Berkeley and Religious Language

Abstract

Contemporary philosophy has recently shown an increasing interest in the problems of religious philosophy especially where such problems lend themselves to linguistic analysis. More often than not the consequence of such analysis has been a scepticism concerning the meaningfulness of religious language. Many philosophers regard theology as nonsense; religious belief is held to be unwarranted on any reasonable grounds. In his own time Berkeley contended against similar attitudes and attacks upon religious belief and religious language. For Berkeley the two great threats to Christianity and to religious belief in general were Materialism and Deism. These are historical issues of considerable interest but any concern we have with them will be only peripheral in character. My primary purpose will be to show that in his defense of religion Berkeley developed certain concepts of religious language that enabled him to establish the meaningfulness and the reasonableness of Christian belief. In contrast, then, to much of the contemporary effort, he provided for a justification of religious language and religious belief. More specifically, he contended that religious language, whether natural or theological, is both meaningful and true. (In the development of this thesis we have no intention of relating Berkeley’s linguistic analysis to that of contemporary philosophy, nor shall we attempt to read the past in terms of the present.