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Religious Language

The principal aim of research on religious language is to give an account of the meaning of religious sentences and utterances. Religious sentences are generally taken to be have a religious subject matter; a religious utterance is the production in speech or writing of a token religious sentence. In principle, religious subject matters could encompass a variety of agents, states of affairs or properties—such as God, deities, angels, miracles, redemption, grace, holiness, sinfulness. Most attention, however, has been devoted to the meaning of what we say about God.

The scope of religious language and discourse could be construed more widely. For instance, while The Song of Songs has little in the way of distinctively religious content, it could be included in the field because of its place within a religious canon. Alternatively, the field could be characterised pragmatically to include utterances which are used for religious purposes or in religious contexts (Alston 2005: 220; Donovan 1976: 1; Soskice 1999: 349; Charlesworth 1974: 3). In practice, however, philosophical treatments have not extended so broadly, instead focusing on sentences and utterances with putatively religious content. This is partly because it is difficult to find a principled characterisation of a religious context that would delineate a philosophically interesting scope for the topic. When a church congregation is told “Please kneel”, this direction appears to be in a religious context and have a religious purpose but it is difficult to see how the analysis of the meaning of this instruction would informatively contribute to the topic. It is also because the most pressing questions about religious language seem to be those that come into alignment with questions in other areas of philosophy of religion. Is there anything distinctive about the meanings of what we say about God and other religious matters that are also the focus of metaphysical and epistemological discussion? If, in talking about God, speakers are not expressing propositions or not talking literally—to take a couple of the more radical proposals—that would accordingly require dramatic adjustments in approaching questions about knowledge of God or God’s existence.

Research in the field has a lengthy history, with sustained discussion of the meanings of religious expressions and utterances stretching back at least to the middle of antiquity. Notable treatments of the topic include the work by medieval theologians and philosophers concerned with the meanings of divine predicates, including the debates surrounding analogy and apophaticism (White 2010; Turner 1995; Scott & Citron 2016), and debates about the meaningfulness of religious language that were prompted by Ayer’s 1936 popularisation of logical positivism in Language, Truth and Logic and remained a central issue in the philosophy of religion through the mid-twentieth century. Religious language has also become a topic of interest in continental philosophy (Derrida 1989 and 1992; Marion 1994 and 1995).

A distinction that guides the selection of material for this article is between revisionary and non-revisionary accounts of religious language. Non-revisionary theories aim to explain what religious sentences and utterances mean. Revisionary theories, in contrast, propose accounts of what religious language should mean or how it should be used. While non-revisionary theories are descriptive of religious language and should do justice to linguistic data, revisionary theories are usually driven by metaphysical or epistemological considerations. This article will mainly be concerned with theories of the former type i.e., what religious utterances mean rather than what they should mean.

1. Preliminaries: The Face Value Theory

2.1 ayer and verificationism, 2.2.1 religious plans: r. b. braithwaite, 2.2.2 mixed strategies: george berkeley, 2.2.3 the prospects for religious non-cognitivism, 2.3 paradoxical content, 2.4 reductionism, 3.1 analogy and metaphor, 3.2 praise and prayer, 3.3 fictionalism, 3.4 religious purposes, 4.1 minimalism about religion, 4.2 wittgenstein, 5. reference and logic, other internet resources, related entries.

A useful starting point for thinking about religious language is a face value theory that promises to give an interpretation of religious sentences and utterances that adheres as closely as possible to what they appear to say. Take, for instance, the affirmation of an indicative religious sentence such as

• (1) God is omnipotent

According to the face value theory, (1) has various apparent characteristics: (a) It has the propositional—or “linguistic” or “semantic”—content that God is omnipotent and is true just in case God is omnipotent; (b) it is an assertion that conventionally expresses the speaker’s belief that God is omnipotent; (c) it is a descriptive utterance that represents (truly or falsely) the fact that God is omnipotent, just as other descriptive utterances in other fields of discourse (in science, history, etc.) represent facts. For proponents of face value theory, generalisations of (a), (b) and (c) that extend to indicative religious utterances such as (1)—(a*), (b*) and (c*) respectively—provide the starting point for the interpretation of religious discourse. It should be treated in the same way as the interpretation of other descriptive areas of discourse: there’s nothing special about religious discourse other than its distinctive subject matter.

The face value theory will, of course, need more development if it is to explain other areas of religious discourse. The approach taken to (1) clearly does not apply to non-literal or non-assertoric religious utterances, such as metaphors, questions, fictional stories, expressions of hope, or devotion. However, these are all forms of expression that occur outside religious discourse; they are not unique to religion. For the face value theory, the treatment of religious cases will fall in line with the treatment of non-literal and non-assertoric communication more generally. So, other than the fact that religious discourse is about God, the afterlife and so on, there is nothing remarkable or distinctive in the interpretation of religious utterances.

A large part of research on religious language has been concerned with whether one or more of (a*), (b*) and (c*) ought plausibly to be rejected. Indeed, the attention that some theories of religious language receive is in part due to their divergence from a face value interpretation. Most of the theories that are discussed within the field reject at least one of the components of face value theory.

The most radical rejection of face value theory is the denial of (a*), i.e., that religious utterances express religious propositions. [ 1 ] These theories will be explored in section 2 . The most famous example of this position is Ayer’s version logical positivism ( 2.1 ). Non-cognitive accounts, from which we have selected Braithwaite ( 2.2.1 ) and Berkeley ( 2.2.2 ), are similarly radical but are differently motivated and offer a more positive alternative account of the meaning of religious utterances. The prospects for a more sophisticated non-cognitivism are considered in 2.2.3. A third class of theories ( 2.3 ), propose that religious utterances are paradoxical or fail to express complete propositions. A fourth group, reductionist and subjectivist theories ( 2.4 ), allow that religious utterances express propositions but not the ones that they appear to. Instead, their truth conditions are given by “reduced” (typically non-religious) sentences.

Section 3 will look at theories that reject (b*), i.e., that indicative statements affirmed about God are not literal assertions. 3.1 will review metaphor theories, encompassing a discussion of analogy. Interpretations of religious discourse as a form of praise or prayer, suggested by Jean-Luc Marion and Jacques Derrida, will be considered in 3.2. These theories propose that despite appearing to literally assert religious sentences, speakers are instead employing a different type of speech act. An alternative approach is to argue that religious utterances are avowed for practical reasons rather than their truth. Ian Ramsey ( 3.3 ) takes this approach, as do hermeneutic fictionalists ( 3.4 ).

Minimalists ( 4.1 ) agree that indicative religious utterances are representational and assertoric but deny that they represent religious facts in the way that other areas of descriptive discourse represent facts. That is, they agree with (a*) and (b*) but reject (c*). This view is sometimes associated with Wittgenstein, whose brief remarks and lectures on religion have been highly influential. However, the interpretation of his work is not widely agreed upon and some different possibilities will be considered in 4.2.

The face value theory is a widely assumed—if not the default—approach taken to religious discourse in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion. Resistance to it is sometimes presented a brief aberration confined to the middle decades of the twentieth century (Mackie 1982: 2; Swinburne 1993: 88) with questionable if not anti-religious motivations (van Inwagen 2006: 156; Plantinga 2000: ch. 2, particularly in reference to Gordon Kaufman). However, as will become clear in the following sections, the opposition to face value theory is not of recent vintage and although some who disagree with face value theory may be atheists, the position is not tied to atheism.

2. The Content of Religious Utterances

Although Ayer’s version of verificationism is one of the most well-known rejections of (a*), his approach is unusual in two respects. First, he offers no positive alternative account of the meaning of religious utterances. Ayer saw little value in religious discourse and preferred its elimination. In contrast, the other theories considered in this section propose that religious language may be meaningful even if it does not express religious propositions. Various options have been proposed: it may express non-cognitive states, have a practical value in modifying the thought and action of speakers, or represent non-religious facts. Second, Ayer’s account is ostensibly comprehensive for religious language whereas most other theories are more piecemeal, that is, they reject (a*) for some significant subclass of religious utterances but for other religious utterances accept face value theory.

The verificationist theory of meaning was popularised by A.J. Ayer in his 1936 Language, Truth and Logic . Ayer argues that religious statements —his term for indicative sentences—are “literally meaningless”. According to Ayer, a statement is factually contentful if and only if it is empirically verifiable. A statement is empirically verifiable if what it says can in principle be shown to be true or false by observation. Although logically necessary statements are not verifiable, according to Ayer they are analytic or true by virtue of the meaning of their constituent terms. As such, “none of them provide any information about any matter of fact” (1936: 79). Ayer encapsulated the verificationist theory of meaning with the infamous empirical verification principle : to have literal meaning a statement must be either analytically true (and thereby factually uninformative) or empirically verifiable.

Ayer’s chief target is metaphysics and he rather ambitiously titled the first chapter of his book “The Elimination of Metaphysics”. Metaphysics is taken to be made up of statements that concern the nature of reality that falls beyond the scope of scientific inquiry. Examples include the existence of the external world, the number of substances that there are in the world, whether the world is made up of ideas and the reality of propositions or universals. Because theories on these issues are not empirically verifiable, Ayer takes them to lack “factual meaning”: they should be eliminated as a topic of debate. Other conspicuous victims of the application of the verification principle were ethical, aesthetic and religious statements all of which, so Ayer argues, are not susceptible to verification and are thereby similarly factually meaningless.

Notably, however, Ayer has a positive “emotivist” story to tell about ethical statements. Although he takes ethical statements to be unverifiable descriptions of normative facts, from which he concludes that an ethical predicate “adds nothing to the literal meaning of the sentence”, he argues that ethical language has a non-descriptive function of expressing approval or disapproval as well as encouraging attitudes of approval or disapproval in others. For example, in saying “Stealing money is wrong”, the speaker does not say something that is true or false but expresses disapproval towards stealing (1936: 107). Ayer extends his emotivism to aesthetic language: it is used “simply to express certain feelings and evoke a certain response” (1936: 113). What of religious language? Ayer is silent on this issue, implying that religious language should be dispensed with in the same way as other areas of metaphysics.

Logical positivism was briefly in vogue in the 1930s but quickly ran into intractable difficulties. That something is seriously awry can be seen by subjecting the verification principle to its own standards: it is itself neither empirically verifiable nor analytically true, so literally meaningless according to its own criterion. Ayer exacerbated this problem by exaggerating the predicament of statements that failed to satisfy this principle, sometimes characterising them as “nonsense”. However, the central reason for the theory’s collapse was the failure to come up with a workable version of the verification principle (see MacDonald 2010 for a review). Ayer was unable to find a happy medium between a strict formulation that renders statements of scientific theory unverifiable and a lax formulation that allows any statement to be verifiable.

This brings us to the question of why religious statements should be held by to fall foul of the verification principle. Why can’t religious statements legitimately be regarded as scientific hypotheses (as Swinburne 1994, among others, argues)? Religious statements do in many cases appear to have implications for what is or should be observable. We can predict, for instance, that a world created by God will exhibit various kinds of orderliness. It seems, therefore, that some religious statements should be in a good a position to satisfy the standards of literal content set up by the empirical verification principle. Ayer’s reply to this argument is surprisingly terse. Suppose, he argues, that “God exists” entails that there should be observable regularities in nature. If that exhausted the observable results of “God exists” then “to assert the existence of a god will be simply equivalent to asserting that there is the requisite regularity in nature” (1936: 115). Clearly, Ayer contends, this is not all that religious believers intend to assert in saying that God exists: they are committed to the existence of an unverifiable supernatural agent.

Ayer’s response seems to involve a sleight of hand. The verification principle is presented as a way of demarcating factually contentful from contentless statements. In arguing against the verifiability of religious statements, Ayer relies on the assumption that the verification principle provides the means for specifying what statements mean. In this case, that the content of “God exists” is exhausted by the observation statements that (in combination with other assumptions) can be deduced from it. However, this is in effect to concede that religious statements are verifiable according to the original (official) version of the verification principle. As to the meaning-specifying, unofficial version of the verification principle, this is not something that Ayer defends. However, it would place religious statements in good company with scientific statements that posit theoretical entities that are not directly observable and the meanings of which are similarly not exhausted by the observation statements that are derivable from them.

Despite the availability of conclusive objections to Ayer, worries about the verifiability (or falsifiability) of religious statements continued to exert a remarkable influence on work in the philosophy of religion, with papers and books being produced well into the second half of the twentieth century. Particularly notable is John Hick’s argument that theism could be verified postmortem: “the verifying situation lies in the final fulfilment of God’s purpose for us beyond this present life” (1977b: 190). Other examples include Flew and MacIntyre (1955), Ferré (1962), Macquarrie (1967), Donovan (1976) and Tilley (1978); for a discussion of this prolonged impact see Scott (2013: 45–48).

2.2 Varieties of Non-Cognitivism

Ayer argues that although ethical statements are not descriptive they have the important function of giving voice to our non-cognitive attitudes of approval and disapproval. However, he offers no positive non-cognitive theory of the meaning of religious statements. Braithwaite addresses this asymmetry with a non-cognitivist account of religious language. His theory is modelled on Ayer’s ethical emotivism but with modifications. [ 2 ] Braithwaite takes the same approach to religious statements. He proposes that religious statements are “primarily declarations of adherence to a policy of action, declarations of commitment to a way of life” (1955: 15). For example, “God is love” expresses the intention to follow an agapeistic way of life. Religious discourse concerned with matters that are not directly concerned with behavioural conduct, such as claims about important religious figures, parables, accounts of the creation, and so on, Braithwaite calls stories . These stories, according to Braithwaite, provide models of exemplary behaviour (or behaviour to avoid) that serve as psychological assistance for the believer to act on their intentions. For this reason, their truth is not crucial to the action-guiding role that they play: they are entertained rather than believed (1955: 24). Braithwaite combines a non-cognitive theory of a range of core religious judgements and doctrinal claims with a theory of religious “stories” as useful fictions.

A religious belief is an intention to behave in a certain way (a moral belief) together with the entertainment of certain stories associated with the intention in the mind of the believer. (1955: 32)

To the extent that the negative part of Braithwaite’s position—that religious utterances lack factual significance—relies on Ayer’s verificationism, his theory encounters similar problems. However, the positive part of Braithwaite’s theory also runs into difficulties both for its psychological implausability (Swinburne 1993: ch. 6) and as a theory of religious language (Scott 2013: ch. 4). Here is one objection. What are the intentions expressed by different religious statements? Braithwaite is rather sketchy on the details but he proposes that Christian statements express an intention to pursue an agapeistic way of life (1955: 21–22). However, equipped with only one plan, Braithwaite’s theory will have all Christian claims (or at least all doctrinal claims) meaning the same. They will all express an intention to pursue the same plan. Even if Braithwaite could identify some additional plans there seems no prospect of finding plans to individuate the meanings of all statements of Christian belief.

George Berkeley offers the most detailed and important account of religious language of any of the major early modern philosophers. These are elaborated in his 1732 dialogue Alciphron . His account has negative and positive elements. First, he rejects (a*) for a limited range of religious utterances. Specifically, Christian doctrinal concerns about grace, original sin, the afterlife and other Christian “mysteries”. Regarding the rest of religious discourse, Berkeley offers a thoroughly cognitive account: religious terms—and in particular “God”—correspond to ideas that refer to really existing features of reality. Moreover, Berkeley believes many Christian claims are not only cognitively contentful but also rationally defensible. Second, he proposes that this limited group of utterances should be interpreted non-cognitively: they do not represent facts but evoke various attitudes and practical dispositions.

In a part of the dialogue concerned with the Christian doctrine of grace, Berkeley attributes two arguments to the sceptical interlocutor Alciphron. First, when we consider the meaning of the word “grace” we find a “perfect vacuity or privation of ideas”; it is an “empty name” ( Alciphron , 7.4). Second, in saying that grace “acts” or “causes” things to happen, we are employing words that are clear and intelligible when used to describe the behaviour of physical objects but have no similarly clear significations when applied to a “spiritual” matters. In supposing that talk of the causally efficacious properties of grace is contentful, speakers are unjustifiably trading on the familiar meanings of these words when talking about physical properties and causal relations between physical objects; when used to elaborate on the nature of grace or describe its nature, these words do not have a clear sense. We have, concludes Alciphron, no clear idea corresponding to the word “grace”; we “cannot assent to any proposition concerning it” or have any faith about it. Berkeley, through the interlocutor Euphranor, rejects Alciphron’s conclusion but concedes Alciphron’s arguments that the word “grace” does not suggest a clear idea. Nevertheless, a discourse “that directs how to act or excites to the doing or forbearance of an action may … be useful and significant”—and express faith—even if it is not representational ( Alciphron , 7.5).

Berkeley goes on to develop his non-representation account not just for grace but a variety of Christian doctrines. Talking of grace has a practical role in encouraging conduct in accordance with Christian faith:

Grace may … be an object of our faith, and influence our life and actions, as a principle destructive of evil habits and productive of good ones, although we cannot attain a distinct idea of it. ( Alciphron , 7.7)

He takes a similar approach to the Trinity: we lack a clear idea of what it is, but talk of it is significant because of its practical role in modifying the attitudes and conduct of the faithful ( Alciphron , 7.8). Original sin receives a similar treatment. In general, talk of the “religious mysteries”, according to Berkeley, serves a practical function of motivating and guiding the faithful to think and act according to Christian principles. They are “placed in the will and affections rather than in the understanding, and producing holy lives rather than subtle theories” ( Alciphron , 7.10).

One of the distinctive characteristics of Berkeley’s account is his attempt to develop a non-cognitive theory for only a limited region of religious language, while retaining a cognitivist account for the rest. Let’s call this a mixed theory. There are two pressing problems for a mixed theory. First, how should we differentiate areas of religious language which should be given a face value interpretation from those that should be given a non-cognitive interpretation? Second, how are the non-cognitive areas of religious language meaningfully related to the cognitive areas of language? Berkeley answers the first problem by an introspective experiment. We reflect on what we are thinking when we talk about the Christian mysteries and find that we lack clear ideas or beliefs. However, this is unsatisfactory. There is no general agreement on which religious expressions or sentences we are sufficiently clear about to make them suitable vehicles for expressing religious beliefs. Nor does Berkeley identify anything that specifically characterises the Christian mysteries as matters on which speakers have much less clear ideas than many of the other ideas that form part of religious judgements, not least the ideas of God and divine properties. Berkeley does not, therefore, have a successful method for discriminating religious ideas and thoughts that are cognitively contentful from those that are not.

On the second problem, suppose for example we follow Berkeley giving a face value account of

• (4) God is good

and a non-cognitive interpretation of

• (5) Salvation is given by divine grace.

That is, (5) does not have a propositional content but is used to encourage faith and virtue. How should (6), be interpreted?

• (6) If God is good then salvation is given by divine grace.

The mixed theory has two problems. This sentence combines (4) and (5) in a conditional sentence but since the consequent is taken to express an attitude it is unclear how it should be understood. This is because one can assert (6) without expressing the attitude in (5); one might, for example, think that the antecedent and consequent are false but nevertheless think that (6) is true because if the antecedent were true then the consequent would be true. It seems, therefore, that if the mixed theorist is right that (5) expresses a non-cognitive attitude then it must have a different meaning in (6) where it is not tied to the expression of any attitude. This brings us to a second problem, which is that (4) and (6) together entail (5). Together these sentences make an evidently valid modus ponens argument. However, if (5) means something different when asserted and when embedded in the conditional (6), then this argument is invalid. More generally, the mixed theory looks in difficulty when trying to explain the meaning of conditionals or valid arguments that contain expressive and cognitive religious sentences.

Some of the problems with Berkeley’s theory arise from its limited application to only parts of religious language. This raises the question of whether a more thoroughgoing non-cognitivist theory of religious language could be developed, perhaps employing the methods developed in the defence of current expressivist theories of ethics. The prospects for such a theory remain relatively unexplored territory but here are a couple of relevant consideration, one in favour and one against.

An important part of religious discourse is the communication of faithful attitudes. Moreover, faith is a state that appears to be intrinsically connected to our motivations and feelings. This is something that Berkeley makes great play of:

Faith, I say, is not an indolent perception, but an operative persuasion of mind, which ever worketh some suitable action, disposition, or emotion in those who have it; as it were easy to prove and illustrate by innumerable instances taken from human affairs. ( Alciphron , 7.10)

The idea that faith must have a practical element commands broad support. Faith is said to be intrinsically motivational (Bishop 2007: 105–106), to involve desires (MacDonald 1993: 44; Howard-Snyder 2013: 363), plans and commitments (Swinburne 2005: 211–212; Kvanvig 2013: 111), stances (Callahan & O’Connor 2014: 13–14) pro-attitudes (Audi 2011: 67; Alston 1996: 12–13; Schellenberg 2014: 83). Berkeley sees it as one of the main selling points of his non-cognitivism that it explains why faith in religious mysteries should have practical effects on the dispositions and behaviour of the faithful and lead people to change their lives ( Alciphron , 7.10). More generally, it appears that there are at least the rudimentary components for an argument akin to the argument from motivational force used to support ethical non-cognitivism (see van Roojen 2016). This offers one potentially promising line of argument for the non-cognitivist to pursue. Note that religious utterances need not be exclusively either cognitive or non-cognitive. It is possible to argue that religious utterances conventionally express both non-cognitive attitudes and beliefs (for a defence of this position see Scott 2013: 71–85).

There are general objections to ethical and other varieties of non-cognitivism—most notably the Frege-Geach and the “embedding” problems (see Schroeder 2010 for an overview)—that will equally apply to a putative expressivist account of religious language. However, a thoroughgoing religious non-cognitivism will face the additional problem of identifying the relevant attitudes and plans that are expressed in religious utterances. While there are attitudes that might be considered characteristic of religious language—for instance, awe, devotion and obedience—it is difficult to see how such attitudes could provide the resources to provide a plausible account of the meaning of religious utterances or to individuate the meanings of different religious utterances. To take just one example, “God is omniscient” will need to be expressive of a distinct non-cognitive attitude to “God is omnipresent” to distinguish their meanings.

