The problem Hare answers

The religious-language debate asks whether sentences about God are meaningful. The issue is not simply whether a believer feels strongly. It is whether religious sentences make claims, and if so, what could count for or against them.

Hare is responding to the challenge that religious language fails tests of factual meaning. On a falsification test, a meaningful assertion must rule something out. If no possible evidence would count against a claim, the critic may say that the claim asserts nothing clear.

Hare makes a careful move. He does not try to prove that religious claims pass Flew's test for factual assertions. Instead, he shifts the ground: religious language may be meaningful as the expression of a Blik.

That move matters for AO1 because it explains Hare accurately. It matters for AO2 because it creates the central evaluation: has Hare saved religious language, or has he saved it only by making it non-factual?

What a Blik is

A Blik is not just an isolated belief, such as "it will rain tomorrow". It is more like an underlying orientation. It affects many judgements at once.

The key phrase is "language as an expression of a Blik". Hare's point is not that religious language is meaningless noise. It expresses a deep way of interpreting the world. For example, saying "God is loving" may express a believer's basic trust that reality is ultimately held within divine purpose.

This makes Hare's view non-cognitive in an important sense. Religious language expresses a framework of trust and interpretation rather than functioning only as a factual hypothesis to be verified or falsified.

Hare's parables

Hare explains Bliks through parables. His original wording uses dated language about mental illness, so it is better to focus on the philosophical structure rather than repeat that label as a teaching term.

In the first parable, a person is convinced that all university dons want to murder him. His friends introduce him to kind, respectable dons. After each meeting, the friends point out that the don behaved warmly. The person replies that the kindness was only cunning. However many kindly dons appear, the reaction is unchanged.

Hare's point is subtle:

Hare's second example is trust in the steering of a car. A person normally trusts that the steering will keep working. No finite number of safe journeys logically proves that the next journey will be safe, yet ordinary life depends on this trust. Hare links this to a wider point: our dealings with the world rest on basic frames of confidence.

The two examples show two sides of the idea. A Blik can be distorted, as in the dons example. A Blik can also be ordinary and life-enabling, as in everyday trust in the regularity of the world.

Religious language as Blik

Hare applies the idea to religion. Religious language may express the believer's Blik about the world. It shows how the believer interprets reality, suffering, goodness, obligation, hope, and dependence.

Scholar/source card:

Hare's argument can be set out as an argument chain:

1. Flew's falsification challenge attacks religious language as if it were a set of factual assertions.
2. Some religious language does not behave like ordinary factual assertion, because believers may not state clear conditions under which it would be withdrawn.
3. However, not all meaningful language has to work as a falsifiable assertion.
4. A Blik is a meaningful frame through which a person interprets experience.
5. Religious language can therefore be meaningful as the expression of a religious Blik.

This means Hare does not answer the challenge by saying, "Here is the evidence that verifies God." His answer is different: the critic is using too narrow a model of meaning if only testable assertions count.

Strengths of Hare's response

Hare's response is strong because it exposes a possible weakness in strict verification or falsification challenges: they may define meaning too narrowly. Human life includes trust, commitment, moral orientation and existential interpretation. These are not always testable in the same way as scientific hypotheses, but they can still be significant.

One strength is that Hare explains why religious language can shape life. A believer's language about God may influence worship, moral courage, repentance, gratitude, hope, and endurance. Even if a sentence such as "God loves us" is not treated as a scientific hypothesis, it can still structure a believer's world.

A second strength is intellectual honesty. Hare does not simply pretend that every religious statement is easily falsifiable. He concedes that Flew wins if religious language is judged only on Flew's terms. Hare's response is to question those terms.

A third strength is that Hare distinguishes between having no factual assertion and having no difference at all. Two people with different Bliks may live, judge and respond very differently. For Hare, that difference is philosophically important.

AO1-to-AO2 bridge:

Limits and objections

The strongest criticism is that Hare may save religious language at too high a price. Many religious believers do not think they are merely expressing an attitude or outlook. They often intend claims about God, creation, salvation, judgement, or ultimate reality to be true. If Hare makes religious language non-cognitive, he may protect it from falsification but weaken its realist content.

A second objection is that Hare struggles to explain how one Blik can be judged better than another. Hare thinks there can be sane and mistaken Bliks, but if Bliks are not settled by observation, it becomes difficult to say why a religious Blik is rationally preferable to a hostile, fearful, or harmful one.

Mitchell's criticism is useful here. In the same debate, Mitchell argues that faith should recognise that some evidence counts against belief, even if it is not decisive. On this view, Hare's account risks making faith too insulated from evidence. If nothing can count against a Blik, then the believer may look closed to correction.

Flew's challenge also remains sharp. If religious language does not assert anything that could be denied, then perhaps it is not meaningful in the sense religious believers need. It may express commitment, but it may no longer tell us anything true about God.

Hare's possible reply is that this criticism assumes factual assertion is the only serious kind of meaning. A religious Blik may not work like a scientific claim, but it can still orient a whole life. The evaluation turns on whether that is enough for religious language.

Essay-ready judgement

For AO1, keep Hare precise: a Blik is an interpretive frame, and religious language can express such a frame. Hare is not the same as Hick, who answers verification through possible after-death verification. Hare is not the same as Wittgenstein, who focuses on language games and communities of use.

For AO2, the key judgement is balanced:

A basic paragraph might say: Hare says religious language is a Blik, so it is meaningful. This is strong because it helps religious people.

A stronger paragraph move would be: Hare's account is persuasive if the critic has assumed that only empirically testable assertions can be meaningful. By treating religious language as an expression of a Blik, Hare explains why religious speech can shape trust, conduct and interpretation even when it is not falsifiable like a scientific claim. However, this strength is also the weakness: if religious language is only an expression of a Blik, then claims about God may lose their status as factual truth claims. Hare therefore gives a strong defence of non-cognitive significance, but a weaker defence of realist religious belief.

Synoptic link: in the wider AQA religious-language cluster, Hare can be compared with Hick and Wittgenstein as three different responses to the challenge that religious language is meaningless. Hare's distinctive contribution is the Blik: religious language as the expression of a basic interpretive frame.