Statements about God or religious phenomena are philosophically problematic. How are we to understand talk of ‘the infinite’ or ‘eternal life’ or ‘omnipresence’ when we have no direct experience of these concepts? What does it mean to say that ‘God loves us’ when we have so little understanding of God? Such religious utterances seem impossible to derive from our everyday experience, and for this reason they are hard to verify. For some, this is inevitable given the subject; for others, it suggests that religious statements are in fact empty of meaning.
There have been two main types of approach to these problems. Realists take as their starting point the idea that language corresponds to reality: for every statement we make there is a state of affairs that exists if that statement is true. This is called the correspondence theory. On the other hand, anti-realists consider reality fundamentally separate from language, and insist that meaning is a matter of coherence, not correspondence: a statement achieves meaning and truth through its relationship to other ideas or activities. This is called the coherence theory. Attempts to understand or analyse religious language usually depend upon one or other of these theories.
One way of establishing whether or not a statement is meaningful was proposed by A J Ayer. This criterion for meaning was called the Verification Principle and insisted that for a statement to be meaningful, it must be verifiable by sense experiences – or, in the weaker form of the principle, it should be possible to know what sense experience could make the statement probable. This form of realism implies a very strict view of language: words have meaning only in so far as they correspond to things in the world which can be known. Such a view is deeply influenced by scientific notions of truth, and evolved from the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle.
Such a theory of meaning has potentially dire consequences for religious statements. How is it possible to verify claims like ‘God is infinite’ or ‘The soul is constantly reborn’ or ‘There is life after death’? Do such statements really pick out things and properties in the world? Or are they as meaningless as claims in astrology or the paranormal?
The Verification Principle was intended as a tool to allow us to distinguish between the meaningful statements of science and the meaningless claims of pseudo-science and mysticism, and in that sense it has at times been valuable: as Ayer argued, sometimes people assume that because a word exists, there must be a corresponding real thing to which it refers. But the principle was quickly discredited as an adequate criterion of meaning, and much recent philosophy has examined less narrow ways in which language is used. But it is difficult to abandon completely the notion that for a statement to be meaningful, it must in some sense be shown to correspond to reality.
Various implications of this notion were put to the test in a famous exchange that played out in the philosophical journal University in the 1950s. The debate opened with a paper by Antony Flew which centred around an old parable of an invisible gardener.
Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. In the clearing were growing many flowers and many weeds. One explorer says, ‘Some gardener must tend this plot.’ The other disagrees, ‘There is no gardener.’ So they pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. ‘But perhaps he is an invisible gardener.’ So they set up a barbed-wire fence. They electrify it. They patrol with bloodhounds... But no shrieks ever suggest that some intruder has received a shock. No movements of the wire ever betray an invisible climber. The bloodhounds never give cry. Yet still the Believer is not convinced. ‘But there is a gardener, invisible, intangible, insensitive to electric shocks, a gardener who has no scent and makes no sound, a gardener who comes secretly to look after the garden which he loves.’ At last the Sceptic despairs, ‘but what remains of your original assertion? Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?’
Flew’s point is a subtle one. The believer’s initial claim that a gardener must exist is tested in several ways, and each piece of evidence is dismissed by a qualification – the gardener is invisible, then intangible, then free of scent, and so on. By the end, there seems no way of testing the existence of the gardener at all. The claim seems empty of content and therefore meaningless. Taking his cue from Karl Popper, Flew argues that for a statement to be meaningful it must at least be open to falsification – there must be some way of showing it to be false. A statement that fits any imaginable state of affairs doesn’t appear to say anything at all, and is therefore meaningless. Religious statements tend to suffer from ‘death by a thousand qualifications’: the claims they embody are so immune to falsification that they are, in fact, empty.
Consider a statement like ‘God moves in mysterious ways’. By invoking mystery as the defining characteristic of God’s plan, a believer can make the statement fit any situation. Earthquakes, plagues, diseases, holocausts – all are compatible with ‘mysterious’ intentions and none can be considered evidence against the claim. Of course, a statement like ‘God always prevents suffering’ is easily falsified, which is the thrust of the problem of evil: but at least it says something specific, asserting one state of affairs and denying another. Flew’s argument is that such assertive and meaningful statements are absent in religious discourse. The only statements that remain are meaningless.
Three key responses to Flew’s paper refined the discussion in different ways. The first response came from R M Hare who offered another parable:
A certain lunatic is convinced that all dons want to murder him. His friends introduce him to all the mildest and most respectable dons that they can find, and after each of them has retired, they say, ‘You see, he doesn’t really want to murder you; he spoke to you in a most cordial manner; surely you are convinced now?’ But the lunatic replies, ‘Yes, but that was only his diabolical cunning; he’s really plotting against me the whole time, like the rest of them; I know it, I tell you.’ However many kindly dons are produced, the reaction is still the same.