Some of the claims most commonly made about God’s nature and doctrinal claims, particularly those of Christianity, have been said to be absurd, paradoxical or impossible to understand. The most familiar version of this worry concerns the consistency of the predicates ascribed to God such as omnipotence and doctrinal views such as the Trinity. Considerable effort has been directed towards establishing that religious claims are coherent (for example, Swinburne 1994). Those who concede that some religious claims are paradoxical have proposed a variety of different responses. Paradox in religious claims has been seen as grounds for atheism (Martin 1990), for modifying religious doctrine or changing our attitudes towards them (Hick 1977a: 1993), or as an ineliminable part of faith (Kierkegaard [1844] 1985; see Evans 1989). However, there is a further question about what such claims mean. If we take paradoxical utterances (or ones that are in some way absurd or impossible to understand) as failing to express propositions, then allowing that some of the principal expressions of faith are paradoxical (or absurd or impossible to understand) is thereby to reject (a*).

A number of accounts of religious language appear potentially sympathetic with this approach. For example, Ronald Hepburn (1958)—according to whom “paradoxical and near-paradoxical language is the staple of accounts of God’s nature” (16)—proposes that religious ideas and stories may have the role of imaginatively informing a moral way of life. This view has some similarities with fictionalism, discussed below. More recently, Stephen Mulhall (2015) has suggested that some religious utterances can be understood as unresolvable riddles the meanings of which we are unable to grasp fully, inviting an open-ended process of articulating their meaning that is pursued by those engaged in religious discourse.

Also relevant here are the works of authors in the apophatic and mystical tradition that was particularly prominent from mid-antiquity through to the late medieval period. Although a variety of accounts of religious language are suggested by the writings of authors in this tradition, some of what they say appears sympathetic to paradoxicalism about utterances about God’s nature. Two themes that are found in their writings are particularly notable. First, God’s nature is taken to be both inconceivable and inexpressible (Dionysius The Mystical Theology : ch. 5; Gregory of Nyssa Contra Eunomium II : 61; Maximus the Confessor, Chapters on Knowledge : part one 1–2, part two 2; Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed : ch. 58). It appears to follow from this that in saying, for example, “God is good”, one does not succeed in representing God in either thought or language. A second theme found in some apophatic writers is that an important aspect of religious engagement is establishing a secure relationship with God—sometimes characterised as an “ascent” to God (Dionysius The Mystical Theology : ch. 1.1; Cloud of Unknowing : ch. 4)—and a recognition of the abject failure of what we say to communicate any representation of God’s nature may form part of that process. Far from being pointless, religious discourse about God may assist in the recognition of our intellectual and linguistic limitations ( Cloud of Unknowing : ch. 8). For further discussion and other interpretations of these works see Turner 1995 and for a detailed review focused on religious language see Scott and Citron 2016, Gäb 2020 and Hewitt 2020.

One difficulty that might be pressed by supporters of the face value theory is these theories, as least to the extent that they are providing accounts of religious language, appear revisionary rather than descriptive of the meanings of religious utterances. For example, the proposal that “God is good” does not simply express the proposition that God is good seems, in the case of apophaticism, to be based on a contentious theological view about what can be represented in thought and language rather than what speakers mean when they utter this sentence. The sentence is used in a variety of apparently descriptive ways by speakers: it is said to be true (or false), it is used in apparently valid arguments, can be embedded in a conditional, it is said to be a matter of belief or even of knowledge. Any account of religious language will need to do justice to the evidence that religious utterances are used descriptively, particularly ones that put (a*) into question.

A variety of philosophical positions go by the name “reductionism” but reductionist theories of language aim to give the truth conditions for sentences that are apparently about a certain range of phenomena in terms of sentences about some other range of phenomena. We can call these (following Dummett 1991: 322) the disputed and reduced class of sentences respectively. Commonly discussed examples include logical behaviourism (see Graham 2017), which reduces sentences about mental states to ones about behaviour, and temporal reductionism (see Markosian 2016) which proposes that sentences about time can be reduced to sentences about temporal relations between things and events. Most varieties of religious reductionism posit various naturalistic phenomena as the subject of the reduced class of sentences. Unlike other positions considered in this section, religious reductionists agree with face value theories that religious utterances have propositional content, however, they argue that the content in question is not the face value subject matter but instead the subject matter described by the reduced class of sentences.

A variety of reductionism adopted by early Christian writers in their treatment of pagan religion, such as Lactantius ([4 th century] 1871: 22) and Augustine ( The City of God , VII ch. 18), proposes that the pagan deities were based on real, mortal historical figures revered after their death for their contributions to human society and subsequently elevated to the status of gods. However, this is clearly not a linguistic reductionism. Augustine—in a chapter titled “A more credible cause of the pagan error”—aims to discourage and debunk pagan beliefs: they are fictions inspired by the benevolent deeds of mortal leaders. Linguistic reductionism does not seek to explain religious belief but identifies a reductive class of sentences by which the truth or falsity of sentences in the disputed class is determined.

Linguistic reductionism has never received widespread support, and has never been developed systematically or comprehensively for religious language. Nevertheless, it has an interesting pedigree. For example, Spinoza, one of the most influential defenders of pantheism, suggested ways of interpreting sentences about God in terms of facts about nature (Mason 2007). He writes:

By God’s direction I mean the fixed and immutable order of Nature, or chain of natural events … So it is the same thing whether we say that all things happen according to Nature’s laws or that they are regulated by God’s decree and direction. ([1667] 2002: 417)

Since all human actions are, according to Spinoza, the product of the predetermined order of nature, we can—following the reductive strategy—say that nobody acts except by the will of God. Similarly, since anything that we can achieve is produced by either our own actions and/or by external conditions, all such achievements can be understood as the result of divine providence. So, for example, (6) is true if (5) is true.

• (5) Nobody acts except by the will of God.
• (6) All actions are the product of the predetermined order of nature.

Spinoza also proposes naturalistic reductions of talk about the Holy Spirit (1667 [2002, 525]), divine action and providence (1667 [2002, 445]) and miracles (1667 [2002, 448]).

Naturalistic interpretations of religious language became popular in the 1920s in both Britain and America. For example, Julian Huxley (1931) suggests that talk of God could be understood as a way of talking about forces operating in nature or about aspects of nature that we do not understand (see Bowler 2001), and proposes naturalistic interpretations of talk of the Holy Ghost and the Son of God (1927: 37). Influential early figures in the American tradition of “religious naturalism” or “religious empiricism” are Bernard Meland (1976) and Henry Wieman (1932). Wieman offers various naturalistic accounts of talk of God, usually identifying God with natural processes that yield or facilitate ethically or socially desirable results.

Also notable is the work of Gordon Kaufman, a leading figure in the development of modern liberal theology. He observes that in many cases the natural phenomena that are integral to giving our lives meaning are deeply mysterious, for instance, that humans are capable of consciousness and thought and the appreciation of beauty. He contends that “God” is the name given to the “pervasive mystery” that gives life meaning (2007: 12). Saying that God is “real” or “exists” express the belief that underpinning this “pervasive mystery” are natural forces that promote and facilitate ethical, aesthetic and social human flourishing (1981: 49).

Does truth-conditional reductionism offer a plausible theory of religious language? The obvious place to start is to consider whether or not there are any compelling reasons to prefer a reductive rather than a face value theory. Unfortunately, reductionists appear to stumble at this first hurdle. It is clear from the writings of reductionists that the reductionist interpretation of religious discourse is not advanced from a consideration of the meanings of what speakers say when they talk about God but instead on the basis of religious or metaphysical theories about the nature of the universe. However, the belief that there is no creator God is not a reason for giving naturalistic truth-conditions to (1); it is a reason for thinking that (1) is false. Notably, even among writers more sympathetic to linguistic reductionism we find lapses into non-linguistic reductionism. For example, while Kaufman sometimes presents his theory as an account of what is meant by talk about God, at other times he presents a much more clearly revisionary proposal. He writes, “It is this cosmic serendipitous creativity, I suggest, that we should today think of as God” (Kaufman 2007: 26, my italics) and he proposes that the “traditional notion” of God’s purposive activity in the word should be replaced with

what I call trajectories or directional movements that emerge spontaneously in the course of evolutionary and historical developments. (2007: 25)

For further discussion of reductionism see Alston 2005 and Scott 2013: ch. 9; the latter also discusses subjectivist versions of reductionism.

3. The Use of Religious Language

Suppose that religious sentences represent a religious subject matter, i.e., that (a*) is true. There remains the further question of what speakers mean when they use religious sentences. The semantic or propositional content of a sentence and its truth conditions is one thing, the information that a sentence is used to communicate is another. Any philosophical account of religious discourse must allow for non-literal utterances, where the propositional content of the utterance and the thought that it is used to communicate appear to diverge. However, according to the face value theory, utterances such as (7), (8) and (9) should—unless the context indicates otherwise—be understood as literal assertions that, if sincerely stated by a religious believer, express the speaker’s belief in what is said. [ 3 ]

• (7) God created the world.
• (8) The authors of the Bible were inspired by the Holy Spirit.
• (9) God is omnipotent.

There are two main types of opposition to (b*). The first is that religious utterances—including utterances of indicative sentences that are apparently literal—are not literal assertions but fall under some other standard category of speech act. Speech acts—or illocutionary acts in Austin’s (1955 [1975, 95]) terminology—are what a speaker does in saying something. Examples include assertions, questions, commands, warnings, threats, statements of intention, requests. So, according to the first type of opposition to (b*) religious utterances, while many of them appear to be literal assertions, are in fact some other kind of speech act. Proposals include analogy or metaphor ( 3.1 ), praise or prayer ( 3.2 ), and pretence or other kinds of quasi-assertion ( 3.3 ). The second type of opposition to (b*), considered in ( 3.4 ), proposes that religious sentences are used for various (non-assertoric) purposes but does not identify a unified speech act as characteristic of religious discourse.

The two main kinds of non-literal discourse that have been seen as particularly important in religion are analogy and metaphor. [ 4 ] Analogy relates to the use of expressions that occur in both religious and non-religious contexts. Take, for example, the expressions “good”, “wise” and “powerful” when used in ordinary contexts to talk about people. Do these expressions have the same meaning when used to talk about God, or are they used analogously: is the conventional meaning they have when used to talk about mundane objects in some way modified when used to talk about God? Discussion of religious analogy was particularly lively in early medieval theology and Aquinas was a leading proponent of an analogical treatment of religious predicates. See Roger M. White (2010) for a detailed account of Aquinas’ theory, its background in Aristotle’s philosophy as well as subsequent ideas about analogy in religion in the work of Karl Barth and Immanuel Kant.

A detailed contemporary account of analogy by Richard Swinburne (1993: ch. 4) proposes that analogical use of a term involves a modification of its syntactic and/or semantic rules. A syntactic rule for the use of a term p sets down general conditions governing its use. A semantic rule for p gives examples of the things to which p correctly applies, or does not correctly apply. For instance, giving a semantic rule for red might involve pointing to various examples of red objects and contrasting them with objects that are not red (1993: 58). In using an expression analogically, Swinburne proposes, its semantic or syntactic rules are loosened. So W *, the analogical use of a predicate W , may require a less strict degree of resemblance to standard examples of W for its correct use. Swinburne believes that “person” which in its ordinary sense has living human beings with physical bodies as its standard examples, must be used analogically with a suitable weakening of its semantic rules and modification of its syntactic rules when applied to God.

It is notable that on Swinburne’s theory analogy can be seen as a commonplace feature of language use that is both compatible with a face value theory and found much more widely than in religious discourse. For example, consider the following utterances:

• (10) The lawn is square.
• (11) The audience was silent.

Lawns do not, of course, have four sides of equal length and in saying (11) the speaker does not mean that the audience was not making any noise whatsoever. According to modern pragmatic theories of interpretation (such as Sperber & Wilson 1986; Carston 2002; Recanti 2004), constituent expressions or concepts undergo an ad hoc modification prompted by the context in which they are uttered and understood. For instance, (10) might involve a loosening of the concept SQUARE, i.e., SQUARE* that includes not just objects that are square but also objects (like lawns) that look square or are approximately square. Akin to Swinburne’s account of rule modification in analogy, the condition that squares have four sides of equal length and internal angles of ninety degrees is relaxed. Understood in this way, however, analogy is not distinctive of religious discourse but a prevalent characteristic of normal communication. When God is the subject matter, expressions undergo a suitable ad hoc loosening as part of normal, literal communication.

Recent research has focused more on religious metaphors. [ 5 ] The importance of metaphor has long been noted by theologians, with Sally McFague (1983) offering the most extensive treatment, while in the philosophy of religion William Alston (1989: ch. 1 and 2), Janet Soskice (1985), Anthony Kenny (2005) and Richard Swinburne (1991: ch. 3; 1993: ch. 4 and 5) have all contributed to the discussion.

Since metaphors are commonplace in various areas of discourse, it may seem that questions about religious metaphor should be subsumed under questions about metaphor in general raised in the philosophy of language. However, some have proposed that what is said about God is irreducibly metaphorical . Tillich’s (1951) theory that religious language is symbolic is perhaps an early expression of the view, and Anthony Kenny and Sally McFague are more recent proponents of a view of this type (see also Jüngel 1974; Sarot 1992). William Alston, the chief critic of the theory, offers the following statement of irreducibility theory (1989: 17–19):

• (IT) Religious metaphors are the only way of stating truths about God, and the content of a metaphorical utterance about God cannot be stated, even in part, in literal terms.

Alston sees the supporter of IT as construing even apparently literal claims about God as metaphorical. However, Alston’s formulation may be overly modest, since both Kenny and McFague seem to take the view that all talk of God is irreducibly metaphorical, irrespective of whether it is true or false.

IT fails, according to Alston, because metaphors, religious metaphors in particular, are always in principle susceptible to literal paraphrase. Scott (2013: 180–182) argues that IT, on any plausible account of what metaphors are, faces insurmountable problems. For example, according to one standard theory (Searle 1993), metaphors say something that is usually patently false with the aim of implying something other than the false thing that is said. “God is my rock”, for instance, might imply that God is a source of confidence for the speaker. However, it follows from IT that if a metaphor about God implies anything true about God then that implied claim should also be metaphorical. This appears to undermine truthful communication about God. If, however, talk of God is not in the business of expressing truths, according to what norm are utterances about God affirmed or rejected? Metaphor theories therefore face challenges in specifying and defending the irreducibility claim as well as in as well as elaborating what a metaphor is.

Although some caution is needed in placing work in continental philosophy into the analytic classifications that inform this article, the treatment of religious language by Jean-Luc Marion (1994, 1982 [1995]) and Jacques Derrida (1992) appears sympathetic to the speech act theories considered in this section. Speakers, according to Marion, in uttering indicative sentences about God praise God (and thereby express devotion, awe, and so on, towards God) rather than express beliefs about God. Derrida is critical of Marion; not, however, because he endorses a face value approach but because he believes speakers are better understood as voicing prayers to God rather than praise.

Marion’s theory is influenced by the apophatic idea that God cannot be accurately conceived of. Conceiving of something, according to Marion, involves placing some descriptive limitation or restriction on that thing. God and other religious subjects, Marion claims, are “saturated phenomena” that cannot be captured by human concepts:

That he is the given par excellence implies that “God” is given without restriction, without reserve, without restraint. “God” is given not at all partially, following this or that outline … but absolutely, without the reserve of any outline, with every side open … (1994: 588)

However, inspired by Dionysius’ writings, he presents an interpretation of religious discourse as referring to God without ascribing properties to God. For example, “God is good” addresses rather than describes God (1982 [1995, 76]). Marion calls this non-objectifying and non-predicative way of talking about God “praise”; it is a form of speech that is laudatory but combined with a recognition (at least by the speaker) that the property that is apparently predicated of God is inappropriate. Praise “feeds on the impossibility or, better, the impropriety of the category” (1982 [1995, 76]). In talking of God, therefore, speakers praise God but recognise the inadequacy of the concepts they are using to represent God: the predicate expressions are not used with the belief that they accurately represent God. In saying “God is good” speakers do not, therefore, believe or assert that God is good . For further discussion see James Smith 2002.

Derrida is sympathetic to Marion’s account but raises the objection that praising God (the “encomium” of God), on Marion’s account, still involves predication:

Even if it is not a predicative affirmation of the current type, the encomium preserves the style and the structure of a predicative affirmation. It says something about someone … [Praise] entails a predicative aim, however foreign it may be to “normal” ontological predication. (1992: 137)

Derrida proposes instead that religious talk about God should be understood as prayer rather than praise. Unlike praise, prayer is a form of address that, Derrida argues, is entirely non-descriptive. Prayer “is not predicative, theoretical (theo logical ), or constative” (1992: 110). He elaborates:

I will hold to one other distinction: prayer in itself, one may say, implies nothing other than the supplicating address to the other, perhaps beyond all supplication and giving, to give the promise of His presence as other, and finally the transcendence of His otherness itself, even without any other determination; the encomium, although it is not a simple attributive speech, nevertheless preserves an irreducible relationship to the attribution. (1982 [1995, 111])

Derrida’s objection is unconvincing. (12) and (13), for example, appear to have the same “style and structure”:

• (12) God is good.
• (13) The table is round.

However, Marion’s point is presumably that the similarity of (12) and (13) is purely superficial. Marion does not give specifics, but one way of developing his is account is to take (12) to be communicating (something like):

• (14) Oh, God you are good!

Where (14) is understood as an expression of (say) the speaker’s respect and admiration of God and the speaker recognises the descriptive inadequacy of “good”. Derrida is, in effect, reading too much into the surface appearance of utterances: (12) and (13) may look similar but they are not thereby speech acts of the same type.

The strengths and weaknesses of Derrida’s and Marion’s accounts are as yet largely unexplored in analytic philosophy. There are, however, some obvious challenges that need to be addressed. For example, Marion claims in praising God the predicates that are ascribed to God are recognised as inadequate by speakers . This seems implausible. Speakers in many cases appear to believe what they are saying about God. Marion might argue that such religious believers have false beliefs about God’s nature, but to claim that they do not have beliefs about God’s nature that they intend to communicate seems to be a misrepresentation of speakers’ states of mind. Moreover, Derrida’s own suggestion that talk of God should be understood as prayer does not seem to have any advantage over the position his is criticising. Prayer also involves utterances that appear to represent God: “Our Father, which art in heaven”, for instance.

Fictionalists defend the moral and intellectual legitimacy of engaging with a field of discourse for speakers that do not believe that the sentences of that discourse are true (for a general overview see Divers & Liggins 2005, for a review focused on religious fictionalism see Scott & Malcolm 2018, Brock 2020). Some fictionalists propose that that speakers employ quasi-assertion . A quasi-assertion is a speech act that has the appearance of an assertion—it is the utterance of an indicative sentence—but it does not commit the speaker to the truth of the expressed proposition. The speaker goes along with or accepts the content of what is quasi-asserted but does not thereby believe it. The details of quasi-assertion depend on the kind of fictionalism being proposed and a variety of options have been proposed (for an overview see Kalderon 2005: 119–129). On some accounts, quasi-assertion involves the assertion of something other than the propositional content of the uttered sentence. For example, a fictionalist about mathematics might argue that a mathematical sentence M is used to assert that M is true according to standard mathematics (Field 1980). Alternatively, to quasi-assert a sentence might be to pretend to assert it. Comparable approaches are found among religious fictionalist. Peter Lipton (2007), for instance, suggests that engagement with religious could be akin to immersion in a fiction; the fictionalist accordingly pretends that the claims of religion are true. Other religious fictionalists (such as Robin Le Poidevin 2016, 2019) propose that the fictionalist, without believing that a religious utterance is true, may say it on the basis that it is true within some religious tradition.

Particularly important for our purposes is the distinction between revolutionary and hermeneutic fictionalism. Revolutionary religious fictionalism is not a theory of religious language—it is not a position on what speakers actually mean—but instead a revisionary proposal that is usually offered in response to error theory about religion. Despite religious claims being untrue, revolutionary fictionalists argue religious discourse has sufficient pragmatic benefits that we should continue to employ religious language and engage in religious thought rather than eliminate it, even though we should not believe that it is true. In general, revolutionary fictionalism is motivated by the wish to continue to receive the social and other benefits of engagement with a religion without commitment to its truth. LePoidevin and Lipton are both revolutionary fictionalists. The Sea of Faith Network, inspired by the work of Don Cupitt (1980), can also be understood as sympathetic to revolutionary fictionalism because it promotes Christian practice and the continuing engagement with religious discourse without religious belief. Interesting though they are, we will not be investigating these theories further because they are not saying anything about the meaning of religious utterances. Instead, they are recommending a change of attitude towards the claims of religion and quasi-assert rather than assert them.

Hermeneutic fictionalism about religion is the view that speakers are not committed to the truth of what they say on religious matters: speakers are quasi-asserting rather than asserting indicative religious sentences. This is not offered as a proposal about what speakers should do but instead as a fact about current linguistic practice. Speakers accept but do not believe what they say when engaging in religious discourse. So, along with other positions discussed in this section, hermeneutic fictionalists reject (b*). Defending this position may seem like a tall order: isn’t hermeneutic fictionalism undermined by the apparent linguistic evidence that religious speakers are committed to the truth of what they say? Nevertheless, there are a couple of positions that look to be potential contenders for religious hermeneutic fictionalism.

