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How can finite human language meaningfully speak about an infinite, transcendent God? When believers say "God is good," "God loves us" or "God exists," what — if anything — do these statements mean? The difficulty is acute because our words were forged to describe the finite, physical, observable world, while God is by definition beyond all of that. The AQA 7062 specification frames the topic around a foundational distinction — between cognitive and non-cognitive uses of language — and around two great twentieth-century challenges to the meaningfulness of religious assertions (the verification challenge of Ayer and the falsification challenge of Flew), followed by a set of responses (eschatological verification — Hick; bliks — R.M. Hare; language games — Wittgenstein) and a set of other views about how God-talk works (the symbolic theory — Tillich; analogy — Aquinas; and the Via Negativa). This lesson sets out each position precisely, with its actual proponent's view, and reaches a judgement about whether religious language can survive the verificationist attack and still say something true of God.
Key term: Cognitive vs non-cognitive language — cognitive language makes fact-stating claims that are true or false (and so express knowledge); non-cognitive language does something else — expressing an attitude, a commitment or a way of seeing — and so is not straightforwardly true or false. Whether "God exists" is cognitive or non-cognitive is the hinge of the whole debate.
The most radical attack on religious language came from logical positivism, the programme of the Vienna Circle (active in the 1920s–30s; among them Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap and Friedrich Waismann). Its central tool was the verification principle: a statement is meaningful only if it is either analytic (true or false by definition, like "all bachelors are unmarried") or empirically verifiable (confirmable, at least in principle, by sense experience). Statements meeting neither condition are not false but literally meaningless — they fail to express a genuine proposition at all.
A.J. Ayer (1910–1989) carried this into English-speaking philosophy in Language, Truth and Logic (1936). Ayer's signal move was to apply the principle to all discourse and to draw the consequences without flinching. Statements like "God exists," "God is love" or "God created the world" are, he argued, neither analytic nor verifiable by any possible observation; they are therefore cognitively meaningless — expressions of feeling, perhaps, but not assertions of fact. Notably, Ayer held this verdict struck atheism and agnosticism too: if "God exists" is meaningless, so is "God does not exist," and so is "we cannot know whether God exists." The whole dispute, on his view, rests on a pseudo-proposition.
| Type of statement | Status under the verification principle | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Analytic | Meaningful — true/false by definition | "All triangles have three sides" |
| Synthetic and verifiable | Meaningful — confirmable by experience | "It is raining outside" |
| Neither | Meaningless — no genuine proposition | "God exists"; "the Absolute is beautiful" |
Key term: Verification principle — the logical-positivist criterion that a statement is meaningful only if it is analytic or empirically verifiable. Ayer applied it to render religious (and anti-religious) statements cognitively meaningless.
The motivation behind the principle was not narrowly anti-religious but a general campaign against metaphysics. The positivists held that whole tracts of traditional philosophy — claims about "the Absolute," "substance," "the Ground of Being," the immortal soul — were neither true nor false but strictly nonsensical, pseudo-statements that look grammatically like assertions while asserting nothing testable. Religious language was simply the most prominent casualty of a programme aimed at the whole of speculative metaphysics; theology, ethics, and aesthetics fell together. This is worth stressing because it explains both the principle's appeal (a bracing demand that claims about reality make an observable difference) and the scope of its eventual collapse (it took down far more than religion, including, embarrassingly, itself).
Ayer was careful to refine the principle. He rejected strong verification (meaningful only if conclusively and finally verifiable), because it would make even scientific laws and historical statements meaningless — no finite set of observations conclusively establishes a universal law, and no present observation can finally verify a claim about the distant past. He proposed instead weak verification: a statement is meaningful if some possible observations would be relevant to, or raise/lower the probability of, its truth. Even on this looser test, he maintained, religious statements fail, because no observation could count for or against "God exists." Critics retorted that weak verification, once loosened enough to admit scientific laws, becomes so permissive that almost any statement can be paired with some observation made "relevant" to it — so the principle either excludes too much (strong) or includes too much (weak), and in neither form does it cleanly capture the intuition it was meant to express.
Criticisms of the verification principle are decisive and well-rehearsed:
Antony Flew (1923–2010), in the "Theology and Falsification" symposium (1950/1955), reframed the attack using Karl Popper's insight that what marks a genuine empirical claim is its falsifiability — its ruling something out. A meaningful assertion about reality must be incompatible with some conceivable state of affairs; one must be able to say what would count against it.
Flew dramatised this with the parable of the gardener, adapted from John Wisdom. Two explorers come upon a clearing in the jungle. One says a gardener tends it; the other denies it. They watch, set up an electric fence, patrol with bloodhounds — no gardener is ever detected. Yet the believer keeps qualifying the claim: the gardener is invisible, intangible, insensible to electric shocks, undetectable by any test. At last the sceptic asks what is left of the original assertion: "how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?" The believer's claim, Flew says, has "died the death of a thousand qualifications" — each qualification stripping away a bit of content, until nothing falsifiable, and so nothing factually meaningful, remains. Believers, he charged, will let nothing count against "God loves us" — not even a child dying of cancer — so the statement asserts nothing.
Key term: Falsification principle — Flew's criterion that an utterance is a genuine factual assertion only if some observation could in principle count against it; a claim compatible with every possible state of affairs ("dying the death of a thousand qualifications") asserts nothing.
