Assessing the View that Religious Language is Meaningless

Assessing the View that Religious Language is Meaningless

In recent times one of the most compelling and interesting arguments

against God and religion has come from linguistic philosophy. In very

basic terms the argument points out the fact that religion must

necessarily use language in order to express abstract ideas such as

God, love and so on, and in doing so commits a fallacy because as soon

as such ideas are put into words they become meaningless. However,

this is a rather large generalisation; the specific arguments go into

a lot more detail and most vary in some way from this basic idea.

Before we look at these arguments, though, I feel it is necessary to

emphasise just how important an argument this is for religious

believers, as it shakes the very foundations of religion. Religious

language has until recently been taken as unequivocal, absolute truth,

and to deny that its meaning is not completely true in all senses is a

huge and brave step on the part of philosophy, as without language

much of religion simply would not function. In the course of this

essay I intend to examine and assess logical positivism, put forward

by the Vienna Circle thinkers, which links in with verification. Then

I will examine the criticisms and challenges to this argument,

followed by its complete rejection by Wittgenstein, and then I will go

on to falsification and its criticisms.

The first argument for the idea that religious language is meaningless

is logical positivism, a branch of philosophy that sprouted the idea

of the verification principle. This idea first came about in the early

work of Ludvig Wittgenstein, who put forward a picture the...

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... take part in are mutually exclusive, and finally non-believers

may have a better view of religious language because they have an

objective standpoint from which to view religion.

From all of this it seems to me that religious language is faced with

much criticism despite the fact that it has done nothing really very

wrong. We all know how difficult it is to talk about God and other

supernatural metaphysical religious ideas, but just because they

cannot be defined or justified in this world does not mean they have

no significance. They not only putting people on the right moral

track, they are and have had a long history of being guides and gurus

for millions of people over the years, and to dismiss them on the

grounds that they are improvable is to reject thousands of years of

human moral and linguistic development.