First, Georges Rey has defended a position that he calls meta-atheism according to which practitioners of religion exhibit widespread self-deception about what they say (2006: 337). For anyone with a basic education in science, Rey contends, it is obvious that religious claims are false. Rey is not proposing, however, that educated speakers are insincere when they affirm religious claims since they may think of themselves as believing what they are saying (2006: 338). Instead, speakers are in a state of self-deception. While they may recognise on a more critical level that religious claims are false, they do not entertain this when engaging in religious discourse. Why do religious people do not recognise and consciously draw out the implications of their disbelief? Rey suggests a number of reasons: loyalty to family and other social groups, personal ties and identifications with religious institutions, resistance to changing one’s public stance, the wish for one’s life to be part of a larger project. Rey supplements his arguments by pointing up differences between religious and scientific judgements aimed at showing that the latter are “understood to be fictional from the start” (2006: 345). Now, Rey’s position is, to say the least, contentious—for starters, his contention that religious claims are obviously false seems unsupportable (see Scott 2015 for a more detailed critique). However, with some assumptions about self-deception, we can understand meta-atheism as a kind of hermeneutic religious fictionalism. Speakers are in a conflicted state of self-deception that falls short of belief: on some level or in some uncritical contexts speakers treat religious claims as if they were true, while also believing in critical and reflective contexts that they are false. Accordingly, in uttering religious sentences speakers engage in quasi-assertion whereby they accept what is said without genuinely believing it to be true.

Second, a point of debate in current research on the nature of faith is whether propositional faith—i.e., faith that p —requires belief that p . Supporters of traditional doxastic accounts defend this condition while supporters of non-doxastic theories of faith argue that it is sufficient that one have a positive cognitive attitude towards p other than belief. There are various proposal for what this non-doxastic attitude is. Candidates include: acceptance (Alston 2007), assent (Schellenberg 2005), assumption (Swinburne 2005; Howard-Snyder 2013), trust (Audi 2011), hope (McKaughan 2013; Pojman 1986 and 2001), or acquiescence (Buchak 2012). However, to the extent that religious discourse is in the business of trading in the expression of faithful attitudes then it follows from the non-doxastic position that a speaker may sincerely affirm their faith in a religious proposition without believing it to be true. Notably, some non-doxastic theorists offer linguistic evidence to show that speakers do not believe what they say. This appears to concede a hermeneutic fictionalist account of faithful discourse (for discussion see Malcolm & Scott 2017 and Scott 2020). It seems likely that many proponents of non-doxastic theories of faith will not welcome the characterisation of their position as a variety of hermeneutic fictionalism (see Howard-Snyder 2016 and Malcolm 2018). However, non-doxastic theories are usually presented primarily as psychological or epistemological theories about the nature of faith; the implications of the position for religious discourse, and its relationship with hermeneutic fictionalism, have yet to be fully set out.

We have been looking at theories than characterise the affirmation of indicative religious sentences by a type of speech act other than literal assertion. However, some accounts propose that religious discourse, rather than exhibiting a distinctive type of speech act, employs language for certain distinctive purposes. Possible examples of this position include Wittgenstein’s suggestion that a religious judgement should be understood as a picture that has a regulative function in guiding practical decisions (1966: 53–4) and Kant’s proposal that religious utterances communicate guidance for how to think ( Critique of Pure Reason A671/B699; A686/B714). This section will consider the accounts from Ian Ramsey (1957) and more recently Rowan Williams (2014).

According to Ramsey, full-blooded religious engagement involves two things: a commitment and a discernment. The commitment is an attitude that is directed towards the universe as a whole; it is “total” and has a particular intensity akin to a personal relationship. The discernment involves a “disclosure”, which he describes as a recognition of something of enormous importance. The something in question is not a new fact but a recognition that “brings together” what is known whereby one appreciates the world in a new light. For Ramsey, the purpose of religious language is to communicate and promote religious commitment and discernment: “religious language talks of the discernment with which is associated, by way of response, a total commitment” (1957: 49). With respect to utterances about God, Ramsey says:

My suggestion is that we understand their logical behaviour aright if we see them as primarily evocative of what we have called the odd discernment, that characteristically religious situation which, if evoked, provokes a total commitment. (1957: 50)

When it comes to the details of how to interpret specific religious utterances, Ramsey’s proposals are very varied. Some utterances he takes to be expressive of attitudes. Talk of “eternal purpose” aims to evoke a sense of “cosmic wonder” (1957: 77). Some are metalinguistic claims about the proper use of religious discourse:

to say that “God is impassable” is to claim that the word “God” is a word which cannot be confined to passability language. (1957: 89)

Others are about mystery:

Let us recognize that the doctrine of the Virgin Birth is essentially a claim for mystery at Christ’s birth or at Christ’s death. (1957: 132)

However, for Ramsey, religious sentences have representational content but are used by speakers in a variety of non-representational ways—expressive, metalinguistic, to generate a sense of mystery—for the purposes of evoking discernment and encouraging commitment, rather than descriptively.

Recently Rowan Williams (2014) has proposed that religious language serves to challenge us both morally, by undermining selfishness and complacency, as well as conceptually by encouraging us to think about the world in different terms. The use of religious language involves innovations that “invite us to rethink our metaphysical principles” (2014: 130), undercut “our sense of being a finished subject with a clear agenda of need and desire” (2014: 152–3), and “open us to a truth that is changing us and never leaves us in complacent possession of the power we think we have” (2014: 154). A similar approach is taken to discourse about God. What we are representing in talking of God is not an object but “a particular aspect of every perception, the aspect that gives to any specific perception its provisionality, its openness to being represented afresh” (2014: 148). These purposes can be furthered even by using religious sentences that are not consistent.

Face value theorists will, of course, find much to object to in both Ramsey’s and Williams’ discussions of religious language. One obvious point to raise is that if engagement in religious discourse is driven by the purposes that Ramsey and Williams describe then it seems that one need not be concerned with the truth of what one says. Notably, Williams appears to be sympathetic to the endorsement of incoherent claims if they further the broader proposed purposes of religious discourse. However, caution is needed in classifying these accounts as descriptive of religious discourse rather than revisionary proposals for objectives that speakers might aim for. If they fall into the latter category, then they are in a similar position to revolutionary fictionalism.

4. Religious Minimalism

Minimalist accounts of religious language, which are—rightly or wrongly—closely associated with Wittgenstein, agree with (a*) and (b*) but take issue with the face value understanding of descriptiveness along with associated ideas of fact, representation, reference and truth. For convenience, let us call these realism-relevant concepts. The opposition involves two main ideas. First, rather than posit a demanding standard that a field of discourse must meet to count as genuinely descriptive, minimalists propose that a discourse that satisfies very modest conditions—for example, that it possesses a truth predicate and standards of justification for what is affirmed or rejected—is thereby descriptive. Second, realism-relevant concepts are taken to be at least partly constituted by features of the discourse (or “language game”) in which they are used. Minimalists thereby reject a uniform account of descriptiveness across different areas of discourse. Descriptiveness, reference, truth, and so on are language-game-internal concepts: they are constituted differently in different areas of discourse. 4.1 will consider minimalist accounts of religious discourse and 4.2 will look at whether Wittgenstein might plausibly be understood as sharing this approach.

The discussion in this section touches on issues that have been explored in detail outside of the philosophy of religion. For more on the wider philosophical background see Stoljar & Damnjanovic 2014 on deflationary and Pedersen & Wright 2013 and 2016 on pluralist accounts of truth.

The two key features of minimalism are prominent in Hilary Putnam’s Wittgensteinian account of religious language in Renewing Philosophy (1992). First, Putnam draws attention to Wittgenstein’s well-known remarks on family resemblances (1953: 65–66). Wittgenstein’s target in these remarks is the idea that an expression requires necessary and sufficient conditions for its correct application. Intuitively, it seems that there must be such conditions if the meaning of the expression remains the same when it is used in different contexts. However, consider the term “game”, with its varying applications—board games, card games, Olympic games, and so on; we can see, Putnam (following Wittgenstein) argues, that for any particular condition that appears to characterise some types of game, there will be others that fail to satisfy it. Rather than common necessary and sufficient conditions for all uses of “game”, there is a network of similarities and relationships between them. Putnam proposes that Wittgenstein took a similar lesson to apply to notions like language , reference and truth :

referring uses don’t have an “essence”; there isn’t some one thing which can be called referring. There are overlapping similarities between one sort of referring and the next, that is all. (1992: 167–8)

Philosophical confusion results when, for instance, we attempt to apply standards of reference appropriate to descriptions of the perceived world to mathematical claims. Putnam then extends this point to religion:

The use of religious language is both like and unlike ordinary cases of reference: but to ask whether it is “really” reference or “not really” reference is to be in a muddle. There is no essence of reference … In short, Wittgenstein is telling you what isn’t the way to understand religious language. The way to understand religious language isn’t to try to apply some metaphysical classification of possible forms of discourse. (1992: 168)

A similar point is taken to extend to truth, descriptiveness and other realism-relevant concepts.

Second, Putnam argues that truth can be understood as idealised rational acceptability. [ 6 ] This is not to say that truth depends on justification here and now —that is, what seems to us justified on currently available evidence—but rather that truth is not independent of all justification: “To claim a statement is true is to claim it could be justified” (1981: 56). To be truth-apt, it is sufficient that the assertoric utterances of religious discourse are governed by internal standards of warrant. While the standards of warrant in a given area of religious discourse may be significantly different to those in science (appealing to the authority of the Bible or the Pope, for instance, would not count in favour of a scientific theory), the condition that there are such standards is clearly satisfied. To arrive at a positive account of what constitutes truth (and other realism-relevant concepts) in religion , therefore, requires an examination of the specific standards of justification that are in play in religious discourse (or, more accurately, the different standards in different religious discourses).

D.Z. Phillips was a leading interpreter and champion of a Wittgensteinian approach to philosophy of religion. His early writings appear sympathetic to a non-cognitivist account of religious discourse. He questions whether religious utterances are descriptive and proposes, for instance, that “religious belief is itself the expression of a moral vision” (1976: 143) and that

the praising and the glorifying does not refer to some object called God. Rather, the expression of such praise and glory is what we call the worship of God. (1976: 149)

In his later writings from the 1990s, however, Phillips’ remarks appear more minimalist.

By all means say that “God” functions as a referring expression, that “God” refers to a sort of object, that God’s reality is a matter of fact, and so on. But please remember that, as yet, no conceptual or grammatical clarification has taken place . We have all the work still to do since we shall now have to show, in this religious context, what speaking of “reference”, “object”, “existence”, and so on amounts to, how it differs, in obvious ways, from other uses of these terms. (1995: 138)

Here, Phillips allows that religious expressions refer and religious sentences are descriptive, etc., but proposes—in line with minimalism—that the reference and descriptiveness of religious discourse is partly constituted by features distinctive of religious discourse. For a detailed and sympathetic treatment of Phillips’ work see Burley 2012 and for a critique see Scott & Moore 1997.

In general, religious minimalists agree on a number of points. They grant that religious statements have propositional content, and may be true, descriptive, factual, and so on. Second, realism-relevant concepts are understood as language game internal concepts. To know what makes for truth in religion, for instance, we need to look at the internal standards of justification that inform religious discourse. Third, the primary aim of minimalism, at least in the Wittgensteinian form it takes in philosophy of religion, is to elucidate the different standards that characterise different areas of discourse, and to spell out the differences between realism-relevant concepts in religion and realism-relevant concepts in science or history. However, there is also an important area of disagreement between religious minimalists. Phillips takes the different constitution of truth in different areas discourse to show that “true” means something different in different discourses: We have multiple truth concepts, with different extensions (1976: 142; 1995: 149). In contrast, Putnam appears to be more sympathetic to a pluralist account of truth: the truth predicate has certain necessary and sufficient conditions for its use (such as the disquotational schema) but may be additionally constituted by different further conditions according to whether we are talking about religious truths, scientific truths, or ethical truths (see Wright 1992: ch. 2). Fragmentary accounts of truth of the kind that Phillips appears to endorse have been widely criticised—see, for example, Timothy Williamson (1994: 141) Christine Tappolet (1997).

Religious minimalism is usually offered as a program of research rather than a detailed account of religious discourse. There is talk of the need to attend to the practices and forms of life of religious believers, an emphasis on the difference between religious and other areas of discourse, and warnings against applying scientific or historical standards to religious judgements, but the positive story of the meaning of religious utterances is often left as a promissory note. However, there are some areas where more substantial points of disagreement can be pursued. For instance, many supporters of the face value theory will reject the pluralist or fragmentary accounts of truth that inform the minimalist approach. Also, even if one is sympathetic to a pluralist account of truth, it does not straightforwardly follow that truth in religion is different from truth in science or history (for a defense of this point see Scott 2013: ch. 11). Religious minimalism will also be rejected by non-cognitivists. If the descriptiveness of religious language is secured as easily as minimalists propose, then this will undermine the non-cognitivist position that it is—despite superficial appearances—not descriptive. Non-cognitivists argue that the “propositional surface” of language conceals a variety of different functions: ethical statements express approval or disapproval, mathematical statements are stipulations, and so on. For a defense of this see Blackburn 1998.

Wittgenstein’s work on religion has served as a sourcebook for modern opposition to the face value theory. His remarks have been seen as lending support to many of the positions considered in this article. Non-cognitivists can find support in Wittgenstein’s characterisation of religion as “a passionate commitment to a system of reference” (1970 [1994, 64]; see also Tilghman 1991); fictionalists in his proposal that religious believers live their lives according to certain “pictures”; non-assertoric speech act theorists in his comparison of religious utterances to commands (1970 [1994, 61]). Wittgenstein was even attracted (if only briefly) to a subjectivist interpretation of God-talk ([PO]: 42). Given Wittgenstein writings on religion are only infrequent and relatively brief, it is perhaps not surprising that, beyond his clear resistance to the face value theory, he would not have settled views on the topic. For accounts profoundly influenced by or interpretative of Wittgenstein, see Winch (1987), N. Malcom (1997), Rhees (1970).

The minimalist reading of Wittgenstein is supported by his apparent endorsements of a deflationary account of truth (1953: 136), although he does not explicitly endorse the idealised justification theory that Putnam proposes. However, the best evidence for minimalism comes from his emphasis on the differences between the use of religious sentences, and historical or scientific (and in general empirical and descriptive) sentences. Specifically, he points up differences between the standards of warrant employed in religious and other discourses—the kinds of circumstance in which a religious believer judges something to be true, grounds for disagreements between religious believers and non-believers, and so on. This pervades his work on religion. For example, Wittgenstein compares the religious belief in the Last Judgement with scientifically based beliefs, or ordinary beliefs about observable states of affairs (he gives the example “There is a German aeroplane overhead”). While religious believers may speak of “evidence” and “historical events”, Wittgenstein argues that the evidence and events cited in connection with religious judgements do not constitutes reasons to believe them in the way that evidence given in support of a hypothesis gives a reason to believe that the hypothesis is true. In religious discourse “reasons look entirely different from normal reasons” (1966: 56), religious belief is not “a matter of reasonability” (1966: 58), religious beliefs are not hypotheses or opinions, they are not properly spoken of as objects of knowledge or as having a high probability, and when historical facts are introduced in support of religious belief “they are not treated as historical, empirical, propositions” (1966: 57). Here Wittgenstein seems at pains to emphasise the contrast between religious discourse and empirical discourses. Indeed, he implies that when taken (or where offered) as reporting scientific facts or scientific theories, religious sentences are in error. Wittgenstein is not, according to the minimalist interpretation, seeking to find any disadvantageous comparison between religion and science; to show, for example, that religion is merely expressive of attitudes, while science is properly descriptive. Rather, he is describing the different standards that make for truth and descriptiveness in these fields of discourse and, in so doing, elucidating the distinctive characteristics of religious truth as well as other realism-relevant concepts.

Notably, if Wittgenstein was a minimalist about religious discourse then one standard line of objection to his account is misplaced. Wittgenstein is sometimes criticised as proposing that religious discourse should be quarantined from other areas of discourse, in particular science and history. This is seen as leading to a variety of fideism, where religious beliefs are compartmentalised and unsusceptible to non-religious intellectual evaluation. The objection is forcefully prosecuted by Kai Nielsen. According to Wittgenstein, Nielsen argues,

no philosophical or other kind of reasonable criticism, or for that matter defence, is possible for forms of life or, indeed, of any form of life, including Hinduism, Christianity and the like. (2000: 147)

However, contrasting the different standards exhibited by religious and scientific discourses is consistent with scientifically or historically well-founded evidence informing religious judgement. Indeed, minimalists would be remiss in not taking account of the fact that historical evidence clearly is seriously weighed in a variety of religious beliefs including belief in Christ’s resurrection, or the creation of the world, and beliefs about miracle workers and what they have done. Insofar as this happens, the verdicts of historical or scientific investigation can modify religious judgements. In a similar way, many religious judgements are dependent on historically or scientifically assessable evidence. For example, compelling evidence that the documentary and eyewitness testimony for a miracle was a hoax would be a good reason not to believe that the miracle in question occurred and this evidence comes from “outside” the religious language game. However, minimalists can allow that empirical evidence is part of the justification for many religious beliefs while maintaining the theory that religious discourse employs distinct standards of justification to science.

Although they have received less attention that the other topics in this article, two other issues relating to religious language should be noted. First, the reference of “God”, second, the logic of religious language.

Recent work on the reference of “God” mostly proceeds from the assumption that “God” is a name rather than a title or a description (for criticism of this view see Johnston 2011: 6–7; for supporting arguments see Scott 2013: 86–7). From this starting point, attention has focused on how to apply the rich resources of research on names from the philosophy of language to this case. For example, according to descriptivist theories “God” has a descriptive content (a view that stretches back at least as far as Anselm), whereas according to Millian theories “God” refers to its bearer without conveying any information about the object referred to. The latter theory can be combined with a causal theory of reference (Kripke 1980) to explain how the name becomes attached to the referent. Although many of the arguments in this debate derive from the philosophy of language, there are also interesting implications of these positions for the philosophy of religion. For instance, a descriptivist theory appears to place limits on how wrong we can be about what God is like. A causal theory of reference, in contrast, will need to be backed up by a defence of the possibility of causal interaction with God and an account of how God is named. For discussion of these theories see Alston 1989 and 1991, Gellman 1997 and Sullivan 2012. For a recent review of the field see Scott 2013: ch. 7.

Does religious language adhere to a non-classical logic? This issue has been raised in at least two contexts. First, some of the writings of authors in the apophatic tradition have been seen as supporting a paraconsistent logic of religious language, specifically dialetheism, the view that some contradictory sentences are true (see Priest 2002: 22–3, although Scott & Citron 2016: 72 cast doubt on this as a plausible interpretation of apophatic authors). Second, Michael Dummett considers a number of arguments in favour of the view the divine omniscience entails bivalence, i.e., that for any statement p it is determinately either true or false. For example, if God knows that p , then He knows that he knows that p and therefore it is true; but if God does not know p then He knows that He does not know it and hence knows that it is not true. From this it can be shown that God must know whether p is true or false, thereby securing bivalence (2004: 94–96; see also 1991: 318–9, 348–351). Since, for Dummett, realism for a field of discourse hinges on the success of the principle of bivalence for the statements of that discourse, it would follow that theism leads to global realism. For a critical discussion of Dummett’s arguments see Scott and Stevens 2007.

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Overview – Religious Language

Religious language in A level philosophy looks at the meaning of religious statements, such as:

• “God exists”
• “God answers my prayers”
• “God loves us”

This topic is not about whether these statements are true or false. Instead, the debate is about whether such religious language is meaningful or whether it is meaningless . At first glance, it might seem obvious what “God exists” means. But there are philosophical definitions of meaningful which are used to argue religious language is meaningless:

• Verificationism says only statements that can be verified are meaningful
• Falsificationism says only statements that can (in principle) be falsified are meaningful

You also need to know the difference between cognitivist and non-cognitivist views of religious language .

Cognitivism and non-cognitivism

All the arguments we’ve looked at so far ( ontological , cosmological , teleological , problem of evil ) assume a cognitivist view of religious language.

The arguments so far treat “God exists” as a scientific, empirical statement – i.e. a statement that aims to literally describe how the world is. They then aim to show that this statement is either true or false.

But some philosophers argue that religious language is non-cognitive. This is to say that religious language is not to be taken literally as true or false (in a similar way to how moral non-cognitivism says moral judgements are not to be taken as literally true or false).

Cognitivism is perhaps the ‘common-sense’ view of religious language. When someone says “God exists”, “God loves me”, or “God answers my prayers” then, according to cognitivism, they are making a statement that is intended to be taken literally as true or false.

Non-cognitivist statements are neither true or false. In the context of religious language, a non-cognitivist might say religious statements like those above express someone’s attitude to the world.

Religious language is meaningless

There’s some sense in which it may seem obvious that “God exists” is meaningful – we know what someone means when they say it. But ‘meaningful’ in a philosophical context means something a bit different:

AJ Ayer: verification principle

If you don’t remember from metaethics , AJ Ayer’s verification principle says: a statement only has meaning if it is either:

• An analytic truth (e.g. “a triangle has 3 sides”)
• Empirically verifiable (e.g. “water boils at 100c”)

Any statement that does not fit these descriptions is meaningless , according to verificationism. This is a similar claim to Hume’s Fork from epistemology .

Applying the verification principle to religious language, Ayer argues that statements like “God answers my prayers” and “God exists” are not analytic truths. Further, they are not empirically verifiable or falsifiable (see below) .

Therefore, according to Ayer’s verificationism, religious language is meaningless.

Problem: Self-defeating

In response to Ayer’s argument you can argue that Ayer’s verification principle fails its own test.

Ayer’s claim that “a statement is only meaningful if it is analytic or empirically verifiable” is itself neither an analytic truth or empirically verifiable! Therefore, according to its own criteria, the verification principle is meaningless.

Falsifiability

Despite how it may sound, falsifiability is not about being true or false. Instead, falsifiability is part of what it takes for a statement to be meaningful .