Flew's challenge is in one respect sharper than Ayer's. Ayer's verification principle was a sweeping theory of meaning that, notoriously, failed its own test; Flew makes no such grand claim about all language but issues a pointed challenge about a particular practice — he simply asks the believer to say what would count against "God loves us," and observes that the believer characteristically refuses to let anything count. The burden is placed squarely on the theist, and it cannot be lifted merely by exposing a flaw in verificationism, since Flew need not endorse the verification principle at all. This is why the most effective replies (Mitchell's especially) do not attack Flew's logic but meet his challenge head-on by specifying what would count against religious claims while explaining why the believer does not treat it as decisive.
John Hick (1922–2012) met the verification challenge on its own ground, arguing that religious statements are verifiable in principle — just not yet. His parable of the Celestial City imagines two travellers on a road: one believes it leads to the Celestial City, the other that it leads nowhere. During the journey their dispute looks empty, since each interprets the same events differently. But the road has an end: if there is a Celestial City, the believer will be shown right and the sceptic wrong when they arrive; if not, the matter dissolves. Religious statements, likewise, are eschatologically verifiable — confirmable after death, in the post-mortem existence Christianity affirms (the resurrection world, the vision of God). "God exists" therefore meets even the empiricist's demand: it predicts a difference in future experience, so it is cognitively meaningful, not a pseudo-proposition.
Key term: Eschatological verification (Hick) — the view that religious claims are verifiable in principle by experiences after death (at the eschaton); the claim is asymmetrically verifiable (confirmable if true, though not falsifiable if false), which suffices to make it cognitively meaningful.
Hick stressed that "God exists" is asymmetrically verifiable: it can be confirmed if true (the believer arrives at the Celestial City and meets God) but cannot be falsified if false (if death is annihilation, there is no surviving subject to register that the journey led nowhere). This asymmetry, he argued, is shared by many respectable statements — "there is a greatest prime number under which all are unique" or certain open scientific conjectures — and asymmetric verifiability is enough to secure cognitive meaning, since the statement still makes a genuine prediction about possible future experience. The strength of Hick's reply is that it keeps religious language cognitive — "God exists" really does assert a fact about reality, with experiential consequences. The objections are pointed: it presupposes the very survival of death and continuing personal identity that are themselves deeply contested (see the self/death lesson), so it leans on one disputed doctrine to rescue another; the claim is only verifiable, not falsifiable (if there is no afterlife, no one is around to register the disconfirmation), so it answers Ayer better than it answers Flew, whose demand was precisely for falsifiability; and a hardened positivist will object that a "verification" available only to the dead is no verification a living enquirer can use to settle the dispute now, which was the original point of demanding verification at all.
R.M. Hare (1919–2002) responded not by defending the factual status of religious language but by denying that it is factual at all — while insisting it is still meaningful and important. He coined the term blik for an unfalsifiable but life-shaping way of seeing the world. His example: a lunatic is convinced all Oxford dons want to murder him; introduced to the kindliest of dons, he treats their friendliness as cunning concealment of murderous intent. No evidence can shake him — his conviction is unfalsifiable. Yet, says Hare, there is a real difference between the lunatic's blik and a sane one: we all have bliks (e.g. our confidence that the world is regular and that the steering of our car will keep working), and they matter profoundly because they frame how we interpret everything and how we live. Religious belief, on this view, is a blik — a fundamental, unfalsifiable orientation, not a hypothesis.
Key term: Blik (Hare) — an unfalsifiable but meaningful and significant way of "seeing" or interpreting the world that shapes how a person lives; religious belief is a blik rather than a factual assertion.
Hare's proposal concedes Flew's central point — religious language does not assert falsifiable facts — and tries to make a virtue of it. The cost is severe: if "God loves us" is a blik and not a fact-stating claim, then it does not assert that God actually exists, which is not what most believers think they mean; and Hare's own example seems to undercut him, since the lunatic's blik is precisely a false and insane one, raising the question of how a non-factual blik can be right or wrong at all.
Basil Mitchell (1917–2011) offered a middle path with the parable of the partisan and the stranger. In occupied wartime, a partisan meets a stranger who, in a single night's conversation, deeply impresses him and claims to be on the partisan's side, leading the resistance. The stranger then asks for trust whatever happens. Thereafter the partisan sometimes sees the stranger aiding the resistance, sometimes apparently helping the enemy. The partisan keeps faith — not by pretending the ambiguous evidence does not exist, but by trusting the stranger despite it, on the strength of their original meeting. Religious believers, Mitchell argues, do acknowledge that suffering counts against God's goodness — so their language is falsifiable in principle, contrary to Flew — but they have grounds (revelation, religious experience, prior commitment) for not letting the evidence count decisively.
| Philosopher | Response | What it does to religious language |
|---|---|---|
| Hick | Eschatological verification (Celestial City) | Keeps it cognitive; verifiable after death |
| Hare | It is a blik (the lunatic and the dons) | Makes it non-cognitive; concedes it is not fact-stating |
| Mitchell | Falsifiable but held in trust (partisan/stranger) | Keeps it cognitive; counter-evidence is felt but not decisive |
| Flew | Dies "the death of a thousand qualifications" | Empties it of factual meaning |
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), in his later philosophy (Philosophical Investigations, 1953), supplied a more thoroughgoing response by attacking the assumption behind the whole verificationist programme — the picture of language as essentially a system of fact-stating descriptions. Meaning, the later Wittgenstein argued, is not a matter of a word "picturing" a fact but of its use: "the meaning of a word is its use in the language." Language is not one tool with one function; it is a vast kit of tools, and its many activities — commanding, joking, thanking, praying, cursing, greeting, calculating — are different language games, each embedded in a form of life with its own rules and standards of sense. To understand an utterance is to know which game is being played.
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