3.3.3 - Religious language - verification and Hick's response

The Meaning Problem

Religious language raises a problem before we even ask whether it is true.

When someone says that God exists, that God loves human beings, or that there is life after death, are they making claims that could be true or false? Or are they doing something else, such as expressing trust, worship, commitment, hope, or a way of seeing life?

The philosophical issue is:

Can religious statements have cognitive, factual meaning?

A statement has cognitive meaning if it expresses a proposition: something that can be true or false. A proposition is truth-apt. It may be true, false, well-supported, badly-supported, known, doubted, or rejected.

A command, a cry of pain, a cheer, or an expression of commitment can be meaningful without being truth-apt. "Shut the door" and "hurrah" are meaningful uses of language, but they do not state facts in the same way as "the door is shut".

That distinction matters because Ayer's challenge is not simply:

Religious claims are false.

His deeper challenge is:

Many religious sentences fail to express genuine factual propositions at all.

That is more radical. If a claim is false, it is still meaningful enough to be assessed. If it fails to express a proposition, then arguing over its truth is like arguing over the truth of a grammatically impressive but factually empty string of words.

The basic religious-language problem can be reconstructed like this:

Claim at issue: Central religious sentences are meaningful factual claims.

1. P1: A meaningful factual claim must express a proposition that can be true or false.
2. P2: A sentence expresses such a proposition only if we understand what would make it true or false.
3. P3: Some religious sentences appear to refer beyond any possible human experience.
4. Therefore, C: It is unclear whether those religious sentences express meaningful factual claims.

Hidden assumption: Understanding factual meaning requires grasping possible truth-conditions or evidence-conditions.
Inference type: Conceptual and semantic reasoning about meaning.
Main pressure point: Whether religious language must work like ordinary factual description.

So this lesson is not an argument about whether God exists. It is an argument about what kind of language religious language is, and whether it can count as fact-stating language at all.

Cognitivism And Non-Cognitivism

This distinction is about what religious language does. It is not yet a judgement about whether religion is valuable or worthless.

The debate with Ayer begins from the cognitivist reading. Ayer asks whether religious sentences, taken as factual claims, pass an empiricist test of meaning. Hick replies by trying to show that at least some religious claims can pass that test.

Do not blur three questions:

Ayer is mainly attacking factual meaning. Hick is mainly defending factual meaning. Neither point, by itself, settles whether the claim is true.

The distinction can be reconstructed like this:

Claim at issue: Religious language should be treated as cognitive.

1. P1: If religious sentences express propositions, they can be true or false.
2. P2: If they can be true or false, then it makes sense to ask what would verify or falsify them.
3. P3: Some religious sentences appear difficult to verify or falsify by experience.
4. Therefore, C: The cognitivist reading of religious language faces an empiricist challenge.

Hidden assumption: Truth-apt factual language must be answerable to possible evidence.
Inference type: Conceptual reasoning from truth-aptness to evidential conditions.
Main pressure point: Whether there are non-empirical but still factual forms of meaning.

Ayer's Verification Challenge

A J Ayer's challenge comes from logical positivism, an empiricist movement that tried to draw a sharp line between meaningful factual discourse and metaphysics. A metaphysical claim, in this context, is a claim that purports to describe reality beyond possible experience.

The verification principle is the key test.

An analytic statement is true or false by meaning alone. For example, a triangle has three sides. It does not report a new fact about the world; understanding the terms is enough.

An empirically verifiable statement is one for which possible experience could count toward establishing its truth or falsity. It need not be verified right now. It must be the kind of claim for which observation could be relevant in principle.

Ayer distinguishes strong and weak verification:

Ayer's attack on religious language is that claims about a transcendent God do not meet the test. They are not analytic truths. They also do not seem empirically verifiable, because a transcendent God is not an object within possible sensory experience.

The argument is not merely that no one has proved God exists. Ayer's point is sharper: if no possible experience could count for or against the claim, then the sentence does not state a factual proposition.

The verification challenge can be reconstructed like this:

Claim at issue: "God exists", understood as a transcendent religious claim, is factually meaningful.

1. P1: A sentence has literal factual meaning only if what it says is either analytic or empirically verifiable in principle.
2. P2: "God exists", understood as a claim about a transcendent being, is not analytic.
3. P3: No possible sensory experience could verify a transcendent being whose essential nature is beyond the empirical world.
4. Therefore, C: "God exists", so understood, lacks literal factual meaning.

Hidden assumption: All factual meaning must be either analytic or empirically answerable.
Inference type: Deductive argument from a criterion of meaning, if the verification principle is accepted.
Main pressure point: The verification principle itself, and whether religious claims really have no possible experiential implications.

This is why Ayer's challenge is often described as non-cognitivist about religious language. Religious utterances may express feelings or attitudes, but when they are presented as factual descriptions of a transcendent reality, Ayer argues that they fail to express genuine propositions.

The challenge is powerful because it forces the religious believer to say what would count as evidence. But it is also risky for Ayer. If the verification principle cannot itself be verified empirically or shown to be analytic, then the principle may fail its own test. A defender of Ayer can reply that the principle is a proposed rule for meaningful factual discourse, not an ordinary factual hypothesis. The residual problem is whether such a rule has been justified rather than simply asserted.

Verification And Falsification

AQA pairs the verification principle with verification/falsification because the central issue is whether a sentence is answerable to possible experience.

Verification asks:

What possible experience would count in favour of this claim being true?

Falsification asks:

What possible experience would count against this claim, or show it to be false?

The two questions are related but not identical. Some claims are easier to verify than falsify. Others are easier to falsify than verify.

In The Central Questions of Philosophy, Ayer treats verification and falsification with more caution than in the most slogan-like version of logical positivism. Simple criteria create problems. If the criterion is too strict, it excludes ordinary science and history. If it is too loose, it allows in claims with no real empirical discipline.

The important AQA point is this: