Religious Language
The Verification principle⇒ Statements that can be verified using internal logic and grammar are analytic-"All bachelors are unmarried". The definition of a bachelor is an unmarried man. Everything needed to verify the statement is included in the statement.
⇒ Statements that can be verified using external sense data are said to be synthetic.-"Eric is a bachelor". We would need to find Eric and ask him about his marital status-this would provide the external sense data.
⇒ A sentence could only be meaningful if some sense experience could count in its favour. In other words it had to be verifiable i.e we could actually see, hear or touch it in order to discover whether it was true or false. Thus a sentence must be considered meaningless if it could not be verified. This is known as the Verification Principle.
The Falsification Principle
⇒ Statements are considered true until some evidence counts against them.
⇒ As well as applying falsification as a test for the truth of scientific theories, it was thought that it could also be applied to test the meaningfulness of statements. Scientific theories were only considered true as long as they were not falsified.
Negation
⇒ Some have argued that even though it may not be possible to describe God, it is possible to say hwat He is not.
⇒ For example, it could be said that "God is not evil" and joined with many other similar statements, this can actually tell us something about God.
⇒ However, other have argued that this idea of "negation" cannot really tell us anything about God since saying what He is not, never pinpoints exactly what He is.
Analogy
⇒ This is a comparison of two (or more) different things that points out the ways in which they are similar. For instance, a writer may explain a new idea by comparing it to more familiar experiences.
⇒ A famous example of an analogy is William Paley's comparison of the universe and the watch.
<⇒ u>Thomas Aquinas- used the idea of analogy to try and show that it is possible to talk about God.
Aquinas first looked at the way the same word could be used to mean different things.
Aquinas said that a word could be used in 2 ways: either univocally when it is used to mean exactly the same thing, or equivocally when it is used in a completely different way. He argued that when we talk about God we cannot used words either univocally or equivocally rather we must appeal to the idea of analogy and say that words are used in a similar though not identical way.
Aquinas felt there are 2 way in which analogies can be used to talk about God: proportion and attribution.
For example,we can understand "God is omnipotent" by using an analogy of proportion- we have a human idea of what it means to be able to do something and we can use this as our basis for understanding God. God however is proportionally more powerful than humans.
Aquinas' idea of attribution is based on the idea that many human characteristics are derived from God's.