• Falsifiable statements are meaningful and capable of being true or false
• Unfalsifiable statements are meaningless , and not capable of being true or false.

A statement is falsifiable if it is inconsistent with some possible observation. In other words, there has to be some possible evidence that could count against that statement – otherwise the statement is meaningless.

The statement “water boils at 100°c” is falsifiable because it could be proven wrong by some possible observation. For example, if we heated a beaker of water and it didn’t boil despite a reliable thermometer showing 500°c, this observation would count against the statement. So, “water boils at 100°c” is a falsifiable and meaningful statement because there are possible tests that could prove it wrong.

In contrast, the statement “everything in the universe doubles in size every 10 seconds” is unfalsifiable because no possible observation could disprove it . You could use a ruler to measure things every 10 seconds but this couldn’t disprove the claim because you could just say that the ruler doubled in size as well! There is seemingly no possible experiment that could disprove the statement “everything in the universe doubles in size every 10 seconds” and so it is unfalsifiable and meaningless.

Antony Flew: Invisible Gardener

Antony Flew gives the following analogy in an attempt to show that religious language – in particular the statement “God exists” – is unfalsifiable , and therefore meaningless:

• Two explorers find a clearing in a jungle. Both weeds and flowers grow here.
• Explorer A says the clearing is the work of a gardener. Explorer B disagrees.
• To settle the argument, they keep watch for the gardener.
• After a few days, they haven’t seen him, but Explorer A says it’s because the gardener is invisible
• So, they set up an electric fence and guard dogs to catch the gardener instead
• But, after a few more days, they still haven’t detected him
• Explorer A then says that not only is the gardener invisible, he’s also intangible, makes no sound, has no smell, etc.
• Explorer B: What is the difference between this claim and the claim that the gardener doesn’t even exist?
• In other words, Explorer A’s theory is unfalsifiable – nothing could possibly prove this theory wrong, but nothing could prove it correct either.
• Because it is unfalsifiable, Explorer A’s theory is meaningless.

• Jungle clearing = the world
• Invisible gardener = God
• Flowers = Good
• Weeds = Evil

So, Flew is arguing that “God exists” is meaningless because it is unfalsifiable in the same way the existence of the invisible gardener is unfalsifiable. We can’t even use the problem of evil as evidence against God’s existence because the religious believer just creates reasons (e.g. free will , soul-making ) why an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God would allow evil.

Flew argues that because the religious believer accepts no observations count as evidence against belief in God, the religious believer’s hypothesis is unfalsifiable and meaningless.

Religious language is meaningful

You can think of the arguments below as responses to Flew and Ayer’s claims that religious language is meaningless. These arguments take different approaches:

• Arguing “God exists” is verifiable so passes Ayer’s verification principle (Hick)
• Rejecting Ayer’s verificationist definition of meaningful (see above)
• Arguing “God exists” is falsifiable so Flew’s jungle clearing analogy fails (Mitchell)
• Rejecting Flew’s falsificationist criteria of meaningful (Hare).

Hick: eschatological verification

Eschatological verification: A statement that can be verified after death, or at the end of time.

John Hick agrees with Ayer that “God exists” is not empirically verifiable in this life . However, Hick argues that many religious claims are about things beyond the limits of human life . And, he argues, such religious claims are falsifiable because it is possible to verify them after we die. For example, many theists believe in a life after death during which they will meet or otherwise experience God (which would be unambiguous verification that “God exists” is true).

To illustrate this, Hick tells a parable of a ‘celestial city’ :

• Two men are travelling on a road – it is the only road there is, so they both must travel it
• Traveller A believes the road leads to a celestial city, whereas Traveller B believes the road leads nowhere and that the journey is meaningless
• As they travel along the road, they experience both “refreshment and delight” and “hardship and danger”
• When they turn the last corner of the road, one of them will be proved right: If traveller A is correct and there is a celestial city, his belief will be verified.

In this parable, Traveller A is the theist and Traveller B is the atheist. The “hardship and danger” represents the problem of evil . If the theist is correct, his belief will be verified in the afterlife when he meets God – this is the equivalent of reaching the celestial city.

So, in response to Ayer’s verification principle , Hick says “God exists” is verifiable (and therefore meaningful). It may not be empirically verifiable, but it is eschatologically verifiable: If “God exists” is true, then it can be verified after we die.

Basil Mitchell: resistance fighter

Mitchell agrees with Flew that in order for a statement or belief to be meaningful it must be possible for some observation to count against it (i.e. it must be falsifiable in order to be meaningful).

But, Mitchell argues, just because there are some observations that count against a certain belief, that doesn’t automatically mean we have to reject that belief. Mitchell gives the following example to illustrate this:

• You are in a war, your country has been occupied by an enemy
• You meet a stranger who claims to be leader of the resistance
• You trust this man
• But the stranger acts ambiguously, sometimes doing things that appear to support the enemy rather than your own side
• Yet you continue to believe the stranger is on your side despite this and trust that he has good reasons for these ambiguous actions

In this analogy, the stranger represents God and his ambiguous actions represent the problem of evil . Mitchell is arguing that we can accept that the existence of evil counts as evidence against the statement “God exists” (and so it is falsifiable ) without having to withdraw from belief in this statement.

Mitchell argues that religious beliefs are not ‘provisional hypotheses’ like scientific statements that the believer is totally detached from. But nor are religious beliefs ‘vacuous formulae’ that the believer holds regardless of any evidence to the contrary.

Instead, reasonable religious beliefs are a kind of middle ground: They are ‘significant articles of faith’ . The religious believer is invested in these beliefs and so doesn’t withdraw from them as soon as the slightest evidence to the contrary turns up. However, this is not to say that the religious believer would believe “God exists” in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary – that would be irrational or, to use Mitchell’s term above, a ‘vacuous formulae’.

So, Mitchell is arguing that we can accept that the existence of evil counts as evidence against God’s existence (and so “God exists” is falsifiable and meaningful ) without withdrawing belief in God.

R.M. Hare: bliks

According to Hare, religious statements are not things that can just be shown to be true or false. Instead, they are basic fundamental beliefs that are not empirically testable – Hare calls these attitudes ‘bliks’.

You assure this student that university lecturers are not trying to kill him and provide tons of evidence, yet the student still believes it anyway. Imagine, for example, that you decide to go with him to speak to a university lecturer and the lecturer acts totally normal:

You: See, he’s fine – the university lecturer isn’t trying to kill you! Paranoid student: But he was just pretending to be normal so as not to reveal his true plan to kill me!

So, no amount of evidence/reassurance will convince the student that his blik is false. In other words, their blik is unfalsifiable .

But despite being unfalsifiable, Hare argues that bliks are still meaningful to the person who holds them. In the case of the university lecturers example, the blik clearly means something to the paranoid person because it has an effect on his behaviour: He won’t go to lectures, and will look over his shoulder to check university lecturers aren’t following him, for example.

Hare argues that religious language is the same: “God exists” may be unfalsifiable to people who have this blik, but it clearly means something to them. For example, people who believe “God exists” might pray or go to Church – it means enough to them that it affects their behaviour.

In other words, a blik is unfalsifiable but still meaningful to the person who holds it.

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Essay on Religious Language

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Religious Language

Michael Scott

The University of Manchester

This study reviews some of the principal themes in contemporary work on religious language. Unlike other recent surveys, the most pressing issues about religious language are addressed from the perspective of the philosophy of language; different positions taken on these issues by philosophers of religion and theologians are considered. Topics that are covered include: the subject matter of religious discourse, reductionism and subjectivism, expressivism, the nature of religious metaphor, religious fictionalism and truth in religious discourse. The study also looks at the relationship between questions about religious language and cognate areas of philosophy of religion such as epistemology and metaphysics, and potential future directions of research.

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Language of Religion, Religions as Languages. Introduction to the Special Issue ‘Religions and Languages: A Polyphony of Faiths’

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• Published: 31 March 2022
• Volume 61 , pages 1–7, ( 2022 )

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• Andrea Vestrucci   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6336-1036 1 , 2  

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Religions use linguistic and non-linguistic codes of meaning to express their contents: natural tongues, music, sculpture, poetry, rituals, practices... Also, religions provide the semantic context and the rules to produce, validate, and interpret their expressions: as such, religions can be considered languages. The Sophia Special Issue ‘Religions and Languages: A Polyphony of Faiths’ explores the multifaceted relationships of world religions with languages broadly construed, intended as other religious codes, natural tongues, artistic forms, digital media, and even science. Do natural languages modify themselves in order to convey a divine message? How do artistic means of expression accommodate religious contents? What are the aspects of interaction between religions, technological advances, and scientific methods? The five contributions in this issue offer innovative, compelling, and engaging perspectives regarding this complex and fascinating issue.

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Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

We do not choose our family. We do not choose our name. Along with our family and our name, we also do not choose the natural language(s) we learn during the first years of our life—our ‘mother tongue(s).’ Mother tongues play an essential role in our interaction with the world and in our orientation in the world. Every aspect of our world experience passes through language—even if it is just to say: ‘Words fail me!’ Thus, language modifies the world: our world is a world that is said in a specific tongue.

Since there are many natural languages, perhaps different languages enable different access to the world. Are there as many relationships to the world as languages? Is the so-called Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis true? Perhaps, one of the problems in demonstrating that hypothesis is precisely language’s omnipresence: language is simultaneously the means used to demonstrate the hypothesis and the object under examination.

Another thing we might receive at the beginning of our life is a religious identity. The reception of this identity comes in at least two ways: a direct way and an indirect way. By ‘direct way’ I mean the presentation (more or less free) of a religious identity by the family group or religious order (e.g. baptism). By ‘indirect way’ I mean the religious presence that marks the area, town, or country in which we grow.

In light of this, one can infer that a religious message is claimed to be true only for the habitude of being imbued with a religious tradition—in most cases the tradition of the family or of the birth/living place. The constant exposure to this religious tradition transforms a religious message into an unquestionable truth. So—the argument goes—the supposed truth of a religious message is a matter of self-delusion because it does not depend on the message itself but just on the reiterated and/or coercive contact with the message (Dawkins, 2016 ).

I make two observations on that. First, a religion can surely have a core set of ‘truths’ (messages, teachings, doctrines) that circumscribe the identity of this religion and its difference from the others, but this core set is not necessarily consistent (it is not a set of axioms), and for this reason, it is open to reinterpretations, rearrangements, and diversifications. Otherwise, there would be no history of religions, but just a crystallized and disembodied doctrinal recapitulation. Second, religious truths are universal in a very peculiar way: they activate only within the specific religion in which these truths are formulated. In other words, the validity of a religion’s truths spans across all possible expressions of that religion (rituals, discourses, practices…), precisely because these truths establish the connection between these expressions and the actual existence of that religion; therefore, the validity of a religion’s truths does not span across the expressions of other religions. Footnote 1 I will develop this shortly.

The same argument can be applied to anything uttered in any natural language, and not only religious ‘truths.’ In light of the plurality of natural languages, the specific access to the world provided by a language x might not be understood in a language y . Different hermeneutics are in place in different linguistic settings.

However, for natural languages, there is translatability : something expressed in a language can be translated into another language with no (remarkable) semantic loss—perhaps with the exception of poetry. Footnote 2 ‘The snow is white,’ ‘बर्फ सफेद है,’ ‘雪は白い,’ A hó fehér’ … the same message can be formulated in different languages.

Between religions, translatability is more complex. Sure, the teachings of a religion can be translated (more or less successfully) into multiple languages—the evidence of this is that some religions are practiced in very different tongues. But translatability from one religion to another is a challenge, because it is hard to find a common semantic ground between religions. Translating ‘The snow is white’ across languages is easy because there is a common semantic ground: the shared empirical experience that the object called ‘snow’ has the property of being ‘white.’ In sum, this common ground is the definition of an object of common experience. In the case of religions, translating a religious expression across religions is difficult, because the ‘object’ defined, represented, or conveyed by this expression (one or more deities, a notion, a virtue…) is not common, but it is specific to this or that religion—and it is specific because it characterizes this or that religion and its difference from other religions. Thus, the semantic commonality between religions is not linear. Footnote 3

This semantic non-linearity across religions is just the tip of the iceberg. Religions provide not only their symbols’ meanings (the semantics), but also the ways of combining such symbols (the syntax), the definition of the context for these symbol combinations (the pragmatics), and in some cases even the symbols’ sacred origin (a sort of semiotics). In sum, religions provide the rules of composition (the grammar) and of validation (the logic) of their own expressions—either explicitly, e.g., in a set of core teachings (sacred texts, tenets, dogmas …), or implicitly, e.g., in living practices and habits. Hence, the semantic encounter between religions is not linear because it is also an encounter between specific (religious) grammars and logics, i.e., between definitions of specific (religious) linearities. In other words, religious truths are ‘universal’ in the sense that they are valid within, and only within, the semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic contexts defined by a specific religious grammar and logic. It follows that each religion is not just a specific use of language: it is a specific language on its own—with vernaculars, neologisms, contradictions, and developments. As it makes no sense to say that a natural language is superior to another language, so it makes no sense to say that a religion is superior to another religion.

The issue of translatability is further complicated by the notion of sacred language: many religions attribute to a specific language a holy status, as the elective vessel to convey a divine message. Qur'anic Arabic, L’shon Hakodesk, Sanskrit, and Classic Armenian are just a few examples of sacred language. Any translation from a holy linguistic vessel into a ‘secular’ natural language loses some of the sacrality of what is stated in that sacred language. Thus, religions are multi-layered, internally complexified systems of communication.

These reflections invite the formulation of the hypothesis that religions use natural languages not only to convey a message through these languages, but also to convey a religious message about these languages: the message that no human language is able to fully express a divine message. Thus, religions might use language ‘against itself,’ so to say, in order to formulate the idea that, from a religious perspective, all human languages are limited. When used to express a religious meaning, a language simultaneously expresses its own religious limitation (Vestrucci, 2019 ).

However, religions do not use only natural languages, but also other ‘languages’ lato sensu , i.e., other codes of meaning, other systems of human communication. One of these codes is arts. It is difficult to find a religion which does not use music and rhythms in rites, meditations, holy readings, etc. Moreover, architecture, sculpture, abstract or figurative decorations, and various techniques of painting are all employed in religious settings. Another example is poetry, or, more generally, the metaphoric use of language; thanks to its rhythmic component, poetry is used in sacred texts, ritualistic formulae, and prayers.

Also, religion interacts with other specific and widespread codes such as the languages of technology and of science. There are negative and positive examples of such interaction: the recent COVID-19 pandemic has forced the invention of alternative, technology-driven forms of worship and spiritual care; religions might refer to scientific explanations both as challenges (as in the case of cosmological and evolutionistic theories) and as resources (as in the case of the ecological emergence inviting to reformulate interreligious responsibility) (Sherma & Bilimoria, 2022 ).

The Sophia Special Issue ‘Religions and Languages: A Polyphony of Faiths’ explores the multifaceted relationship of world religions with languages qua codes of meaning. These codes can be other religious languages, and in this case, the relationship is a (more or less harmonic) polyphony of faiths. Or these codes can be natural languages, artistic codes, digital media, and science. Do natural languages modify themselves in order to convey a divine message? How do artistic forms of expression accommodate religious contents? What are the different aspects of interactions between religions, technological advances, and scientific methods? The five contributions in this issue offer highly innovative, compelling, and engaging perspectives in this complex and fascinating issue.

The first contribution, by Francis X. Clooney, presents an encounter between two religions, Hinduism and Christianity, in two specific forms: Vaishnavism and Catholicism. This encounter is built in two moments: the first moment is the contact made by Clooney, a highly respected academic and a Jesuit, with the verses of Tiruviruttam , a sacred poem written by the great Tamil mystic poet Śaṭakōpan (eighth century C.E.); the second moment is the comparison between a verse of this sacred Hindu text, and a verse of the Song of Songs , one of the books constituting the sacred text of Judaism and Christianity. The connection between the two moments is the attitude of the reader—Clooney, and we alongside with him: the attitude of the pilgrim. A pilgrim leaves the motherland to begin a journey in distant lands, entering in contact with people of different rites, different languages, and different texts. The pilgrim approaches this foreign reality respectfully because this reality contains a glimpse of what constitutes the pilgrim’s own identity: after all, beneath the specific differences, the pilgrim still finds a(nother) language, (other) rites, and (other) texts. This contact allows the pilgrim to formulate new insights on their own language, rites, and sacred texts, and thus to deepen their own religious identity. This is precisely what happens in this article: the accurate analysis of the verse from Tiruviruttam opens to rediscover the role of poetry in sacred texts as expression of the limit of human language in conveying a divine message.

The second contribution, by anthropologist Lionel Obadia, studies the cross-contaminations between two apparently distant codes: magic and technological development. On one hand, we have magic, something that is usually considered, perhaps too hastily and superficially, a form of thinking which is connected with irrationality and superstition. On the other hand, we have technology and its development, something that is usually considered and praised as the ultimate achievement of human intelligence and as the most evident mark of the progress of humankind. By engaging these ‘usual considerations’ and our prima facie approaches to magic and technology, Obadia’s article reveals hidden affinities between the two codes and unveils their unexpected facets, thus helping us recalibrate our approach to them. The article analyzes different layers of the relationship between magic and technology: magic is a form of technology in the meaning of a ‘way to modify the world,’ and technology seems to perform things magically, i.e., in a way that defies all reasonable explanations; where present, both magical and technological attitudes permeate human life, and both express complex symbol-manipulation. The article focuses specifically on Artificial Intelligence (AI): it underlines how AI developments serve human ‘magical’ need to transcend our finite condition, and it synthesizes the religious metaphors used in AI-related dystopias.

​The third contribution focuses on the interconnections between three languages: geometry, fine arts, and religion. In her article, Islamic art historian Wendy Shaw explores Islam’s artistic representation of the divine through non-figurative, geometric artistic means. She hints at the religious interpretation of a psychological disposition to recognize an affinity between geometric order and divine order. From this, Shaw underlines the non-semiotic character of geometrical patterns in Islamic arts: the meaning that geometrical arts convey are particular to non-figurative representations. Thus, in contrast to many nineteenth century European considerations, geometrical patterns do not constitute a grammar, but a potential spiritual message. The contribution reconstructs the changes in European interpretations of Islamic geometrical arts, by underlying the shift from an ‘etic’ concept of arts to an ‘emic’ approach focusing on the artistic expression of religion in several cultural frameworks. Islamic geometric art contributes to recalibrating the tension between the secular and the sacred: the imitative expression of the divine in geometric patterns makes it possible to retranslate a spiritual meaning into the observer’s semantic coordinates. The contribution applies this non-semiotic interpretation of geometrical patterns to modern art by presenting a comparative analysis between the works of Iranian artist Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian and Dutch artist M. C. Escher. In both artists’ works, geometrical forms are not semantic placeholders: the meaning they express coincides with ideas suggested in Islamic sources, even though they are not overtly or intentionally religious.

Fourth, philosopher of science and theologian Yiftach Fehige leads us to explore the interactions and distinctions between science and religion, specifically the natural sciences and Judeo-Christian religious tradition. Fehige focuses on the distinction between language and imagination to explain the complex equilibrium between these two different expressions of human intelligence. As the contribution’s title synthesizes, Fehige entertains the notion that science and religion are separated by their specific languages, but they are united by the common use of imagination as the heuristic tool to guide, on one hand, scientific research and, on the other hand, theological speculation. Imagination is at the basis of creativity, which activates when one needs to conceive an empirical or thought experiment to confirm a scientific theory, to express hidden affinities in fine arts, or to formulate intuitions about the divine in theology. Thus, imagination plays a fundamental role in the investigation of truth in science, arts, and religion, providing unity between them. In support of this idea, Fehige refers to the analysis of imagination in the writings of mathematician Jacob Boronsky, philosopher of science Menachem Fisch, physicist Thomas McLeish, and theologian David Brown. Particularly evocative is Fehige’s analysis of the story of the Tower of Babel, where Old Testament exegesis meets epistemological and methodological reflections to unveil unexpected complexities in the Biblical story.

The last contribution, by scholar of religion Andrea Rota, analyzes the speech acts characterizing a specific component of religion: ritual practices. Rota harks back to the notion of ‘collective intentionality’: in specific circumstances, a group of individuals acts, thinks, and/or feels in a way that reflects the intentions of the group itself, rather than of its individual members. Religious rites may explain the emergence of such circumstances. The article focuses on the linguistic structure of Jehovah’s Witnesses’ congregational practices, and in particular the question-and-answer section of JW worship. Rota underlines that, in this dialogical section of the worship, it is a common practice to limit the use of the first and second singular pronouns in favor of the first plural pronoun. The emphasis on the ‘we’-dimension determines a collective intentionality which, at its turn, is expressed through the joint commitment towards active ministry for the congregation’s sake. This explains the apparent contradiction in empirical data collected by Rota between, on one hand, the collective agreement to perform a ministry action (e.g., door-to-door ministry) and, on the other hand, the uneasiness to perform the same action whenever conceived as an individual act. As such, the contribution provides pioneering evidence for the fruitfulness of a real interdisciplinary interaction between analytical philosophy and the social sciences, via the mediation of speech act theory.

This begs the question about how it is possible to group religions under a common label unless there is a basic religious structure or even a universal religious grammar of which all religion are specifications. Pure theoretical models risk to be disembodied from living practices, and empirical studies need further development (Oviedo & Canteras,  2013 ).

