by Harry Windsor

Created on: November 16, 2007

Ever since David Hume argued that all language not empirically grounded should be "committed to the flames for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion", there have been these who believe that no religious language can ever be meaningful. The basic argument is that because religious language discusses concepts that have no provable basis in reality it is irrelevant.

In the early 20th century the Logical Positivists made the claim that unless a statement can at least in theory be empirically verified by scientific testing it is meaningless. Statements about God or the afterlife therefore cannot be meaningful because it is impossible to verify such a claim. It is not necessary to actually verify all statements, merely to describe what conditions would be necessary to constitute proof.

Later Popper argued that it is not the possibility of verification that makes a statement meaningful but that of falsification. He points out that any theory which it is impossible to disprove is certainly meaningless. His claim is directed at theories and concepts which are so vague or abstract that any empirical evidence can be adapted to support its claims. So religious language is meaningless because for a believer there is essentially no evidence they would accept that disproves e.g. God's existence. This is precisely because believers rely on faith which remains unshaken in the face of worldly evidence. (Popper also included psychoanalysis and Marxism among those areas which can never be falsified as any existing results are twisted to fit the theory they are supposed to support)

Wittgenstein arrived at the theory of Language games to describe religious language - a language game being a concept which has a certain number of accepted words ad phrases which are meaningful to those involved in the language game, but may not be to those outside of it. So religious language derives its meaning from the fact that while its concepts may not clearly describe objects in the world they do have a set definition which is accepted by its users.

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