At first sight Hare’s paranoid lunatic seems to confirm Flew’s argument, and Hare agreed that religious statements are meaningless by Flew’s standards of evidence. But what counts as evidence? For the lunatic, there is plenty of evidence to confirm his paranoia: from his perspective, every ‘diabolical’ don’s mild manner is just a pretence. It is this notion of perspective that is key: Hare calls this a ‘blik’, a frame of reference that determines what counts as evidence. A ‘blik’ is a way of seeing the world, a filter that affects our standards of evidence. The paranoid man’s blik leads him to see evidence of hostility in everything; the religious blik similarly allows the believer to see evidence where a sceptic may not.
Hare’s point is that religious statements are not assertions at all, and therefore are immune to verification and falsification. Instead they are expressions of a particular blik with particular standards of explanation and conduct. Religious people see the world a certain way, and from within that perspective all sorts of things count as evidence for God: a beautiful sunset, a flock of geese, the ‘miracle’ of birth, and so on.
Hare is certainly right about the way we choose to evaluate the world from within a framework. But it is difficult to resist the conclusion that some frameworks, some bliks, are better than others at representing the nature of things. Paranoia is not a flattering analogue to religious belief – and surely the scientific blik (if such a thing is admitted) trumps them both. Moreover, by claiming that religious statements are not assertions of fact, Hare seems to be weakening the important claims that believers make. As Flew replied:
If Hare’s religion really is a blik, involving no cosmological assertions about the nature and activities of a supposed personal creator, then surely he is not a Christian at all?
A second response came from Basil Mitchell who offered his own parable.
In time of war in an occupied country, a member of the resistance meets one night a Stranger who deeply impresses him... The partisan is utterly convinced at that meeting of the Stranger’s sincerity and constancy and undertakes to trust him. They never meet in conditions of intimacy again. But sometimes the Stranger is seen helping members of the resistance, and the partisan is grateful and says to his friends, ‘He is on our side.’ Sometimes he is seen in the uniform of the police handling over patriots to the occupying power. On these occasions his friends murmur against him: but the partisan still says, ‘He is on our side.’ He still believes that, in spite of appearances, the Stranger did not deceive him... Sometimes his friends, in exasperation, say, ‘Well, what would he have to do for you to admit that you were wrong and that he is not on our side?’ But the partisan refuses to answer.
Mitchell’s partisan is certainly more flattering to believers than a paranoid lunatic, and the parable illustrates that belief in the absence of conclusive evidence is not unreasonable. While Flew insists upon empirical tests to render a statement meaningful, Mitchell shows that belief is as much a matter of trust and commitment. Religious claims do not have to be intellectually convincing: a believer can trust in their relationship with God, as the partisan comes to trust the stranger. Moreover the partisan’s trust is falsifiable in principle (and thus meets Flew’s challenge) but the question remains: what would it take to change the partisan’s mind? How much evidence is required to show that the stranger has betrayed him? Mitchell admits that there is no simple answer to this question – but at least it is not unreasonable to give the stranger the benefit of the doubt.
Some time after the University debate, John Hick suggested another way in which verifiability can apply to religious statements in his parable of the travellers.
Two men are traveling together along a road. One of them believes that it leads to the Celestial City, the other that it leads nowhere. But since this is the only road there is, both must travel it. Neither has been this way before, therefore neither is able to say what they will find around each corner. During their journey they meet with moments of refreshment and delight, and with moments of hardship and danger. All the time one of them thinks of his journey as a pilgrimage to the Celestial City... The other, however, believes none of this, and sees their journey as an unavoidable and aimless ramble... 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...
In other words, religious claims may, in the end, be verifiable if true (although not falsifiable if false). Hick’s point is that the two men experience the journey differently: the believer accepts the good and the bad calmly and pursues the path in hope of salvation. Belief makes a difference. It is important to note that Hick is not claiming that religious statements are true (or false), only that they are meaningful and that belief in those statements is reasonable. This approach has become known as eschatological verification.
Perhaps Flew’s criteria for meaningfulness are indeed too strict. After all, religious claims do seem to be asserting something, and Hick may be right to suggest that they are verifiable in principle. But the other extreme is also unacceptable. A statement must be bound by some criteria for it to be useful and meaningful: if a claim is not open to any process of verification or falsification, then it seems likely to be meaningless after all.
After so many parables and such subtle distinctions, we might be tempted to agree with Wittgenstein when he says:
... philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday. Philosophical Investigations §38
Wittgenstein’s early work developed a ‘picture theory’ of meaning. The concepts we use have meaning precisely because they correspond to images derived from experience: so my understanding of the term ‘church’ is based on its matching my mental picture of a church. This notion of a correspondence between language and the world influenced the logical positivists and encouraged the notions of verification and falsification as criteria of meaning.