The more we shift from world descriptions to abstract notions, the more translation might become problematic as there might not be a 1 : 1 correlation between source language and target language (see Van Orman Quine, 2013 : 70). However, this does not negate translatability: it rather expands translatability to a 1 : ( x > 1) correlation between source language and target language—i.e., it simply confirms that translation is always possible and improvable (see Davidson,  1973 : 19). Poetry is a good example of the limitation of translatability because it uses figures of speech and word organizations that defy the semantic and syntactic boundaries of the specific natural language in which poetry is composed. Yet, poetry does not negate translatability because poetry is still part of the expressions of that natural language, and as such it is translated (more or less successfully). In sum, there is no ‘neutral language’ from which ‘objectively’ evaluating translations and/or claiming that no translation is possible between two languages; there are just specific languages, and we evaluate translation from within this or that specific language which translates, and which is translated. After all, to speak means always already to be in the act of translating.

Even the (common? shared?) experience of a connection with an ‘outer’ dimension (a mystical/meditative status of rapture, pristine gratitude, unconditioned forgiveness, deep unity, and/or awe) is triggered, lived, and communicated through codes, rites, practices, notions, and representations that are specific to each religion.

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Vestrucci, A. Language of Religion, Religions as Languages. Introduction to the Special Issue ‘Religions and Languages: A Polyphony of Faiths’. SOPHIA 61 , 1–7 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-022-00912-5

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A Level Philosophy & Religious Studies

Verificationism, Falsificationism & Language games

Introduction.

In the 20th century, some non-religious philosophers discovered a new approach to undermining religious belief. The typical method had been to criticise the arguments for God’s existence or to defend arguments against God’s existence. Philosophers like Ayer had become frustrated at the lack of progress. Neither side seemed capable of disproving the other.

Ayer’s new method is to deny that religious language actually manages to meet the requirements for counting as meaningful. If religious language is meaningless then it is neither true nor false. It simply fails to refer to reality in either a true or false way. If successful, this method would show that we don’t have to settle the debate over whether God’s existence is true or false. Whether religious language has meaning is a more foundational question which must first be answered. There is no sense in debating whether it is true or false that God exists if the word God cannot first be shown to be a meaningful term.

This topic is concerned with evaluating whether there is anything to Ayer’s method of denying the meaningfulness of religious language.

The debate turns on the complex philosophical question of what meaning actually is and how it functions. Language is something we are very familiar with. We know how to use it, often without thinking about it. When someone uses language and another person finds it meaningful, how does that actually work ?

The distinction between cognitive & non-cognitive

When words come out of someone’s mouth, they are coming from, being triggered by or, most accurately said, ‘expressing’ a certain part of their mind. If you say “The table is made of wood”, that is expressing the part of the mind that contains beliefs. Philosophers call such language cognitive.

If you are in pain and say “ouch”, that word is not expressing the part of the mind which contains beliefs. Philosophers call that non-cognitive, to indicate that it expresses a non-belief. In this case, it would be an expression of 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 more of a non-cognitive feeling/attitude.

When a religious person uses religious language and says ‘God exists’, do they believe that God exists, or feel that God exists?

Logical positivism & Verificationism

Logical Positivism . Philosophers like Comte and Mill were impressed at the power of science and wanted to universally extend the use of the scientific method to all areas of intellectual inquiry. Comte coined the term positivism to refer to the use of empirical data and empirical generalisations with explanatory power. ‘Logical’ refers to language and Russell’s philosophical method of trying to impose precise clarity on language through analysis. Logical positivism is the extension of scientific positivism not just into intellectual practice but into all of language. They claim that only scientific language is meaningful as it alone can be shown through analysis to refer to reality.

Verificationism was invented by the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers that included A. J. Ayer. They attacked rationalism, which often happened to form the basis for religious belief. Ayer argued that the classic debates between empiricists and rationalists “are as unwarranted as they are unfruitful”. Empiricists claim that synthetic knowledge is gained a posteriori. However, rationalists/metaphysicians often claim that their premises are not based on their senses but derived from an a priori faculty of intellectual intuition which enables them to know about reality beyond sense experience.

Ayer thinks a stalemate exists because it is impossible for empiricists to disprove the possibility of a priori reason/thought knowing things beyond sense experience. Empiricism cannot tell us about anything beyond the empirical, including whether or not there is anything beyond it. In other words, claiming the invalidity of metaphysics is itself a metaphysical claim, which is self-contradictory. Wittgenstein summarised the problem that to show a limit to thinking requires being able to think on both sides of that limit.

Ayer thinks he can eliminate metaphysics in a different way. Not based on empirical claims, but on logic. Metaphysicians, like religious philosophers, fail to show how their statements have meaning.

The verification principle is how Ayer did this. It states:

“A sentence is factually significant [meaningful] if, and only if, we know how to verify the proposition it purports to express – that is, if we know what observations would lead us to accept the proposition as true or reject it as false.” – Ayer.

Analytic statements are also meaningful. If a claim cannot be verified by sense experience, then it cannot be shown to refer to reality/facts. Metaphysical language is meaningless because it cannot be verified in sense experience.

The idea is that words get their meaning by refering to things in our shared experience, or by being true by definition. If a word connects to the world, that connection should be verifiable. If someone uses language, such as the word ‘God’, but cannot show what this word refers to, then Ayer objects that he doesn’t know what the word means. If a statement cannot be shown to be about anything then we cannot grant it factual cognitive meaning.

For Ayer, language can only be meaningful if it is cognitive and analytic or verifiable.

‘God’ is a metaphysical term according to Ayer, which means it is about something beyond the empirical world, so there can be no way to empirically verify it. Ayer concludes that he’s not even an atheist, since an atheist says they do not believe in God, but that is still to give the word meaning.

Whether the verification principle is overly restrictive

Strength: Verificationism fits with a scientific understanding of reality.

It restricts meaning to whatever we have, or can in principle have, scientific evidence for. The positivism of Comte and Mill claimed that the immense power and success of science shows it to be the only valid source of knowledge. It makes sense to then extend this to meaning, to clarify our language by uprooting whatever is unscientific.

Ayer’s theory was initially criticised for being overly restrictive of meaning. It would make all statements about history meaningless because they can’t be empirically verified.

Ayer responded by strengthening his theory with weak verification. We can weakly verify anything for which there is some evidence which provides probability for it being the case. E.g. Historical documents and archaeological findings can be verified, and on the basis of those we can weakly verify that there were certain civilisations in the past with certain histories to them.

Weakness: arguably weak verification opens the door to arguments for God, however.

The teleological argument attempts to infer God’s existence from experience of the world. That seems similar to weak verification. We can weakly verify complexity and purpose in the world and use that to verify God’s existence. So, Ayer seems to fail in his attempt to show that religious language is unverifiable and meaningless.

Evaluation defending Verificationism

However, this criticism of Ayer fails because he overcame it with his final version of the verification principle.

Ayer admitted weak verification ‘allows meaning to any indicative statement’.

So, he developed:

• Direct verification – a statement that is verifiable by observation. E.g. ‘I see a key’ is directly verifiable and so has factual meaning.
• Indirect verification – when a direct verification supports a statement which we haven’t directly verified but in principle know how to verify. E.g. ‘This key is made of iron’.

This rules out the possibility of verifying God either directly or indirectly. Even if we see direct evidence of causation or complexity & purpose which supports belief in a God, we still don’t know how to verify God even in principle. So, the verification principle successfully shows that religious language is meaningless.

Evaluation criticizing Verificationism

Verificationism wants to provide criteria for meaning which eliminates metaphysical statements, but the idea of ‘meaning’ itself is a metaphysical concept. Meaning is a mysterious thing which goes on in our minds. It’s hard for empiricists to explain what it actually is. Quine concludes that the verificationism is just a modern linguistic form of Aristotelian metaphysics. Aristotle claimed the essence or formal cause of a human is rational thought. Logical positivists are simply now calling that ‘meaning’.

Quine’s point is successful because it reveals the paradox at the heart of logical positivism. It attempts to restrict our thought to only what we can possibly know through verification. But we do not know what thought, rationality and meaning actually are. The framework of logical positivism is undermined by its own criteria. All we can say, even since Aristotle, is that whatever rationality or meaning are, they seem to be an essential property of being human.

Whether religious language is eschatologically verifiable

Strength: Verificationism cuts through the stalemate in the debate over God’s existence.

Religious philosophers find it difficult to prove that God exists, but similarly atheistic philosophers find it difficult to prove that God does not exists. Ayer’s approach attempted to break this stalemate with a new approach. We shouldn’t even start debating metaphysical questions like whether God exists, since metaphysical terms like ‘God’ are unverifiable and so meaningless.

Weakness: Eschatological verification.

Hick argued that there is a way to verify God and religious language, because when we die, we’ll see God and then we’ll know. One strength of Hick’s approach is that he doesn’t need to actually undermine verificationism itself, only Ayer’s claim that religious language is unverifiable.

Hick illustrates this argument with the parable of the celestial city. Imagine there are two travellers, one representing a theist, the other an atheist. They are walking along a road, representing life. One thinks that a celestial city is at the end of the road, representing an afterlife and God, the other does not. Neither has reached the end of this road before. Hick finishes with this sentence:

“Yet, when they turn the last corner, it will be apparent that one of them has been right all the time and the other wrong.” – Hick.

The strength of Hick’s approach is its making use of Ayer’s claim that something must be verifiable in practice or principle. Ayer gave the example of mountains being on the dark side of the moon as something that was verifiable in principle. They had not seen the dark side of the moon in his time, but they knew that in principle it was possible to go there and look.

Hick is arguing that religious language is also verifiable in principle because we also know that in principle it is possible to die and ‘see’ God.

Evaluation defending Verificationism:

Evaluation: However, we can’t be sure that there really is a celestial city at the end of the road – that there is an afterlife where we can experience and verify God. It’s only a possibility.

The statement that there are mountains on the dark side of the moon was verifiable in principle in Ayer’s time because they knew how to verify it. They knew the moon existed, that travel in space was possible and knew they simply had to look once traveling there.

None of these requirements hold true in the case of the afterlife. Unlike the moon, we do not know that an afterlife exists. It’s possible that it exists, but that is not enough for us to justifiably claim that it is verifiable in principle, because we do not know that there are steps, had we the means to take them, which would provide the verification in question.

So arguably Hick only shows that religious language is ‘possibly’ verifiable. He hasn’t shown that it is verifiable in principle.

Evaluation criticizing Verificationism:

Whether the verification principle is coherent

Strength: Logical positivist theories like Verificationism are based a reasonable claim about meaning.

For a statement to be about reality it must refer to reality. Its reference must be at least in principle testable. If someone claims to be talking about reality but cannot show that they are referring to reality, then it seems valid to deny that their language has cognitive meaning.

Weakness: The verification principle is self-defeating

It states that to be meaningful a statement must be analytic or empirically verifiable. However, that means that in order for the verification principle itself to be meaningful, it must be analytic or empirically verifiable. It’s hard to see how it could be either, however.

This criticism was actually anticipated and discussed by the early verificationists themselves. Carnap was one of them who tried to defend the principle as analytic, but this appears to fail as it seems one could deny it without contradiction. There’s no obvious reason why it should be true by definition that a statement being meaningful means that it is either analytic or empirically verifiable.

The alternative is to take the verification principle empirically. The problem is, if we test through experience what kind of meaning people use, it isn’t restricted to analytic or empirical statements. We find metaphysical talk of e.g., the world of forms or God. So as an empirical statement the principle is simply false.

Overall, the verification principle seems self-defeating. It cannot pass its own test of meaningfulness.

Ayer responds by admitting that the verification principle cannot be a factual statement about the meaning of factual statements and claims instead that it is a methodological stipulation, a tool which the logical positivist adopts for methodological purposes. It is a tool which enables us to figure out whether a statement has empirical meaning.

Evaluation criticizing verificationism:

The tools of empiricism do not disprove rationalism. Ayer appears to reduce the verification principle into a tool one might use if you already agree with empiricism. A priori metaphysical statements are now only meaningless to this particular empirical tool, rather than categorically meaningless. In that case, Ayer has not shown that the non-empirical approach leads to meaningless metaphysical statements, only that they are meaningless from the perspective of the tools of empiricism. This only shows that if we accept empiricism, we will find the results of a non-empirical approach meaningless. A theist can simply say they are not a radical empiricist like Ayer, and avoid his critique.

Falsificationism

Karl Popper thought he had a better theory of empiricism than Verificationism. He was  impressed with Einstein’s prediction that Mercury would wobble in its orbit at a certain time in the future, because if that prediction was wrong, Einstein’s theory would be proved false. Popper was less impressed with Marxists and Freudians because they only looked for verifications of their theories without ever making falsifiable claims. He concluded that empiricism operates by falsification.

A claim/belief is falsifiable if we can imagine what could prove it false, i.e., if it is incompatible with some conceivable state of affairs.

Antony Flew’s application of Falsificationism to religious language

Flew doesn’t say religious language is ‘meaningless’ in the same way the logical positivists did. He’s not trying to say anything categorical about meaning in general.

Flew only intends to explain what is required for making an ‘assertion’, i.e., in making a claim about reality. He then argues that religious language fails to meet those requirements.

“to assert that such and such is the case is necessarily equivalent to denying that such and such is not the case” – Flew.

Asserting ‘X’ is the same as denying ‘not X’. Assertions about the way reality is entail a denial that reality is some other way. E.g. if I assert that a chair is blue, I deny that the chair is red.

Claims about reality are therefore falsifiable. They could be false, because what they denied could be true instead of what they asserted.

A claim that couldn’t be false entails no denial about the way reality is. But if a claim doesn’t deny anything about the way reality is, then it doesn’t assert anything about the way reality is either.

Falsifiability is thus a test of whether a claim asserts anything.

Flew then applies this to religious belief. Religious people can’t say what could prove their belief in God false. So, they are not actually asserting anything about the way things are (since there is no entailed claim about the way things are not).

Flew accepts that religious language has all sorts of meanings, however he insists that it ‘intends’ to contain, or at least presuppose, claims about reality.

This means he takes religious language to expresses beliefs, making it cognitive. However, Flew seems to be adding that to fully count as cognitively meaningful, a statement must also be falsifiable.

So religious language is a failed attempt at cognitive meaning. It is a failed attempt to say something about the way reality is.

Here’s a simpler way to understand this:

• All our beliefs about reality could be false (empiricism is true)
• So, a belief that cannot be imagined to be false, cannot be about reality.
• Religious belief cannot be imagined to be false.
• Therefore, religious language fails to express beliefs about reality.

The parable of the gardener. Flew illustrated his account of belief in God through analogy to belief in a gardener. Two people are walking and see a clearing in a forest. One claims there is a gardener who tends to it, so the other suggest waiting and seeing if that is true. After a while, the believer says that actually, they are an invisible gardener, so they set up barbed wire fences and so on to try and detect this invisible gardener, at which point the believer then says actually, it’s a non-physical gardener.

At this point the unbeliever gets frustrated and asks Flew’s crucial question: “But what remains of your original assertion?”. The religious person claims to believe in a God, but in order to protect that belief from empirical testing they continually add qualifications to the belief, saying it’s ‘not this’ and ‘not that’, etc. Well eventually, it’s going to be nothing, is Flew’s point, causing the concept of God to ‘die a death of a thousand qualifications’.

Flew ends with the question: what is the difference between a world in which this gardener (God) exists, and a world in which it doesn’t? If belief in God is consistent with any possible discovery about reality, then its existence surely can make no difference to reality. It cannot be about reality. Religious language therefore ‘fails to assert’ anything. It is unfalsifiable and thus meaningless.

Whether religious language is falsifiable

Strength: The parable of the gardener strengthens Flew’s Falsificationism.

Even if religious belief does appear falsifiable, in cases where that belief were ever actually tested, they would simply edit their belief rather than admit they were wrong. This highlights

This illustrates the ‘God the gaps’ phenomenon. Throughout history many beliefs have been claimed about God which science has over time shown false, such as the genesis creation story. Rather than accept the falsity of the belief, Christians have edited their belief.

So Flew can conclude that even if religious believers say something could disprove their belief, we are justified in thinking that a mere pretence.

Weakness: Religious belief is actually falsifiable.

St Paul claimed that if Jesus did not rise from the dead then faith is ‘pointless’ (1 Corinthians 15:14). This means that Christianity could be proven false if we find evidence that Jesus did not rise from the dead, such as finding Jesus’ body. This suggests Flew is incorrect to think religious language is always unfalsifiable as there are at least some believers whose belief is incompatible with some logically possible state of affairs. Paul’s religious language passes Flew’s test of falsification and so would be meaningful.

Evaluation defending Falsificationism

The parable of the gardener suggests, however, that if we did discover Jesus’ body, Christians including St Paul might make some excuse as to why it’s actually not a valid test after all. For example, Christians might be tempted to think that the body is a fake put there by the devil. Tempting though that is, it underlines Flew’s point that there really is no way to falsify belief in God.

Evaluation criticizing Falsificationism

John Frame turns the parable of the gardener on its head, imagining a scenario where the gardener is visible and claims to be a royal gardener, and the sceptic refuses to believe that regardless of the evidence.

This shows that Flew’s approach fails because his belief in atheism is also unfalsifiable. Atheists believe there isn’t sufficient evidence to justify belief in God. The issue is, they cannot say what could prove that belief false.  

For example, to add to Frame’s argument, if Jesus appeared again or God re-arranged the stars to say “God is here”, an atheist would simply say that was more likely just a hallucination, or perhaps evidence they are in a simulation. Atheism is also unfalsifiable. So, falsifiability doesn’t seem a valid test for distinguishing between meaningful and meaningless language regarding religion.

Antony Flew vs Basil Mitchell

Strength of Falsificationism: a good test of rationality

Falsificationism seems like a perfect test of whether a person’s belief is about reality or not. If someone seems like they are just holding onto a belief because of faith without any reason or evidence, you can ask them what it could possibly take for them to change their mind. A person with a rational belief based on evidence will be able to answer that question.

Weakness: Basil Mitchell’s response to Flew

Mitchell argued that religious belief actually is based on the rational weighing of evidence so that religious language is cognitively meaningful.

Mitchell first accepted that Flew was right about some religious people who merely have blind faith. Their religious belief is irrationally blind to counter-evidence. However, Mitchell claims that most religious people are not like that. In the majority case, people have evidence for God in the form of their relationship with God, experience of God or experience of the effect of religion on their lives. They also recognise that there is evidence against God’s existence in the form of evil. If a person weighs the evidence for God greater than the evidence against, they will be a believer. So, religious belief can be and often is empirical. It is based on the rational weighing of evidence.

Mitchell imagines an illustrative parable. A soldier is fighting for the resistance against the government in a civil war. One day someone comes to them and claims to be the leader of the resistance. They stay up all night talking and the stranger leaves a strong impression on the soldier. As a result, the soldier decides to have faith in this person, even when they see them fighting for the government.

This is analogous to the way Christians have an initial experience/relationship with God which justifies their faith. They then do recognise that evil is evidence against God. Sometimes people will deal with terrible evil that outweighs the strength of the evidence they had for God. Then, they will stop believing in God. So, their belief was falsifiable. However, Mitchell insists that the level or amount of evil required to falsify a person’s religious belief cannot always be known “in advance”. It depends on too many particular things – e.g.:

“it will depend on the nature of the impression created by the stranger in the first place … on the manner in which he takes the stranger’s behaviour.” – Mitchell

Each individual Christian will have their own limit regarding the amount of evil that would cause them to abandon their belief. Often, this limit will not be known in advance. Nonetheless, there is a limit, and therefore religious language for the most part is falsifiable. So, Flew is wrong to think that for belief to be rational the believer must be able to say in advance what could falsify it, what level of evil could falsify their faith. Sometimes beliefs are rationally inferred from evidence and yet their falsification is not immediately obvious.

Evaluation defending Flew

One problem for Mitchell is that we wouldn’t be able to know which religious believers have an unfalsifiable blind faith, and which simply didn’t know their falsification in advance. We cannot justifiably claim a belief is falsifiable if the falsification for it cannot be given.

Furthermore, a religious person’s ‘experience’ of and personal relationship with God is not really evidence.

In the parable, meeting an actual person counts as evidence. However, religious encounter with God only happens inside people’s minds. That’s not really analogous to actually meeting a person in reality and weighing whether they are on your side.

Experience of and relationship with God is not valid empirical evidence.

Evaluation criticizing Flew

So, Flew’s gardener parable fails to really capture the way religious belief functions. It isn’t a constant process of altering belief to protect it from rational testing. It is based on personal experience, and it is falsifiable.

There are clearly many examples of religious people abandoning their belief due to evil. This fact/observation is the greatest strength of Mitchell’s critique of Flew. It simply looks like a fact that many religious people have faith based on their personal relationship with God until a certain level of evil outweighs it – E.g. their child dies. If you had asked them beforehand they may not have been able to tell you their faith would be undermined by that. So, for the most part, religious belief and language is falsifiable, even if the falsification cannot be known in advance.

Mitchell thus successfully defends the cognitive meaningfulness of religious language.

Swinburne’s critique of logical positivism

Argument for & strength of Falsif/verificationism: For a belief to be about reality, we must know how it could be true or false.

“we know the meaning of the statement if we know the conditions under which the statement is true or false”. M. Schlick, founder of logical positivism.

A cognitive belief about reality is factual, i.e., it concerns facts. Facts can be either true or false. This is the argument for logical positivism. Knowing the truth-requirements of a fact seem to be essential to knowing that fact. So, a fact is only meaningfully understood when it is known how it could be true or false.

For a statement to be about reality (cognitive), there must be a way to verify (Ayer) or falsify (Flew) it. If a person doesn’t know how their belief could be true or false, their belief isn’t actually connected to reality and thus is not factual, i.e., it is cognitively meaningless.

Weakness: Swinburne attacks this claim.

“Surely we understand a factual claim if we understand the words which occur in the sentence which expresses it, and if they are combined in a grammatical pattern of which we understand the significance.” – Swinburne

Swinburne seems to have a more scientific criteria for meaning. If we understand the words in a sentence and the significance of their combination, then it is meaningful to us. We don’t have to know how to test it through experience.

