Explain Why It Is Difficult to Talk Meaningfully About God Essay

Religious language is defined as the communication of ideas about divinity fudge, faith, belief and practice. This definition makes it intemperate to talk meaningfully about it as each of these words have concepts behind them and each and every individual interprets these divergently, so religious language is different to everyday language, as it only denotes to an individuals belief and faiths traditions.There are also many problems with religious language as a firm as it anthropomorphises deity, by using terminology such as Him King and Shepherd this is limiting and subjects God to have human qualities, which is against what The Bible wants to portray God as. Also another problem is that some think that religious language is cognitive, thus something must be known about God to talk meaningfully about it.Yet this creates the problem that religious statements are not about objective facts that can be proved true or false exactly are answers to questions that are unable to be val idated, as they are based on objective facts that are open to cognition. These issues have led to religious believers to let out slipway in which they can talk about God in a meaningful way and the opposite as non-believers are searching for ways to render religious language meaningless.A group of philosophers called the logical positivists who as a group did not seek to understand how we gain knowledge of the outside(a) world, plainly how we use language to convey it. They believed that everything that can be verified is meaningful. Thus the validation principle was developed which stated that if it could be empirical tested by the five senses then it was meaningful, for example, a house is made of gingerbread, is meaningless as it can be proved false by taking treasure samples from the house. Yet this causes a problem when talking about philosophical and religious aspects.The logical positivists thought it was pointless to talk about art, music, ethic and God as it could nev er be verified, so couldnt be rendered true or false. Therefore it is meaningless as it is used to consider things beyond the human determine and this creates the impossibility to understand to meaning of anything being said. A. J. Ayer a logical positivist introduces two types of verification, strong and weak, to deal with the acceptation of scientific and historical propositions which are fight to regard as meaningful ornot. Strong verification is when there is absolute no doubt that a statement is true, as it is verified through with(predicate) with(predicate) sense, for example, It is sunny today. Yet weak verification occurs when some of the observations are not conclusively true or false, for example, humans are made of atoms as this may be accepted by people who were at the time of the discovery, also future scientific statements are verified by the weak, as they pull up stakes only be affirmed in the future not at present.The falsification principle created by Flew, stat ed that religious statements are meaningless as there nothing which can count against a religious believer, as they will not count or accept any of the evidence against their faith. reprimand dies the death of a thousand qualifications. For example Flew used the story of a father of a terminally ill child, prayed for God to make their child better, but the child died, the father qualifies this by saying it was Gods decision and maybe Gods deal is not merely human love.Tillich believed that religious language was meaningful as it was conveyed through metaphors and symbols, however philosophers such as Paul Edwards thought that revelation could not be portrayed through the verification principle using empirical evidence therefore symbols dont elude any factual knowledge, and are meaningless. Another critique of Tillich is that he stated that metaphors and symbols can be mistranslated and over time the original meaning may have been lost or forgotten therefore considering symbols mea ningless as the meaning may have been changed from what was originally intended to represent.Also with the criticism that symbols can be interpreted in any way the individual wants to, this is demising the supreme truth of reality it is trying to convey as it may point in a different direction as to which was also originally intended. Overall, the verification and the falsification principles argue that it is not possible to talk about God meaningful way as it is not possible to prove the existence of God of go verify any of the statements related to God.