However, for the later Wittgenstein this realist approach to language was wrong-headed. He came to recognise that we use language in many different ways: to promise, to command, to act, to joke, to curse, to greet, to name, and so on. In such cases language does not generate meaning through reference to external objects, but through its use in a particular context. In fact, the meaning of any statement depends upon the context in which it is used. If a spectator watching a football match has no understanding of the rules of football, then all the actions and commentary will lack meaning and appear pointless. Once the rules are understood, however, everything becomes clear. So it is with all language, Wittgenstein claimed: the words used in any ‘form of life’ only have meaning within that context. To expect these words to make sense in a different context is to send language on holiday. Thus a statement can have meaning to a particular group without requiring verification or falsification.
The implications of this anti-realist position for religious language are far-reaching. It is a mistake to see religious utterances as simple factual statements open to proof or disproof: they are, instead, part of a language-game played by religious speakers. The meaning of religious words is determined by their use, not by correspondence to some external reality. Take, for example, the word ‘soul’. To see the word as merely pointing to a thing is a mistake. It is the way the word ‘soul’ is used that determines its meaning to those participating in this language-game. Truth is a matter of coherence, and each form of life has its own internal coherence, just as each game has its own rules.
Following Wittgenstein, D Z Phillips has argued that since religious discourse is self-contained, it cannot be evaluated by ordinary criteria. A religion generates its own rules about meaning and truth, and those rules cannot be judged from outside the language-game. The truth of statements thus becomes relative, and focus switches instead to the performative nature of language. To declare that ‘God exists’, for example, is to express faith or indicate a particular form of life. The meaning of the statement does not depend upon external facts.
The question is not one of explaining a language-game by means of our experiences, but of noting a language-game. Philosophical Investigations §655
But this is a philosopher’s answer. For religious realists, their language (however much it depends upon conventions of use) is employed to refer to the world and its properties. When a believer claims that their soul will survive death, or that their prayers were answered, they often mean exactly that: they are making an empirical claim that should, in principle, be verifiable. Such claims are at the heart of the religious hypothesis and the truth or otherwise of such statements is of ultimate significance.
Even so, Wittgenstein is right to draw attention to the context of any religious statement as an indicator of its meaning. As in most forms of life, not all religious language should be understood as statements of fact. If a believer asserts that ‘God loves me like a father’ or that ‘The Word was God’ then they are not necessarily using language in a simple, informative way: they may be employing analogy or metaphor or speaking symbolically.
In the middle ages Thomas Aquinas explored the ways in which we can apply our language to God. For instance, what is the relationship between God’s love and human love? To apply the word ‘love’ univocally is to give it an identical meaning in both situations. But for Aquinas, this use of ‘love’ cannot be univocal as God is too unlike us (he is infinite, immaterial, non-temporal etc) and therefore God’s love cannot be understood as the same as ours. To apply the word equivocally is to recognise that it has a different meaning in each context: for example, words like ‘bit’, ‘light’ and ‘top’ have several unrelated meanings. But if religious language is equivocal then we cannot understand what is said about God based on our everyday use of language as the two are unrelated. (This led to an approach called the Via Negativa which argued that God cannot be described in positive terms but must instead be defined in terms of what he is not: so God is not multiple, nor mortal, nor temporal and so on.) The third way is to apply the word ‘love’ analogically which combines elements of the other two approaches. In an analogy, terms are used in different but related ways: so God’s ‘love’ is different from human love but related to it somehow. For example, this relation could simply be one of proportion: God’s love is proportional to God’s nature as human love is to human nature. Or the relation might be understood in terms of human attributes: human love is a shadowy and imperfect version of God’s love, as a dog’s loyalty is an imperfect version of his master’s.
Much religious language attempts to express religious claims in a non-literal way: in such expressions, something can represent something else. The most common techniques for representation are symbol, metaphor and myth. In each case the literal meaning of the terms used is not the issue: the terms are a signpost to something else, and evoke participation in the intended meaning. However, if such symbolic language is meant to represent something beyond our direct experience (and hence unverifiable) then we have no way of knowing how adequate the symbol is – or even if the insights it gives are right. And for many believers, to interpret scripture as metaphor or myth is to secularise it rather than to acknowledge its literal truth.
While realist approaches to this question place too strict limits on the function of the language we use, they do serve the purpose of helping to distinguish between the meaningful and the mystical. On the other hand, anti-realist approaches remind us that religious language has many functions and serves a complex purpose. These questions are still undecided and no real consensus has yet emerged.