Swinburne created an illustrates of this. We know what toys are and what it would mean for them to come alive when no one was watching. We currently have no way to test whether that truly happens, nor can we even imagine such a test in principle. Yet, it is meaningful because we understand the concepts involved.

Similarly, we may not currently know how to verify or falsify God, but so long as the concept can be understood it is meaningful.

Swinburne’s point is strengthened by the fact that science often operates using his criteria, not Ayer’s or Flew’s. Physicists use their current knowledge & concepts to create theoretical mathematical models such as inflation theory (how the big bang started), dark matter or string theory. We currently don’t know how to verify or falsify those theories. Nonetheless, they are still meaningful to these scientists.

Such theories are constructed mentally through theorizing on the basis of the information about the world.

Evaluation defending verif/Falsificationism

However, Swinburne’s argument fails. He is confusing understanding with cognitive meaning.

Ideas like the toys coming alive or string theory may be understandable but verificationists can still plausibly claim they lack cognitive meaning.

Reality is factual. Cognitive beliefs are those which represent reality. A representation of reality can be either true or false. If we cannot understand how an idea could be true or false, we cannot regard them as being about reality.

There is a sense in which we can understand such ideas, but it is not a cognitive factual sense. So, Ayer and Flew can be defended in their claim that we cannot understand unfalsifiable/unverifiable claims as being factually significant.

Evaluation criticizing verif/Falsificationism

Providing that evidence is Swinburne’s general philosophical project, to create a cumulative case for God’s existence. This included the apparent design in the laws of physics (design arguments) and religious experience.

The logical positivism of Ayer/Flew is actually too radical a form of empiricism even for many scientists. They are wrong about scientific meaning. It can involve ideas we don’t know how to test. So, Religious language is cognitively meaningful even if it’s untestable.

Hare’s non-cognitive ‘Bliks’ vs Ayer & Flew

Strength: Ayer’s verificationism & Flew’s Falsificationism is based on a reasonable claim.

Namely, that for a word to have meaning that we can all agree on it must surely refer to a thing in the world that we can all in principle test (through verif/falsification). If someone is talking about something that does not refer to anything in public experience then we can’t know what they are talking about and it seems valid to call that meaningless.

Weakness: Hare’s non-cognitivism.

R. M. Hare disagreed with Verificationism and Falsificationism, arguing that those theories had failed to truly understand how religious language functioned. They saw religious language as an expression of belief that attempts to describe reality. Since it is unverifiable or unfalsifiable, it fails to describe reality and is thus meaningless. Hare argues that if religious language was not an attempt to describe reality then it isn’t actually making a statement at all and so it wouldn’t make sense to get to the stage of calling it unverifiable or unfalsifiable.

Hare argues that religious language does not express an attempt to describe reality but is instead a non-cognitive expression of a person’s ‘Blik’, meaning their personal feelings and attitude. The expression of attitudes is not an attempt to describe the world, therefore they cannot be true or false. Hare thinks that since Bliks affect our beliefs and behaviour, they are meaningful.

Hare illustrated his theory with the example of a paranoid student who thought his professors were trying to kill him. Even when shown the evidence that they were not trying to kill him, by meeting them and seeing they were nice people, the student did not change their mind.

This shows that what seem like rational beliefs attempting to describe reality can sometimes really be an expression of an irrational Blik. If it were rational, the meaning could be changed by that description being shown to be false. Hare concluded that the student’s belief must be rooted in a non-cognitive attitude or Blik. Religious language functions similar to this. It may appear to be cognitive on the surface, but it is actually non-cognitive.

Evaluation defending Ayer & Flew

Hare’s argument is unsuccessful because although he saves religious language from being disregarded as a meaningless failed attempt to describe the world, nonetheless he only does so by sacrificing the ability of the meaning of religious language to have any factual content. So when a religious person says ‘God exists,’ for Hare they are really expressing their attitude rather than actually claiming that there objectively exists a God. Many religious people would claim however, that they really do mean that ‘there objectively exists a God’, irrespective of their attitude.

Aquinas wrote many long books attempting to prove the seemingly cognitive belief in God true. So arguably Hare fails to capture the true meaning of religious language

Evaluation criticizing Ayer & Flew

Hare’s argument is successful because although many religious people may indeed feel that they are making factual claims about reality, their conception of reality is really just an aspect of their Blik. Saying God exists therefore really serves to add psychological force and grandeur to what is actually just their attitude.

Hume’s argument for non-cognitivism

Strength of the non-cognitive approach: Hume’s psychology

Hare was influenced by Hume’s psychological argument for non-cognitivism. The cognitive part of our mind is controlled or enslaved by our non-cognitive feelings.

Psychology after Freud accepted this premise to a degree. We are often unaware of the way in which our supposedly reasoned judgements/beliefs are actually controlled by our unconscious socially conditioned feelings/attitudes. When we have a strong emotion, our mind creates a reason that justifies believing it and acting on it. This is called rationalisation. The human mind is more like a lawyer than a scientist.

This explains why people refuse to accept or evidence which goes against their deeply held beliefs, such as with Hare’s paranoid student and also religious belief. Religious language has an appearance of cognitive meaning but is actually expressing the emotions/attitudes (Blik) their belief is rooted in.

Weakness: Hume’s theory of human psychology is controversial.

Kant famously rejected it, arguing that humans were capable of putting their emotions aside and acting out of purely rational motives.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt thinks Hume was closer to the truth than Kant, but still think that Hume went a bit too far by saying that reason was always a slave to the emotions.

Religious belief clearly involves strong emotions and attitudes, but arguably it is still based on reason in some ways. For example, Flew actually changed his mind about God and became religious after being convinced by a modern version of the design argument. This suggests that although religious language might often be rooted in non-cognitive attitudes, nonetheless reason can affect our cognitive attitudes. Hume is wrong to say that reason is just a slave of the emotions. It often is, but nonetheless our reason can control our emotions to some degree, especially long term.

So, Hare is wrong to say that religious language can only be rooted in non-cognitive emotions.

Evaluation defending non-cognitivism

Evaluation: Examples such as Flew, who changed his mind about a higher power later in life due to logical argument, are extremely rare. Most religious believers simply follow the faith of their family or culture. This suggests that Hume & Hare is correct about the vast majority of cases of religious language.

Furthermore, Philosophers who make philosophical arguments for religious belief are arguably not really using religious language in the typical way. Religious language as it commonly exists socially is therefore not best represented by the way religious philosophers use it. They try to put an intellectual sophistication on something which is really just attitudes and spiritual feelings. So, we can conclude that the religious language of the average believer is non-cognitive.

Evaluation criticizing non-cognitivism

Religious language at least sometimes can be based on reason and thus express cognitive beliefs. There is a spectrum of reasoned religious belief from blind faith on the one hand to very rational religious belief like that of Aquinas.

Mitchell accepted that some religious people have blind faith, so perhaps Hare is right about them. However, Mitchell insists they are the minority. That being the case, it looks like Hare is wrong regarding the majority of religious belief.

Language Games

Wittgenstein advanced two significantly different theories of meaning in his life. The first was quite similar to verificationism and was called the picture theory of meaning. Words get their meaning by connecting to the world similarly to how a picture represents reality. The logic of our language somehow reflects the logic of reality.

Later in his life Wittgenstein significantly changed his mind and developed the theory of language games. This claimed that words get their meaning by connecting to the social reality, not the physical reality.

Our social reality is composed of different types of social interaction, which Wittgenstein described as different ‘games’ that we play. Game is meant in a very broad sense, a social practice governed by rules.

Throughout life, we are inducted into various social roles/games and we learn, consciously or unconsciously, what behaviour is considered socially correct in that context, i.e., follows the rules. Wittgenstein’s crucial insight was to recognise that words are a type of behaviour.

Think about the different ways people behave and speak when in an interview, talking with friends or with family. Imagine if we started talking in an interview like we do when talking with friends. That would be strange in that context. Meaning is therefore contextual. It depends on the social context, the ‘language game’ in which we are speaking. The meaning of language depends on how it is used in a particular social game, not on its reference to physical reality. The meaning of a word is not found by looking for what it refers to but by seeing how it is used.

“Don’t look for the meanings; look for the use”. – Wittgenstein.

There can be as many different language games as there can be different types of social interaction, I.e potentially unlimited. They are differentiated by the rules which constitute them.

Religious people play the religious language game. Scientists play the scientific language game. Uprooting a word from the religious language game and try to analyse it within the context of the scientific language game is to misunderstand how meaning works. Words get their meaning from the language game in which they are spoken. So it’s no surprise to Wittgenstein that Ayer and Flew find religious language meaningless, since they are not religious and so are not a participant in the religious language game.

When Wittgenstein remarks that we have to ‘know’ the rules of a game to play it, he doesn’t necessarily mean consciously. For perhaps most of human social interaction we are following rules that we have unconsciously internalised. For that reason it can be very hard to say exactly what the rules of the religious language game are, as opposed to the scientific language game which is more cognitively formalised.

Wittgenstein argued that the scientific language game can be about reality, since it is about evidence, experience and reason, whereas the religious language game is about faith and social communities, conventions & emotions.

Wittgensteinian fideism vs natural theology

Strength: Wittgenstein’s theory captures and explains the disconnect between religious and scientific meaning in a way that accords with important strands of Christian theology.

Fideism is the view that faith alone can gain knowledge of God, not reason. Wittgenstein has inspired a view called Wittgensteinian fideism, though it’s not clear to what degree Wittgenstein held it himself. On this view, religion is purely a matter of faith. It is a totally separate language game to science which is a matter of a posteriori reason. This has a long tradition within Christian theology.

Tertullian (3 rd century) asked “what has Athens to do with Jerusalem”, implying that the philosophical reasoning of the ancient Greeks has nothing to do with Christian faith.

As Pascal put it, the  “God of the philosophers”  that philosophers argue about is not  “the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob”. These days, Fideism tends to be a protestant approach.

Religion and science having nothing to do with each other does explain why scientific evidence can neither prove nor disprove religious belief. Viewing them as separate forms of life does make sense of their apparent disconnect.

Weakness: Language games leads to theological anti-realism

Wittgenstein’s theory suggests that when a religious person says ‘God exists’ they aren’t actually claiming that God exists in objective reality in a scientific sense. Really, they are just expressing their participation in a certain form of life. They are speaking in a certain way due to internalising a set of behavioural rules developed in a culture over time.

The problem is, most religious people would reject that. That think they really do mean that there objectively exists a God. They would claim that religious language is cognitive. It expresses beliefs about reality, not merely participation in a social game.

The view that reason plays a role in religious belief is called natural theology and it is opposed to Fideism.

Aquinas wrote 5 inductive proofs of God’s existence on the basis of empirical observation. Even if they fail logically, it’s hard to deny that they express cognitive belief in God. Aquinas clearly believed in his proofs cognitively. Aquinas’ natural theology holds that analogical religious language is cognitive. So ‘God’s goodness is analogous to ours but proportionally greater’ is objectively true. This looks like an attempt to describe reality, not participate in language game.

Building on Aquinas’ 5 th way, modern scientists & philosophers like Swinburne & Polkinghorne created the anthropic fine-tuning argument. Science cannot explain why the laws of nature are so fine-tuned for human life. God’s design is the best explanation of that. So, Wittgenstein seems wrong for thinking that scientific meaning is radically distinct from religious meaning.

Evaluation defending Wittgenstein

However, we could respond on behalf of Wittgenstein that this particular fusion of religion and science is really itself a unique language game, dissimilar to either the religious or scientific games. Alternatively, Polkinghorne could be argued to not be playing the scientific language game since most scientists reject his ideas.

Evaluation criticizing Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein Fideism and Fideism in general clearly goes too far. Religious language cannot be completely reduced to expression of adherence to a form of life. It expresses cognitive belief. We could say religious belief is false or unverifiable or meaningless, but we cannot justifiably say there is only non-cognitive feeling but no actual religious belief.

Language games, conversion & interfaith dialogue

Strength: language games does seem to accurately capture the way that social life works.

It makes eminent sense to think of different types of social interaction as different games and that what differentiates them is their rules. Each social context has rules governing what is acceptable and not acceptable. These rules will be constantly changing as society changes. Nonetheless, it still seems that what people say depends on the particular language game they are speaking in.

This also explains different religions as different language games or ‘forms of life’.

Weakness : there are elements of religious differences that Wittgenstein struggles to explain.

Wittgenstein claims one can only understand a language game by knowing the rules. So to understand religious language one would have to be a member of that religion. However, it’s hard to explain how people manage to convert to a religion, then. It’s also hard to explain how inter-faith dialogue is possible. If we simply cannot understand the words involved in a language game we are not part of, then such things seem impossible, yet they clearly happen.

furthermore, dividing up human social life into different language games seems very messy. Wittgenstein’s characterisation of language games is imprecise. For example, the ‘religious’ language game can be divided into different religions. Those can often be sub-divided, such as into the ‘Catholic’ language game. Further still, the way the congregation of one Catholic church speak to each other might be different to another, perhaps due to the language game of the village/town they live in. It looks like language games actually overlap and connect in all sorts of ways which ultimately seem impossible to calculate or characterise.

Arguably interfaith dialogue and conversion do not require complete proper understanding. It seems true that only a Christian can truly appreciate the depth of what it means to have faith in Christ. When they share their faith with others through dialogue, including and up to the point of converting others, those they speak to will not have a full appreciation of that meaning until they become Christian themselves.

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Religious Language Essay A-Level AQA Philosophy

Subject: Philosophy and ethics

Age range: 16+

Resource type: Unit of work

Last updated

11 December 2020

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An ungraded essay dealing with Religious language as per the AQA A-Level specification 7172 for Philosophy.

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Article contents

Religion, culture, and communication.

• Stephen M. Croucher , Stephen M. Croucher School of Communication, Journalism, and Marketing, Massey Business School, Massey University
• Cheng Zeng , Cheng Zeng Department of Communication, University of Jyväskylä
• Diyako Rahmani Diyako Rahmani Department of Communication, University of Jyväskylä
•  and  Mélodine Sommier Mélodine Sommier School of History, Culture, and Communication, Eramus University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.166
• Published online: 25 January 2017

Religion is an essential element of the human condition. Hundreds of studies have examined how religious beliefs mold an individual’s sociology and psychology. In particular, research has explored how an individual’s religion (religious beliefs, religious denomination, strength of religious devotion, etc.) is linked to their cultural beliefs and background. While some researchers have asserted that religion is an essential part of an individual’s culture, other researchers have focused more on how religion is a culture in itself. The key difference is how researchers conceptualize and operationalize both of these terms. Moreover, the influence of communication in how individuals and communities understand, conceptualize, and pass on religious and cultural beliefs and practices is integral to understanding exactly what religion and culture are.

It is through exploring the relationships among religion, culture, and communication that we can best understand how they shape the world in which we live and have shaped the communication discipline itself. Furthermore, as we grapple with these relationships and terms, we can look to the future and realize that the study of religion, culture, and communication is vast and open to expansion. Researchers are beginning to explore the influence of mediation on religion and culture, how our globalized world affects the communication of religions and cultures, and how interreligious communication is misunderstood; and researchers are recognizing the need to extend studies into non-Christian religious cultures.

• communication
• intercultural communication

Intricate Relationships among Religion, Communication, and Culture

Compiling an entry on the relationships among religion, culture, and communication is not an easy task. There is not one accepted definition for any of these three terms, and research suggests that the connections among these concepts are complex, to say the least. Thus, this article attempts to synthesize the various approaches to these three terms and integrate them. In such an endeavor, it is impossible to discuss all philosophical and paradigmatic debates or include all disciplines.

It is difficult to define religion from one perspective and with one encompassing definition. “Religion” is often defined as the belief in or the worship of a god or gods. Geertz ( 1973 ) defined a religion as

(1) a system which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic. (p. 90)

It is essential to recognize that religion cannot be understood apart from the world in which it takes place (Marx & Engels, 1975 ). To better understand how religion relates to and affects culture and communication, we should first explore key definitions, philosophies, and perspectives that have informed how we currently look at religion. In particular, the influences of Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Georg Simmel are discussed to further understand the complexity of religion.

Karl Marx ( 1818–1883 ) saw religion as descriptive and evaluative. First, from a descriptive point of view, Marx believed that social and economic situations shape how we form and regard religions and what is religious. For Marx, the fact that people tend to turn to religion more when they are facing economic hardships or that the same religious denomination is practiced differently in different communities would seem perfectly logical. Second, Marx saw religion as a form of alienation (Marx & Engels, 1975 ). For Marx, the notion that the Catholic Church, for example, had the ability or right to excommunicate an individual, and thus essentially exclude them from the spiritual community, was a classic example of exploitation and domination. Such alienation and exploitation was later echoed in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche ( 1844–1900 ), who viewed organized religion as society and culture controlling man (Nietzsche, 1996 ).

Building on Marxist thinking, Weber ( 1864–1920 ) stressed the multicausality of religion. Weber ( 1963 ) emphasized three arguments regarding religion and society: (1) how a religion relates to a society is contingent (it varies); (2) the relationship between religion and society can only be examined in its cultural and historical context; and (3) the relationship between society and religion is slowly eroding. Weber’s arguments can be applied to Catholicism in Europe. Until the Protestant Reformation of the 15th and 16th centuries, Catholicism was the dominant religious ideology on the European continent. However, since the Reformation, Europe has increasingly become more Protestant and less Catholic. To fully grasp why many Europeans gravitate toward Protestantism and not Catholicism, we must consider the historical and cultural reasons: the Reformation, economics, immigration, politics, etc., that have all led to the majority of Europeans identifying as Protestant (Davie, 2008 ). Finally, even though the majority of Europeans identify as Protestant, secularism (separation of church and state) is becoming more prominent in Europe. In nations like France, laws are in place that officially separate the church and state, while in Northern Europe, church attendance is low, and many Europeans who identify as Protestant have very low religiosity (strength of religious devotion), focusing instead on being secularly religious individuals. From a Weberian point of view, the links among religion, history, and culture in Europe explain the decline of Catholicism, the rise of Protestantism, and now the rise of secularism.

Emile Durkheim ( 1858–1917 ) focused more on how religion performs a necessary function; it brings people and society together. Durkheim ( 1976 ) thus defined a religion as

a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things which are set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them. (p. 47)

From this perspective, religion and culture are inseparable, as beliefs and practices are uniquely cultural. For example, religious rituals (one type of practice) unite believers in a religion and separate nonbelievers. The act of communion, or the sharing of the Eucharist by partaking in consecrated bread and wine, is practiced by most Christian denominations. However, the frequency of communion differs extensively, and the ritual is practiced differently based on historical and theological differences among denominations.

Georg Simmel ( 1858–1918 ) focused more on the fluidity and permanence of religion and religious life. Simmel ( 1950 ) believed that religious and cultural beliefs develop from one another. Moreover, he asserted that religiosity is an essential element to understand when examining religious institutions and religion. While individuals may claim to be part of a religious group, Simmel asserted that it was important to consider just how religious the individuals were. In much of Europe, religiosity is low: Germany 34%, Sweden 19%, Denmark 42%, the United Kingdom 30%, the Czech Republic 23%, and The Netherlands 26%, while religiosity is relatively higher in the United States (56%), which is now considered the most religious industrialized nation in the world ( Telegraph Online , 2015 ). The decline of religiosity in parts of Europe and its rise in the U.S. is linked to various cultural, historical, and communicative developments that will be further discussed.

Combining Simmel’s ( 1950 ) notion of religion with Geertz’s ( 1973 ) concept of religion and a more basic definition (belief in or the worship of a god or gods through rituals), it is clear that the relationship between religion and culture is integral and symbiotic. As Clark and Hoover ( 1997 ) noted, “culture and religion are inseparable” and “religion is an important consideration in theories of culture and society” (p. 17).

Outside of the Western/Christian perception of religion, Buddhist scholars such as Nagarajuna present a relativist framework to understand concepts like time and causality. This framework is distinct from the more Western way of thinking, in that notions of present, past, and future are perceived to be chronologically distorted, and the relationship between cause and effect is paradoxical (Wimal, 2007 ). Nagarajuna’s philosophy provides Buddhism with a relativist, non-solid dependent, and non-static understanding of reality (Kohl, 2007 ). Mulla Sadra’s philosophy explored the metaphysical relationship between the created universe and its singular creator. In his philosophy, existence takes precedence over essence, and any existing object reflects a part of the creator. Therefore, every devoted person is obliged to know themselves as the first step to knowing the creator, which is the ultimate reason for existence. This Eastern perception of religion is similar to that of Nagarajuna and Buddhism, as they both include the paradoxical elements that are not easily explained by the rationality of Western philosophy. For example, the god, as Mulla Sadra defines it, is beyond definition, description, and delamination, yet it is absolutely simple and unique (Burrell, 2013 ).

How researchers define and study culture varies extensively. For example, Hall ( 1989 ) defined culture as “a series of situational models for behavior and thought” (p. 13). Geertz ( 1973 ), building on the work of Kluckhohn ( 1949 ), defined culture in terms of 11 different aspects:

(1) the total way of life of a people; (2) the social legacy the individual acquires from his group; (3) a way of thinking, feeling, and believing; (4) an abstraction from behavior; (5) a theory on the part of the anthropologist about the way in which a group of people in fact behave; (6) a storehouse of pooled learning; (7) a set of standardized orientations to recurrent problems; (8) learned behavior; (9) a mechanism for the normative regulation of behavior; (10) a set of techniques for adjusting both to the external environment and to other men; (11) a precipitate of history. (Geertz, 1973 , p. 5)

Research on culture is divided between an essentialist camp and a constructivist camp. The essentialist view regards culture as a concrete and fixed system of symbols and meanings (Holiday, 1999 ). An essentialist approach is most prevalent in linguistic studies, in which national culture is closely linked to national language. Regarding culture as a fluid concept, constructionist views of culture focus on how it is performed and negotiated by individuals (Piller, 2011 ). In this sense, “culture” is a verb rather than a noun. In principle, a non-essentialist approach rejects predefined national cultures and uses culture as a tool to interpret social behavior in certain contexts.

