Religious language is meaningless
“Religious language is meaningless”
The problem of religious language considers whether it is possible to talk about God meaningfully if the traditional conceptions of God as being incorporeal, infinite, and timeless, are accepted. Because these traditional conceptions of God make it difficult to describe him, religious language has the potential to be meaningless. Theories of religious language either attempt to demonstrate that such language is meaningless, or attempt to show how religious language, while problematic, can still be meaningful. I personally believe that the arguments put forward by Maimonides offer a sufficient defence regarding religious language. The arguments raised by the logical positivists, although on the face of it strong arguments against religious language, fail as they themselves, once subjected to their own criterion, become meaningless.
Wittgenstein, at first glance, appears to bear the mark of a more ‘modernist’ approach by providing a puritanically logical reformulation of Hume’s two dogmas: apriori analytic statements are trivial but meaningful and that substantive aposteriori statements are substantive and meaningful. His underlying theory has been called Logical Atomism which is an ideal theory of language which suggests that reality is comprised of fixed ‘atomic facts’ or propositions drawn from sense data which when combined with others of the same variety produce ‘molecular’ facts. Furthermore, each proposition has a meaning independent of other propositions. His early philosophy of language and theory of meaning was based upon Logical Atomism. This suggests that reality is comprised of fixed “atomic facts” or propositions drawn from sense data which, when combined with others of the same variety, produce “molecular facts”. This is best described using an analogy of a table. A table is made of a combination of atomic facts: it must have legs, a flat surface and be raised off the ground. Together, these separate atomic facts
The problem of religious language considers whether it is possible to talk about God meaningfully if the traditional conceptions of God as being incorporeal, infinite, and timeless, are accepted. Because these traditional conceptions of God make it difficult to describe him, religious language has the potential to be meaningless. Theories of religious language either attempt to demonstrate that such language is meaningless, or attempt to show how religious language, while problematic, can still be meaningful. I personally believe that the arguments put forward by Maimonides offer a sufficient defence regarding religious language. The arguments raised by the logical positivists, although on the face of it strong arguments against religious language, fail as they themselves, once subjected to their own criterion, become meaningless.
Wittgenstein, at first glance, appears to bear the mark of a more ‘modernist’ approach by providing a puritanically logical reformulation of Hume’s two dogmas: apriori analytic statements are trivial but meaningful and that substantive aposteriori statements are substantive and meaningful. His underlying theory has been called Logical Atomism which is an ideal theory of language which suggests that reality is comprised of fixed ‘atomic facts’ or propositions drawn from sense data which when combined with others of the same variety produce ‘molecular’ facts. Furthermore, each proposition has a meaning independent of other propositions. His early philosophy of language and theory of meaning was based upon Logical Atomism. This suggests that reality is comprised of fixed “atomic facts” or propositions drawn from sense data which, when combined with others of the same variety, produce “molecular facts”. This is best described using an analogy of a table. A table is made of a combination of atomic facts: it must have legs, a flat surface and be raised off the ground. Together, these separate atomic facts