The Status of God-Talk

Abstract

A NUMBER of contemporary philosophers have been puzzled by the apparently non-falsifiable status of religious claims. They are puzzled because, although it is a sociological fact that many people think they are making ordinary factual claims in their Godtalk, it is a logical fact that such talk does not behave like ordinary factual discourse. This fact leads, then, to the following questions: Do religious beliefs have factual significance? Do they obey the rules for propositions? Or is their content inexpressible in propositional form? If religious beliefs do not obey the rules of propositions, then do they obey other rules and hence have a meaning or structure uniquely their own? Responses to these questions have been many and varied, ranging from Hare's characterization of religious beliefs as bliks,' to Braithwaite's theory that they are disguised moral judgments,2 to Hick's account of them as eschatological predictions.3 Some of these theories have been outrageously simplistic. Some have been sceptical, others not. Those who have been led to a kind of scepticism by their puzzlement are sceptics, however, in an entirely different sense from that of the traditional religious sceptic. The traditional sceptic doubted that religious beliefs could be proven or could even be shown to be probable. The contemporary sceptic doubts that religious beliefs are significant factual claims. He doubts that they are even intelligible possibilities for belief. His scepticism, then, is at a more fundamental level than that of the traditional sceptic, for he calls into question not the truth but the meaningfulness of religious claims. Much of contemporary Anglo-Saxon philosophy stresses that in order to discover the logic or structure of any discourse, including religious discourse, we are obliged to examine that discourse in the context of its use and function. Wittgenstein's impact on contemporary analytic philosophy has been exactly this-to make clear that language has many uses and purposes, that the logic of one use of language, the rules governing the symbols of that use, might be quite different from the rules governing the symbols in another use of language or type of discourse. There is no single test of meaningfulness such as some contended the verifiability principle was. It may well be that religious discourse does not obey the rules of, say, scientific discourse. This does not mean that it has no meaning, no significance. It may well obey other kinds of rules, 1 Hare, R.M. Theology and Falsification. In New Essays in Philosophical Theology.