Philosophers Have Proved Conclusively That Religious Language Is Meaningful

Philosophers have proved conclusively that Religious Language is meaningful. Discuss. (40 marks)

In order to assess the claim that Religious Language has been proved meaningful, it is necessary to first define and analyse what is meant by the word meaningful in a context regarding Religious Language. In terms of the meaningfulness of Religious Language, it is concerns as to whether any religious text has any significance or importance in reality. Some argue that God can be written about and spoke about because he is reality, for example, Aquinas claims that Religious Language is meaningful through his use and placed significance on analogy. Contrasting to this, others argue that writings concerning God have no meaning or importance as God isn’t a real being. Dawkins would agree with this as he is an outspoken atheist who completely denies any religious text as meaningful.

The verification principle states that language is only meaningful if it can be certified by sense observation. AJ Ayer was an advocate of this approach and stated his own definition of meaningful, which is ‘factually significant’. This meant that for Ayer, statements such as ‘God answered my prayers’ are meaningless as they can never be verified by anyone, also those who claim that their ‘prayers have been answered’ are the only people who would be able to support the claim, making it a weak statement as it is.  A weakness of using the verification as a method of determining whether a religious statement is meaningful or not is that in reality, we make statements frequently which cannot be verified. For example, as scientific laws are essentially only predictions of what is extremely likely to happen, they cannot be conclusively proved and therefore would not work in conjunction with the verification principle. So does this mean that most of the statements we make in everyday conversation are meaningless? One strength of the verification principle is that it saves times discussing topics which can’t be verified or falsified, meaning there is no need to enter a debate as the topic will have been deemed meaningless before a discussion can really start. Linking back to the question, advocates of the verification principle such as Ayer would disagree with the statement that Religious Language has been conclusively proved as meaningful as the verification principle deems anything that cant be verified as meaningless, which in most cases includes Religious Language.