Different approaches to culture influence significantly how it is incorporated into communication studies. Cultural communication views communication as a resource for individuals to produce and regulate culture (Philipsen, 2002 ). Constructivists tend to perceive culture as a part of the communication process (Applegate & Sypher, 1988 ). Cross-cultural communication typically uses culture as a national boundary. Hofstede ( 1991 ) is probably the most popular scholar in this line of research. Culture is thus treated as a theoretical construct to explain communication variations across cultures. This is also evident in intercultural communication studies, which focus on misunderstandings between individuals from different cultures.

Religion, Community, and Culture

There is an interplay among religion, community, and culture. Community is essentially formed by a group of people who share common activities or beliefs based on their mutual affect, loyalty, and personal concerns. Participation in religious institutions is one of the most dominant community engagements worldwide. Religious institutions are widely known for creating a sense of community by offering various material and social supports for individual followers. In addition, the role that religious organizations play in communal conflicts is also crucial. As religion deals with the ultimate matters of life, the differences among different religious beliefs are virtually impossible to settle. Although a direct causal relationship between religion and violence is not well supported, religion is, nevertheless, commonly accepted as a potential escalating factor in conflicts. Currently, religious conflicts are on the rise, and they are typically more violent, long-lasting, and difficult to resolve. In such cases, local religious organizations, places facilitating collective actions in the community, are extremely vital, as they can either preach peace or stir up hatred and violence. The peace impact of local religious institutions has been largely witnessed in India and Indonesia where conflicts are solved at the local level before developing into communal violence (De Juan, Pierskalla, & Vüllers, 2015 ).

While religion affects cultures (Beckford & Demerath, 2007 ), it itself is also affected by culture, as religion is an essential layer of culture. For example, the growth of individualism in the latter half of the 20th century has been coincident with the decline in the authority of Judeo-Christian institutions and the emergence of “parachurches” and more personal forms of prayer (Hoover & Lundby, 1997 ). However, this decline in the authority of the religious institutions in modernized society has not reduced the important role of religion and spirituality as one of the main sources of calm when facing painful experiences such as death, suffering, and loss.

When cultural specifications, such as individualism and collectivism, have been attributed to religion, the proposed definitions and functions of religion overlap with definitions of culture. For example, researchers often combine religious identification (Jewish, Christian, Muslim, etc.) with cultural dimensions (Hofstede, 1991 ) like individualism/collectivism to understand and compare cultural differences. Such combinations for comparison and analytical purposes demonstrate how religion and religious identification in particular are often relegated to a micro-level variable, when in fact the true relationship between an individual’s religion and culture is inseparable.

Religion as Part of Culture in Communication Studies

Religion as a part of culture has been linked to numerous communication traits and behaviors. Specifically, religion has been linked with media use and preferences (e.g., Stout & Buddenbaum, 1996 ), health/medical decisions and communication about health-related issues (Croucher & Harris, 2012 ), interpersonal communication (e.g., Croucher, Faulkner, Oommen, & Long, 2012b ), organizational behaviors (e.g., Garner & Wargo, 2009 ), and intercultural communication traits and behaviors (e.g., Croucher, Braziunaite, & Oommen, 2012a ). In media and religion scholarship, researchers have shown how religion as a cultural variable has powerful effects on media use, preferences, and gratifications. The research linking media and religion is vast (Stout & Buddenbaum, 1996 ). This body of research has shown how “religious worldviews are created and sustained in ongoing social processes in which information is shared” (Stout & Buddenbaum, 1996 , pp. 7–8). For example, religious Christians are more likely to read newspapers, while religious individuals are less likely to have a favorable opinion of the internet (Croucher & Harris, 2012 ), and religious individuals (who typically attend religious services and are thus integrated into a religious community) are more likely to read media produced by the religious community (Davie, 2008 ).

Research into health/medical decisions and communication about health-related issues is also robust. Research shows how religion, specifically religiosity, promotes healthier living and better decision-making regarding health and wellbeing (Harris & Worley, 2012 ). For example, a religious (or spiritual) approach to cancer treatment can be more effective than a secular approach (Croucher & Harris, 2012 ), religious attendance promotes healthier living, and people with HIV/AIDS often turn to religion for comfort as well. These studies suggest the significance of religion in health communication and in our health.

Research specifically examining the links between religion and interpersonal communication is not as vast as the research into media, health, and religion. However, this slowly growing body of research has explored areas such as rituals, self-disclosure (Croucher et al., 2012b ), and family dynamics (Davie, 2008 ), to name a few.

The role of religion in organizations is well studied. Overall, researchers have shown how religious identification and religiosity influence an individual’s organizational behavior. For example, research has shown that an individual’s religious identification affects levels of organizational dissent (Croucher et al., 2012a ). Garner and Wargo ( 2009 ) further showed that organizational dissent functions differently in churches than in nonreligious organizations. Kennedy and Lawton ( 1998 ) explored the relationships between religious beliefs and perceptions about business/corporate ethics and found that individuals with stronger religious beliefs have stricter ethical beliefs.

Researchers are increasingly looking at the relationships between religion and intercultural communication. Researchers have explored how religion affects numerous communication traits and behaviors and have shown how religious communities perceive and enact religious beliefs. Antony ( 2010 ), for example, analyzed the bindi in India and how the interplay between religion and culture affects people’s acceptance of it. Karniel and Lavie-Dinur ( 2011 ) showed how religion and culture influence how Palestinian Arabs are represented on Israeli television. Collectively, the intercultural work examining religion demonstrates the increasing importance of the intersection between religion and culture in communication studies.

Collectively, communication studies discourse about religion has focused on how religion is an integral part of an individual’s culture. Croucher et al. ( 2016 ), in a content analysis of communication journal coverage of religion and spirituality from 2002 to 2012 , argued that the discourse largely focuses on religion as a cultural variable by identifying religious groups as variables for comparative analysis, exploring “religious” or “spiritual” as adjectives to describe entities (religious organizations), and analyzing the relationships between religious groups in different contexts. Croucher and Harris ( 2012 ) asserted that the discourse about religion, culture, and communication is still in its infancy, though it continues to grow at a steady pace.

Future Lines of Inquiry

Research into the links among religion, culture, and communication has shown the vast complexities of these terms. With this in mind, there are various directions for future research/exploration that researchers could take to expand and benefit our practical understanding of these concepts and how they relate to one another. Work should continue to define these terms with a particular emphasis on mediation, closely consider these terms in a global context, focus on how intergroup dynamics influence this relationship, and expand research into non-Christian religious cultures.

Additional definitional work still needs to be done to clarify exactly what is meant by “religion,” “culture,” and “communication.” Our understanding of these terms and relationships can be further enhanced by analyzing how forms of mass communication mediate each other. Martin-Barbero ( 1993 ) asserted that there should be a shift from media to mediations as multiple opposing forces meet in communication. He defined mediation as “the articulations between communication practices and social movements and the articulation of different tempos of development with the plurality of cultural matrices” (p. 187). Religions have relied on mediations through various media to communicate their messages (oral stories, print media, radio, television, internet, etc.). These media share religious messages, shape the messages and religious communities, and are constantly changing. What we find is that, as media sophistication develops, a culture’s understandings of mediated messages changes (Martin-Barbero, 1993 ). Thus, the very meanings of religion, culture, and communication are transitioning as societies morph into more digitally mediated societies. Research should continue to explore the effects of digital mediation on our conceptualizations of religion, culture, and communication.

Closely linked to mediation is the need to continue extending our focus on the influence of globalization on religion, culture, and communication. It is essential to study the relationships among culture, religion, and communication in the context of globalization. In addition to trading goods and services, people are increasingly sharing ideas, values, and beliefs in the modern world. Thus, globalization not only leads to technological and socioeconomic changes, but also shapes individuals’ ways of communicating and their perceptions and beliefs about religion and culture. While religion represents an old way of life, globalization challenges traditional meaning systems and is often perceived as a threat to religion. For instance, Marx and Weber both asserted that modernization was incompatible with tradition. But, in contrast, globalization could facilitate religious freedom by spreading the idea of freedom worldwide. Thus, future work needs to consider the influence of globalization to fully grasp the interrelationships among religion, culture, and communication in the world.

A review of the present definitions of religion in communication research reveals that communication scholars approach religion as a holistic, total, and unique institution or notion, studied from the viewpoint of different communication fields such as health, intercultural, interpersonal, organizational communication, and so on. However, this approach to communication undermines the function of a religion as a culture and also does not consider the possible differences between religious cultures. For example, religious cultures differ in their levels of individualism and collectivism. There are also differences in how religious cultures interact to compete for more followers and territory (Klock, Novoa, & Mogaddam, 2010 ). Thus, localization is one area of further research for religion communication studies. This line of study best fits in the domain of intergroup communication. Such an approach will provide researchers with the opportunity to think about the roles that interreligious communication can play in areas such as peacemaking processes (Klock et al., 2010 ).

Academic discourse about religion has focused largely on Christian denominations. In a content analysis of communication journal discourse on religion and spirituality, Croucher et al. ( 2016 ) found that the terms “Christian” or “Christianity” appeared in 9.56% of all articles, and combined with other Christian denominations (Catholicism, Evangelism, Baptist, Protestantism, and Mormonism, for example), appeared in 18.41% of all articles. Other religious cultures (denominations) made up a relatively small part of the overall academic discourse: Islam appeared in 6.8%, Judaism in 4.27%, and Hinduism in only 0.96%. Despite the presence of various faiths in the data, the dominance of Christianity and its various denominations is incontestable. Having religions unevenly represented in the academic discourse is problematic. This highly unbalanced representation presents a biased picture of religious practices. It also represents one faith as being the dominant faith and others as being minority religions in all contexts.

Ultimately, the present overview, with its focus on religion, culture, and communication points to the undeniable connections among these concepts. Religion and culture are essential elements of humanity, and it is through communication, that these elements of humanity are mediated. Whether exploring these terms in health, interpersonal, intercultural, intergroup, mass, or other communication contexts, it is evident that understanding the intersection(s) among religion, culture, and communication offers vast opportunities for researchers and practitioners.

Further Reading

The references to this article provide various examples of scholarship on religion, culture, and communication. The following list includes some critical pieces of literature that one should consider reading if interested in studying the relationships among religion, culture, and communication.

• Allport, G. W. (1950). Individual and his religion: A psychological interpretation . New York: Macmillan.
• Campbell, H. A. (2010). When religion meets new media . New York: Routledge.
• Cheong, P. H. , Fischer-Nielson, P. , Gelfgren, S. , & Ess, C. (Eds.). (2012). Digital religion, social media and culture: Perspectives, practices and futures . New York: Peter Lang.
• Cohen, A. B. , & Hill, P. C. (2007). Religion as culture: Religious individualism and collectivism among American Catholics, Jews, and Protestants . Journal of Personality , 75 , 709–742.
• Coomaraswamy, A. K. (2015). Hinduism and buddhism . New Delhi: Munshiram Monoharlal Publishers.
• Coomaraswamy, A. K. (2015). A new approach to the Vedas: Essays in translation and exegesis . Philadelphia: Coronet Books.
• Harris, T. M. , Parrott, R. , & Dorgan, K. A. (2004). Talking about human genetics within religious frameworks . Health Communication , 16 , 105–116.
• Hitchens, C. (2007). God is not great . New York: Hachette.
• Hoover, S. M. (2006). Religion in the media age (media, religion and culture) . New York: Routledge.
• Lundby, K. , & Hoover, S. M. (1997). Summary remarks: Mediated religion. In S. M. Hoover & K. Lundby (Eds.), Rethinking media, religion, and culture (pp. 298–309). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Mahan, J. H. (2014). Media, religion and culture: An introduction . New York: Routledge.
• Parrott, R. (2004). “Collective amnesia”: The absence of religious faith and spirituality in health communication research and practice . Journal of Health Communication , 16 , 1–5.
• Russell, B. (1957). Why I am not a Christian . New York: Touchstone.
• Sarwar, G. (2001). Islam: Beliefs and teachings (5th ed.). Tigard, OR: Muslim Educational Trust.
• Stout, D. A. (2011). Media and religion: Foundations of an emerging field . New York: Routledge.
• Antony, M. G. (2010). On the spot: Seeking acceptance and expressing resistance through the Bindi . Journal of International and Intercultural Communication , 3 , 346–368.
• Beckford, J. A. , & Demerath, N. J. (Eds.). (2007). The SAGE handbook of the sociology of religion . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Burrell, D. B. (2013). The triumph of mercy: Philosophy and scripture in Mulla Sadra—By Mohammed Rustom . Modern Theology , 29 , 413–416.
• Clark, A. S. , & Hoover, S. M. (1997). At the intersection of media, culture, and religion. In S. M. Hoover , & K. Lundby (Eds.), Rethinking media, religion, and culture (pp. 15–36). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Croucher, S. M. , Braziunaite, R. , & Oommen, D. (2012a). The effects of religiousness and religious identification on organizational dissent. In S. M. Croucher , & T. M. Harris (Eds.), Religion and communication: An anthology of extensions in theory, research, and method (pp. 69–79). New York: Peter Lang.
• Croucher, S. M. , Faulkner , Oommen, D. , & Long, B. (2012b). Demographic and religious differences in the dimensions of self-disclosure among Hindus and Muslims in India . Journal of Intercultural Communication Research , 39 , 29–48.
• Croucher, S. M. , & Harris, T. M. (Eds.). (2012). Religion and communication: An anthology of extensions in theory, research, & method . New York: Peter Lang.
• Croucher, S. M. , Sommier, M. , Kuchma, A. , & Melnychenko, V. (2016). A content analysis of the discourses of “religion” and “spirituality” in communication journals: 2002–2012. Journal of Communication and Religion , 38 , 42–79.
• Davie, G. (2008). The sociology of religion . Los Angeles: SAGE.
• De Juan, A. , Pierskalla, J. H. , & Vüllers, J. (2015). The pacifying effects of local religious institutions: An analysis of communal violence in Indonesia . Political Research Quarterly , 68 , 211–224.
• Durkheim, E. (1976). The elementary forms of religious life . London: Harper Collins.
• Garner, J. T. , & Wargo, M. (2009). Feedback from the pew: A dual-perspective exploration of organizational dissent in churches. Journal of Communication & Religion , 32 , 375–400.
• Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays by Clifford Geertz . New York: Basic Books.
• Hall, E. T. (1989). Beyond culture . New York: Anchor Books.
• Harris, T. M. , & Worley, T. R. (2012). Deconstructing lay epistemologies of religion within health communication research. In S. M. Croucher , & T. M. Harris (Eds.), Religion & communication: An anthology of extensions in theory, research, and method (pp. 119–136). New York: Peter Lang.
• Hofstede, G. (1991). Cultures and organizations: Software of the mind . London: McGraw-Hill.
• Holiday, A. (1999). Small culture . Applied Linguistics , 20 , 237–264.
• Hoover, S. M. , & Lundby, K. (1997). Introduction. In S. M. Hoover & K. Lundby (Eds.), Rethinking media, religion, and culture (pp. 3–14). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Karniel, Y. , & Lavie-Dinur, A. (2011). Entertainment and stereotype: Representation of the Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel in reality shows on Israeli television . Journal of Intercultural Communication Research , 40 , 65–88.
• Kennedy, E. J. , & Lawton, L. (1998). Religiousness and business ethics. Journal of Business Ethics , 17 , 175–180.
• Klock, J. , Novoa, C. , & Mogaddam, F. M. (2010). Communication across religions. In H. Giles , S. Reid , & J. Harwood (Eds.), The dynamics of intergroup communication (pp. 77–88). New York: Peter Lang
• Kluckhohn, C. (1949). Mirror for man: The relation of anthropology to modern life . Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
• Kohl, C. T. (2007). Buddhism and quantum physics . Contemporary Buddhism , 8 , 69–82.
• Mapped: These are the world’s most religious countries . (April 13, 2015). Telegraph Online .
• Martin-Barbero, J. (1993). Communication, culture and hegemony: From the media to the mediations . London: SAGE.
• Marx, K. , & Engels, F. (1975). Collected works . London: Lawrence and Wishart.
• Nietzsche, F. (1996). Human, all too human: A book for free spirits . R. J. Hollingdale (Trans.). Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
• Piller, I. (2011). Intercultural communication: A critical introduction . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
• Philipsen, G. (2002). Cultural communication. In W. B. Gudykunst (Ed.), Cross-cultural and intercultural communication (pp. 35–51). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Simmel, G. (1950). The sociology of Georg Simmel . K. Wolff (Trans.). Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
• Stout, D. A. , & Buddenbaum, J. M. (Eds.). (1996). Religion and mass media: Audiences and adaptations . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Weber, M. (1963). The sociology of religion . London: Methuen.
• Wimal, D. (2007). Nagarjuna and modern communication theory. China Media Research , 3 , 34–41.
• Applegate, J. , & Sypher, H. (1988). A constructivist theory of communication and culture. In Y. Y. Kim & W. B. Gudykunst (Eds.), Theories of intercultural communication (pp. 41-65). Newbury Park, CA: SAGE.

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Philosophy > Religious Language AO2 and Essay Plans > Flashcards

Religious Language AO2 and Essay Plans Flashcards

The verification principle offers no real challenge to religious belief AGREE

• Swinburne- things that we cannot verify are not necessarily meaningless e.g. love Can’t prove that one person loves another but “I love you” is not a meaningless statement.
• Keith Ward- If i were God i could verify myself
• Hicks Celestial City- something may be verifiable in the afterlife (Counter- that’s presupposing there is an afterlife)
• Strong/weak verification - AJ Ayer’s strong verification rules historical facts as meaningless- makes allowances for some things but not religion. ( raises and issue of bias - setting out to disprove religion.)
• Highly subjective theory with a clear and specific goal to eradicate religious language. Support’s Flew’s attack of religious believers- “death of a thousand qualifications” (same criticism Flew makes of religious believers with falsification could be made here)

The verification principle offers no real challenge to religious belief DISAGREE

• Verification tries to provide a clear criteria for determining what is and what is not to count as a meaningful use of religious language.
• It allows us to say what use of religious language points to objective truths and what use of language gives merely subjective opinion.
• Revised- Ayer adapted it so that a statement can carry meaning it’s claim can be verified in principle. (counter with Flew and a death of a thousand qualifications.)

The falsification principle offers no real challenge to religious belief AGREE

-RM Hare ‘Bliks’ -Mitchell’s parable of the partisan soldier- Flew has not correctly understood how religious belief operates. -Wittgenstein’s language games theory. -Wisdom - God is outside of our human understanding -Flew’s conversion to theism in final years of life. -Ahluwalia suggests that Flew’s ‘confidence in empirical evidence as the final rest of meaning in itself, unfalsifiable’ -What can be falsified? Swinburne argues that factual statements can be falsified. However, some existential statements cannot be falsified but thus does not stop these statements meaningful. Swinburne uses the statement of the toys in the cupboard to attack the theory. He says that if toys came alive in your bedroom , you wouldn’t know so it cannot be falsified. Perhaps we can’t falsify God because we don’t know enough about him. -RB Braithwaite criticises the principle, arguing that religious language is meaningful because it is prescriptive- it recommends a course of action. So, for example, the phrase ‘God loves me’ has meaning because it advises you to live your life in a living life.

The falsification principle offers no real challenge to religious belief DISAGREE

• Falsification tries to provide a clear criteria for determining what is and what is not to count as a meaningful use of religious language.
• It offers an alternative to the failed principle of verification.
• It polices the boundaries between scientific and non- scientific use of language rather than the boundaries of linguistic meaning.
• It makes no sense by responding to criticism that we might qualify our beliefs so much that they no longer express the truths that we initially though they did.

We can only talk about God meaning fully , If we say what he is not (VIA NEGATIVA) DISAGREE

• Brian Davies criticises this point, by saying that eliminating negatives we have no idea whether what remains is God or not.
• The via negativa is what Aquinas originally attacked with his use of analogy in religious language.
• The via negative may implicitly assume an idea of God.
• The via negative becomes a new way of speaking positively about God when, for example, we take the attributes of immutability, infinity, impassability etc. Literally.
• We would never be able to identify an object if we were only able to talk of it in negative terms.
• The via negative may lead some people to conclude that the reason why our language cannot describe God is because there is nothing to describe.
• Religious people wish to say something positive about God. e.e St. Thomas Aquinas suggest that our language about God should be analogical.

We can only talk about God meaning fully , If we say what he is not (VIA NEGATIVA) AGREE

• Poetic or anthropomorphic language creates potential pitfalls in our understanding of God. Can cause confusion. Via Negative avoids these potential mistakes.
• Highlights the ineffable qualities of God. He is transcendent and there is an epistemic distance - The Via Negativa attempts to recognise this.
• Saying positive statements about God such as ‘God is good’ or ‘God is our father’ seems to raise questions about God’s nature and the problem of evil.
• Induvidually we may do good, but we are corrupted in a group.

