conclusion:

Falsificationism does improve on Verificationism, however Mitchell shows that technically it fails to show that religious language is meaningless.
Hare attempts an alternative defence of the meaningfulness of religious language as non-cognitively meaningful, but that fails to represent the way religious language actually functions.
So, Mitchell is correct that religious language is cognitively meaningful.