Religious language — AQA A-Level Philosophy

Cognitivism and non-cognitivism are rival accounts of what religious utterances such as 'God exists' or 'God is loving' are doing. A cognitivist holds that these utterances express beliefs and therefore make truth-claims: they purport to describe reality and can be true or false, so evidence and argument are relevant to assessing them. A non-cognitivist holds that they do not express factual beliefs but something else, such as attitudes, commitments, emotions or a way of life, so they are not straightforwardly true or false in the descriptive sense. The distinction is about the meaning and logical status of religious language, not about whether the speaker is sincere or whether religion is valuable.

Logical positivism, an empiricist movement associated with the Vienna Circle, held that a statement is meaningful only if it is analytic (true by definition) or empirically verifiable. Ayer applied this to religious and metaphysical language: since utterances such as 'God exists' are neither analytic nor empirically verifiable, they fail the verification principle and are dismissed as literally meaningless — not false, but without cognitive sense. Ayer later softened this, allowing weak verifiability: a statement is meaningful if some possible observation is relevant to its truth or falsity. The verification principle itself faces the objection that it is neither analytic nor empirically verifiable, so by its own standard it would be meaningless.

Ayer holds that a sentence is factually meaningful only if some possible sense-experience could count for or against it; otherwise it is neither true nor false but literally meaningless. Hick replies that meaningfulness need not be decidable within this life. He asks you to imagine two travellers walking a road: one believes it leads to a Celestial City, the other that it leads nowhere, and both interpret every twist identically until the road ends. If the road does end at the City, the believer's claim is verified and the sceptic's falsified; if not, the reverse. Hick calls this eschatological verification: the claim is verifiable in principle because a post-mortem outcome could confirm or defeat it, even though no present experience settles it. Teach the structure: state Ayer's criterion, state Hick's counter-example, explain 'in principle' versus 'in practice', then evaluate.

This row covers the University Debate and Flew's falsification challenge, built on Wisdom's Gardener parable. In the parable, one explorer claims a gardener tends a clearing while another finds no gardener; when every test — fences, watchmen, electrical detection — fails, the believer still insists the gardener is invisible, intangible and undetectable. Flew draws the lesson: a claim that is compatible with every possible observation asserts nothing. His challenge is that religious believers, like the believer in the parable, refuse to allow any experience to count against their claim, so the assertion dies 'the death of a thousand qualifications' and becomes meaningless. Flew is not simply saying religious claims are false; he is saying they have been emptied of content.

Flew's falsification challenge says a genuine assertion must be incompatible with some conceivable observation; if nothing could count against it, it dies 'the death of a thousand qualifications'. Mitchell replies with the Parable of the Partisan. A resistance fighter meets a stranger who claims to lead the resistance. The fighter trusts him, yet when he reports the stranger helping the enemy, he does not abandon his belief; he says the leader is 'working in a mysterious way'. Mitchell argues this is not a failure of falsification but a case of trusting a person despite contrary evidence. The believer's commitment is provisional and held against appearances, so the statement remains genuinely factual because the believer admits the evidence counts against it and would be shaken if the leader betrayed the cause.

Hare answers Flew with the Parable of the Lunatic, who believes all dons want to kill him. However kindly the dons behave, the lunatic reinterprets the evidence as proof of their murderous intent, so nothing could count against his belief. Hare calls such a belief a 'blik' — a basic, unverifiable framework through which a person interprets the world. Bliks can be sane or insane, right or wrong, but they are not factual assertions that evidence could confirm or refute. Hare argues religious belief is a blik: it shapes how the believer sees everything, so Flew's demand for falsification misapplies a standard appropriate only to ordinary empirical claims. Issues arise: if a blik cannot be tested, how do we distinguish a sane religious blik from the lunatic's? Hare appeals to the fruit of a blik in a person's life, but critics say this does not show the blik is true.