To what extent can Wittgenstein’s theory of language games help to resolve the issues raised by religious language? YES

• Language games helps to a larger extent because it recognises that meaning does not happen in a vacuum bu that people in their contexts find words and concepts meaningful or meaningless.
• The analogy between language and games is useful because it highlights features such as understanding rules, practical applications and sharing goals.
• It highlights the non-cognitive nature of religious language.
• It provides boundaries for the use of religious language
• Statements are judged within their context- they are not inherently true or false

To what extent can Wittgenstein’s theory of language games help to resolve the issues raised by religious language? NO

• the theory is not successful because it does not take into account the important issues of the factual quality of religious truth claims, concentrating on meaning rather than truth.
• Wittgenstein ignores the importance of empirical evidence for supporting religious and other truth claims
• Wittgenstein overstates the problems of understanding the language games of belief systems that are different from one’s own,
• Believers claims cannot be empirically tested.
• It alienates people not initiated into the rules of the game

Strengths of analogy

-Analogy is used in many contexts to aid explanation which suggests that it is found to be effective. -It can help understanding by finding similar examples with which the listener is familiar with in order to support the understanding of the unfamiliar. -Analogy can provide vivid examples of which aid memory and gives insights. -The Bible uses analogy to communicate religious ideas, suggesting that it is appropriate for Christians to do the same. -Aquinas argued that religious language is best understood through the use of analogy. Presented analogy as a ‘middle way’ ANALOGY OF ATTRIBUTION AND ANALOGY OF PROPORTION -We understand plants as being alive in a sense, but that doesn’t compare to how we define ourselves as alive.Similarly, Gods’ life is greater than ours; all things must be understood as in proportion to one another. -Ian Ramsey supports Aquinas’ idea of using analogies in religious language.

Weaknesses of Analogy

• Swinburne questions what is wrong with univocal language for God. We can legitimately speak of God’s goodness and our own goodness univocally.
• We know too little about God for analogical language to have any meaning.
• Analogy operates in a context of what is completely known. Yet, in the case of God, we are dealing with the unknown.
• We have no idea what it might mean to attribute infinite wisdom to God. Human language must fall silent in the mystery of God. (the view of the via negativa)

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Many around the globe say it’s important their leader stands up for people’s religious beliefs

When asked about the leader of their country, people around the world are generally much more likely to say it is important to have someone who stands up for people with their religious beliefs than to say the leader needs to have strong religious beliefs of their own or to have the same beliefs as they do.

This Pew Research Center analysis explores public attitudes about the religious qualities of national leaders in 35 countries in North America, Europe, the Asia-Pacific region, the Middle East-North Africa region, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.

This analysis draws on nationally representative surveys of 40,494 adults conducted in 34 countries from Jan. 5 to May 22, 2024. All surveys were conducted over the phone in Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Surveys were conducted face-to-face in Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ghana, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Israel, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Turkey. In Australia, we used a mixed-mode probability-based online panel.

In the United States, we surveyed 12,693 respondents from Feb. 13 to 25, 2024. Most of the respondents (10,642) are members of Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel recruited through national random sampling of residential addresses, which gives nearly all U.S. adults a chance of selection.

The remaining U.S. respondents (2,051) are members of three other panels: the Ipsos KnowledgePanel, the NORC Amerispeak Panel and the SSRS Opinion Panel. All three are national survey panels recruited through random sampling (not “opt-in” polls). We used these additional panels to ensure that the survey would have enough Jewish and Muslim respondents to be able to report on their views.

The U.S. data is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education, religious affiliation and other categories.

For more about the U.S. data, refer to the ATP’s methodology and the methodology for our previous report that looked at these questions only in the U.S.

Here are the questions and responses for all 35 countries surveyed , as well as the  survey methodology  for data collected outside the U.S.

To compare educational groups across countries, we standardize education levels based on the UN’s International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED).

In each country surveyed, only religious groups with large enough sample sizes for analysis are included.

This analysis was produced by Pew Research Center as part of the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures project , which analyzes religious change and its impact on societies around the world. Funding for the Global Religious Futures project comes from The Pew Charitable Trusts and the John Templeton Foundation (grant 63095). This publication does not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation.

In the United States , for instance, 64% of adults say it is important to have a president who stands up for people who share the respondent’s religious beliefs. Fewer (48%) say it’s important that a president has their own strong religious beliefs, even if the beliefs differ from those of the respondent. And even fewer Americans (37%) say it is important for a president to have religious beliefs that are the same as the respondent’s.

In countries where religion is perceived as very important, people are generally more likely to value each of these qualities in a leader. For example, 94% of adults in Indonesia say religion is very important in their lives, and 86% there say it’s important for their president to have strong religious beliefs. This is among the highest levels found in the 35 places surveyed.

These findings are from a 35-country Pew Research Center survey conducted from January to May 2024 among more than 53,000 respondents.

Leaders who stand up for people with your religious beliefs

Adults in Indonesia, Bangladesh and the Philippines are the most likely to say it is important to have a leader who stands up for people with their religious beliefs: Roughly nine-in-ten in each country hold this view. Around half or more in 22 additional countries say the same.

However, in several European and East Asian countries, adults are less likely to say it’s important for a national leader to stand up for people with their religious beliefs. France, Japan and South Korea stand out as some of the places where the smallest shares say this is important. In each country, around a quarter of adults say this.

Leaders who have strong religious beliefs, even if they are different from your own

Indonesia and the Philippines again top the list when considering the share of adults who say it’s important that their leader has strong religious beliefs, even if they are different from their own (86% each say this). In all four African countries we surveyed – Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa – 70% or more say this, too.

Swedish adults are the least likely to say it is important to have a prime minister who has strong religious beliefs. Just 6% of Swedes say this.

Leaders who have religious beliefs that are the same as your own

About nine-in-ten Indonesian and Bangladeshi adults say it’s important for their leader to have the same religious beliefs as they do. Many people in neighboring South and Southeast Asian countries also feel this way, including 81% of adults in India.

This view is much less common in some countries. In Singapore, a far smaller share (36%) say it is important for a prime minister to share their religious beliefs. And Sweden again has the smallest share of adults who say this is important (12%).

Opinions on these questions among the highly religious

People who say religion is very important in their lives are far more likely than other adults to say it’s important for their country’s leader to stand up for people with their religious beliefs.

For example, 86% of Turkish adults for whom religion is very important say it is important that the president stands up for people with their religious beliefs, compared with 45% among Turks for whom religion is less important.

Similar patterns are evident when it comes to both of the other measures asked about in this survey.

Looking again at Turkey, 55% of adults who consider religion very important say it is important for the country’s president to have strong religious beliefs, even if these beliefs are different from their own. Among less religious Turkish adults, 33% think this is important.

How do people with different religious identities feel?

Differences on these questions also emerge by respondents’ religion.

Among Hindus , majorities say that all three measures of leaders’ religion-related qualities are important. For example, nearly all Hindus in Bangladesh – 99% – say it is important for their prime minister to stand up for people with their religious beliefs. (The survey took place before Bangladesh’s prime minister resigned .)

Likewise, most Buddhists in both of the Buddhist-majority countries we surveyed – Sri Lanka and Thailand – say all three religious aspects we asked about are important in their leaders. But for Buddhists elsewhere, far smaller shares voice these opinions. For example, while 70% of Thai Buddhists feel it is important for their prime minister to stand up for people with their religious beliefs, only 32% of Japanese Buddhists say the same.

In general, most Muslims also say the various religious measures we asked about are important when it comes to their leaders. But Muslims in Israel are a notable exception. Only 30% of Israeli Muslims say it’s important for the Israeli prime minister to have strong religious beliefs, even if they differ from respondents’ own beliefs.

Attitudes among Jews are mixed in Israel and the U.S. (the only two places surveyed with large enough sample sizes of Jews to analyze). Most Jewish adults in both countries say it is important for their prime minister or president, respectively, to stand up for people with their religious beliefs. But only about three-in-ten Jewish adults in either place say it is important for the leader to have strong religious beliefs.

And in the U.S., where only about 2% of the population is Jewish , just 13% of Jewish adults say it is important for the president to have religious beliefs that are the same as theirs. In Israel, where a large majority of the population is Jewish, 59% of Jews see this as important.

The opinions of Christians vary widely by country for all three measures. For example, the share of Christians who say it’s important for their country’s leader to stand up for people with their religious beliefs ranges from 88% in the Philippines to 30% in France.

The religiously unaffiliated are consistently the least likely group to say each of these measures is important. For instance, three-in-ten unaffiliated German adults say it is important for their chancellor to stand up for people with their religious beliefs. Roughly half of German Christians say the same.

Differences by education, ideology and age

Adults with more education tend to be less likely than others to perceive the religion-related qualities of their country’s leader as important. In Greece, for instance, 38% of adults with at least a postsecondary education say it is important to have a prime minister who stands up for people with their religious beliefs. But among Greeks with less education, 49% say this.

Views also vary by ideology. In many countries, those on the ideological right are more likely than those on the left or in the center to say their leader’s religious beliefs are important. For example, in Turkey, those on the right are twice as likely as those on the left to say it is important to have a leader who shares their religious beliefs (92% vs. 46%).

Across many countries surveyed, younger and older adults largely agree on the importance of the three measures asked about when it comes to their country’s leader. However, in Latin America, adults under 40 are consistently less likely than those ages 40 and older to say each is important. For example, in Chile, 42% of adults under 40 say it is important to have a president who stands up for people with their religious beliefs. That share rises to 54% among older Chileans.

Note: Here are the questions and responses for all 35 countries surveyed , as well as the  survey methodology for data collected outside the U.S.

• Christianity
• Religion & Government
• Religion & Politics
• Religiously Unaffiliated
• World Leaders

Jonathan Evans is a senior researcher focusing on religion research at Pew Research Center .

Maria Smerkovich is a research associate focusing on global attitudes research at Pew Research Center .

Manolo Corichi is a research analyst focusing on religion research at Pew Research Center .

William Miner is a research analyst focusing on religion at Pew Research Center .

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ABOUT PEW RESEARCH CENTER  Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of  The Pew Charitable Trusts .

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Fact-checking warnings from Democrats about Project 2025 and Donald Trump

This fact check originally appeared on PolitiFact .

Project 2025 has a starring role in this week’s Democratic National Convention.

And it was front and center on Night 1.

WATCH: Hauling large copy of Project 2025, Michigan state Sen. McMorrow speaks at 2024 DNC

“This is Project 2025,” Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, D-Royal Oak, said as she laid a hardbound copy of the 900-page document on the lectern. “Over the next four nights, you are going to hear a lot about what is in this 900-page document. Why? Because this is the Republican blueprint for a second Trump term.”

Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, has warned Americans about “Trump’s Project 2025” agenda — even though former President Donald Trump doesn’t claim the conservative presidential transition document.

“Donald Trump wants to take our country backward,” Harris said July 23 in Milwaukee. “He and his extreme Project 2025 agenda will weaken the middle class. Like, we know we got to take this seriously, and can you believe they put that thing in writing?”

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Harris’ running mate, has joined in on the talking point.

“Don’t believe (Trump) when he’s playing dumb about this Project 2025. He knows exactly what it’ll do,” Walz said Aug. 9 in Glendale, Arizona.

Trump’s campaign has worked to build distance from the project, which the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, led with contributions from dozens of conservative groups.

Much of the plan calls for extensive executive-branch overhauls and draws on both long-standing conservative principles, such as tax cuts, and more recent culture war issues. It lays out recommendations for disbanding the Commerce and Education departments, eliminating certain climate protections and consolidating more power to the president.

Project 2025 offers a sweeping vision for a Republican-led executive branch, and some of its policies mirror Trump’s 2024 agenda, But Harris and her presidential campaign have at times gone too far in describing what the project calls for and how closely the plans overlap with Trump’s campaign.

PolitiFact researched Harris’ warnings about how the plan would affect reproductive rights, federal entitlement programs and education, just as we did for President Joe Biden’s Project 2025 rhetoric. Here’s what the project does and doesn’t call for, and how it squares with Trump’s positions.

Are Trump and Project 2025 connected?

To distance himself from Project 2025 amid the Democratic attacks, Trump wrote on Truth Social that he “knows nothing” about it and has “no idea” who is in charge of it. (CNN identified at least 140 former advisers from the Trump administration who have been involved.)

The Heritage Foundation sought contributions from more than 100 conservative organizations for its policy vision for the next Republican presidency, which was published in 2023.

Project 2025 is now winding down some of its policy operations, and director Paul Dans, a former Trump administration official, is stepping down, The Washington Post reported July 30. Trump campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita denounced the document.

WATCH: A look at the Project 2025 plan to reshape government and Trump’s links to its authors

However, Project 2025 contributors include a number of high-ranking officials from Trump’s first administration, including former White House adviser Peter Navarro and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson.

A recently released recording of Russell Vought, a Project 2025 author and the former director of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, showed Vought saying Trump’s “very supportive of what we do.” He said Trump was only distancing himself because Democrats were making a bogeyman out of the document.

Project 2025 wouldn’t ban abortion outright, but would curtail access

The Harris campaign shared a graphic on X that claimed “Trump’s Project 2025 plan for workers” would “go after birth control and ban abortion nationwide.”

The plan doesn’t call to ban abortion nationwide, though its recommendations could curtail some contraceptives and limit abortion access.

What’s known about Trump’s abortion agenda neither lines up with Harris’ description nor Project 2025’s wish list.

Project 2025 says the Department of Health and Human Services Department should “return to being known as the Department of Life by explicitly rejecting the notion that abortion is health care.”

It recommends that the Food and Drug Administration reverse its 2000 approval of mifepristone, the first pill taken in a two-drug regimen for a medication abortion. Medication is the most common form of abortion in the U.S. — accounting for around 63 percent in 2023.

If mifepristone were to remain approved, Project 2025 recommends new rules, such as cutting its use from 10 weeks into pregnancy to seven. It would have to be provided to patients in person — part of the group’s efforts to limit access to the drug by mail. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a legal challenge to mifepristone’s FDA approval over procedural grounds.

WATCH: Trump’s plans for health care and reproductive rights if he returns to White House The manual also calls for the Justice Department to enforce the 1873 Comstock Act on mifepristone, which bans the mailing of “obscene” materials. Abortion access supporters fear that a strict interpretation of the law could go further to ban mailing the materials used in procedural abortions, such as surgical instruments and equipment.

The plan proposes withholding federal money from states that don’t report to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention how many abortions take place within their borders. The plan also would prohibit abortion providers, such as Planned Parenthood, from receiving Medicaid funds. It also calls for the Department of Health and Human Services to ensure that the training of medical professionals, including doctors and nurses, omits abortion training.

The document says some forms of emergency contraception — particularly Ella, a pill that can be taken within five days of unprotected sex to prevent pregnancy — should be excluded from no-cost coverage. The Affordable Care Act requires most private health insurers to cover recommended preventive services, which involves a range of birth control methods, including emergency contraception.

Trump has recently said states should decide abortion regulations and that he wouldn’t block access to contraceptives. Trump said during his June 27 debate with Biden that he wouldn’t ban mifepristone after the Supreme Court “approved” it. But the court rejected the lawsuit based on standing, not the case’s merits. He has not weighed in on the Comstock Act or said whether he supports it being used to block abortion medication, or other kinds of abortions.

Project 2025 doesn’t call for cutting Social Security, but proposes some changes to Medicare

“When you read (Project 2025),” Harris told a crowd July 23 in Wisconsin, “you will see, Donald Trump intends to cut Social Security and Medicare.”

The Project 2025 document does not call for Social Security cuts. None of its 10 references to Social Security addresses plans for cutting the program.

Harris also misleads about Trump’s Social Security views.

In his earlier campaigns and before he was a politician, Trump said about a half-dozen times that he’s open to major overhauls of Social Security, including cuts and privatization. More recently, in a March 2024 CNBC interview, Trump said of entitlement programs such as Social Security, “There’s a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting.” However, he quickly walked that statement back, and his CNBC comment stands at odds with essentially everything else Trump has said during the 2024 presidential campaign.

Trump’s campaign website says that not “a single penny” should be cut from Social Security. We rated Harris’ claim that Trump intends to cut Social Security Mostly False.

Project 2025 does propose changes to Medicare, including making Medicare Advantage, the private insurance offering in Medicare, the “default” enrollment option. Unlike Original Medicare, Medicare Advantage plans have provider networks and can also require prior authorization, meaning that the plan can approve or deny certain services. Original Medicare plans don’t have prior authorization requirements.

The manual also calls for repealing health policies enacted under Biden, such as the Inflation Reduction Act. The law enabled Medicare to negotiate with drugmakers for the first time in history, and recently resulted in an agreement with drug companies to lower the prices of 10 expensive prescriptions for Medicare enrollees.

Trump, however, has said repeatedly during the 2024 presidential campaign that he will not cut Medicare.

Project 2025 would eliminate the Education Department, which Trump supports

The Harris campaign said Project 2025 would “eliminate the U.S. Department of Education” — and that’s accurate. Project 2025 says federal education policy “should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated.” The plan scales back the federal government’s role in education policy and devolves the functions that remain to other agencies.

Aside from eliminating the department, the project also proposes scrapping the Biden administration’s Title IX revision, which prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. It also would let states opt out of federal education programs and calls for passing a federal parents’ bill of rights similar to ones passed in some Republican-led state legislatures.

Republicans, including Trump, have pledged to close the department, which gained its status in 1979 within Democratic President Jimmy Carter’s presidential Cabinet.

In one of his Agenda 47 policy videos, Trump promised to close the department and “to send all education work and needs back to the states.” Eliminating the department would have to go through Congress.

What Project 2025, Trump would do on overtime pay

In the graphic, the Harris campaign says Project 2025 allows “employers to stop paying workers for overtime work.”

The plan doesn’t call for banning overtime wages. It recommends changes to some Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, regulations and to overtime rules. Some changes, if enacted, could result in some people losing overtime protections, experts told us.

The document proposes that the Labor Department maintain an overtime threshold “that does not punish businesses in lower-cost regions (e.g., the southeast United States).” This threshold is the amount of money executive, administrative or professional employees need to make for an employer to exempt them from overtime pay under the Fair Labor Standards Act.

In 2019, the Trump’s administration finalized a rule that expanded overtime pay eligibility to most salaried workers earning less than about $35,568, which it said made about 1.3 million more workers eligible for overtime pay. The Trump-era threshold is high enough to cover most line workers in lower-cost regions, Project 2025 said.

The Biden administration raised that threshold to $43,888 beginning July 1, and that will rise to $58,656 on Jan. 1, 2025. That would grant overtime eligibility to about 4 million workers, the Labor Department said.

It’s unclear how many workers Project 2025’s proposal to return to the Trump-era overtime threshold in some parts of the country would affect, but experts said some would presumably lose the right to overtime wages.

Other overtime proposals in Project 2025’s plan include allowing some workers to choose to accumulate paid time off instead of overtime pay, or to work more hours in one week and fewer in the next, rather than receive overtime.

Trump’s past with overtime pay is complicated. In 2016, the Obama administration said it would raise the overtime to salaried workers earning less than $47,476 a year, about double the exemption level set in 2004 of $23,660 a year.

But when a judge blocked the Obama rule, the Trump administration didn’t challenge the court ruling. Instead it set its own overtime threshold, which raised the amount, but by less than Obama.

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https://educationhub.blog.gov.uk/2024/08/20/gcse-results-day-2024-number-grading-system/

GCSE results day 2024: Everything you need to know including the number grading system

Thousands of students across the country will soon be finding out their GCSE results and thinking about the next steps in their education.   

Here we explain everything you need to know about the big day, from when results day is, to the current 9-1 grading scale, to what your options are if your results aren’t what you’re expecting.  

When is GCSE results day 2024?  

GCSE results day will be taking place on Thursday the 22 August.     

The results will be made available to schools on Wednesday and available to pick up from your school by 8am on Thursday morning.  

Schools will issue their own instructions on how and when to collect your results.   

When did we change to a number grading scale?  

The shift to the numerical grading system was introduced in England in 2017 firstly in English language, English literature, and maths.  

By 2020 all subjects were shifted to number grades. This means anyone with GCSE results from 2017-2020 will have a combination of both letters and numbers.  

The numerical grading system was to signal more challenging GCSEs and to better differentiate between students’ abilities - particularly at higher grades between the A *-C grades. There only used to be 4 grades between A* and C, now with the numerical grading scale there are 6.  

What do the number grades mean?  

The grades are ranked from 1, the lowest, to 9, the highest.  

The grades don’t exactly translate, but the two grading scales meet at three points as illustrated below.  

The bottom of grade 7 is aligned with the bottom of grade A, while the bottom of grade 4 is aligned to the bottom of grade C.    

Meanwhile, the bottom of grade 1 is aligned to the bottom of grade G.  

What to do if your results weren’t what you were expecting?  

If your results weren’t what you were expecting, firstly don’t panic. You have options.  

First things first, speak to your school or college – they could be flexible on entry requirements if you’ve just missed your grades.   

They’ll also be able to give you the best tailored advice on whether re-sitting while studying for your next qualifications is a possibility.   

If you’re really unhappy with your results you can enter to resit all GCSE subjects in summer 2025. You can also take autumn exams in GCSE English language and maths.  

Speak to your sixth form or college to decide when it’s the best time for you to resit a GCSE exam.  

Look for other courses with different grade requirements     

Entry requirements vary depending on the college and course. Ask your school for advice, and call your college or another one in your area to see if there’s a space on a course you’re interested in.    

Consider an apprenticeship    

Apprenticeships combine a practical training job with study too. They’re open to you if you’re 16 or over, living in England, and not in full time education.  

As an apprentice you’ll be a paid employee, have the opportunity to work alongside experienced staff, gain job-specific skills, and get time set aside for training and study related to your role.   

You can find out more about how to apply here .  

Talk to a National Careers Service (NCS) adviser    

The National Career Service is a free resource that can help you with your career planning. Give them a call to discuss potential routes into higher education, further education, or the workplace.   

Whatever your results, if you want to find out more about all your education and training options, as well as get practical advice about your exam results, visit the  National Careers Service page  and Skills for Careers to explore your study and work choices.   

You may also be interested in:

• Results day 2024: What's next after picking up your A level, T level and VTQ results?
• When is results day 2024? GCSEs, A levels, T Levels and VTQs

Tags: GCSE grade equivalent , gcse number grades , GCSE results , gcse results day 2024 , gsce grades old and new , new gcse grades

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