All Religious Language Is Meaningless - Discuss

One of the problems surrounding religious language is that it is sometimes extremely difficult to understand religious concepts as we have no experience of them. For example, as humans, how are we meant to fully understand the idea of God’s ‘omnipotence’ as there is no way for us to experience such things on earth? As a result, many question whether or not religious language has meaning as it is not possible for us to understand its meaning properly without experience of it.

A way to arrive at the conclusion of whether or not a word means something is through the Verification Principle. A J Ayer came up with this concept, stating that for a statement to have any meaning there must be evidence to prove that it is meaningful by verifying it against things that exist. For example, to prove that the statement ‘the chair is green’ to be meaningful, one can use their eyes to see that this is the case. However, one could say that there is an immediate problem with this, as it is true that sensory perception can sometimes be misleading. From a distance, one may feel that the person walking towards them is a friend of theirs. However, when this person reaches closer, one notices that this is not the case. Through such examples, we can notice that sensory perception can be misleading. In order to overcome this, as humans we ask others their opinion as to whether or not the chair is actually green. If everyone else states that the chair is green, we take that to be true, thus the phrase has meaning. However, it is not possible to verify religious phrases such as ‘God is almighty’ as we have no experience that we know of to prove that it means something. How can we say then, that because the phrase cannot be verified it is meaningless as the two words ‘truth’ and ‘meaning’ are not the same thing? By applying the Verification Principle to fictional writing, one would come to the conclusion that all fictional writing has no meaning as it is not possible to prove that the characters in the book are real.

People also come across situations in normal life; situations in which they feel that the language used is meaningless. To illustrate this, I shall use the example of a cricket match. People with links to the game of cricket are likely to understand that the phrase ‘long leg’ is a fielding position in the game. However, when a person new to the game hears the captain of one of the sides say ‘go field at long leg’ to one of his players, the

person new to the game will feel that the statement made by the captain is meaningless. I believe that such examples can be linked in with Wittgenstein’s ‘language game’ theory. He suggested that just as cricket players understand that ‘long leg’ is a fielding position, so do religious people understand religious language. Wittgenstein stated that language has a meaning for those people involved in that particular language game. We could