Talk:Problem of religious language

move Move MOVE

What is with all the moving of this article? Is it two or three times now? Say listen, I've never heard of "philosophy of religious language" and I doubt we are going to find sources for that title. I propose that we move it back to "Problem of religious language" and hopefully that will be satisfactory. Greg Bard (talk) 19:11, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

Naming Problem

The article is entitled "Problem of religious language", and the following definition is given: "Religious language is a philosophical problem arising from the difficulties in accurately describing God." Is "religious language" the widely accepted notion for it in philosophy and religious studies? It seems problematic to me because religion is much more than the deity and can even function without one, like Buddhism. Judging from the article, this seems more about the problem with theistic language than the problem with religious language. I feel that the title of the article should therefore be changed to better reflect this with more accurate terminology, perhaps to something like "Problem of theistic language".

~MaiyaH78 05:03, 6 March 2013 (UTC)

Amen to that! Alandeus (talk) 07:44, 6 March 2013 (UTC)

I'm not sure. The sources tend to refer to religious language, rather than theistic language - I think calling it theist language because we think it fits better would be original research. Also, parts of the article are more about religion than deities specifically - the Alternative explanations of religious language section, for example. ItsZippy ^{(talk • contributions)} 10:24, 6 March 2013 (UTC)

Comment

Yea... Speling12345 (talk) 7:53, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

Maybe move to Problem of Abrahamic religious language?

Quick scan indicates conflation of the dominant monotheism with religion in general and therefore with milling about "god". There certainly are problems with religious thought in general but the latter is a proper superset of this thing with many other variants on making scholarly do about made up stuff (as fundamental beliefs).

Alternatively, redact with at least some mention of the set difference. These titles may be useful for such a generalization, in the direction of poetics and game theory directly applied:

1. Finite and Infinite Games. "A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility". James P Carse. ISBN 0-345-34184-8
   
2. Superior Beings. "If they exist how would we know" Steven J Brams. ISBN 0-387-90877-3

(as distinct from generalization to a wider context of historical cultures), respectively.

Lycurgus (talk) 00:48, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

Actually, it might be more accurate to slim it down even further. At a quick glance the article seems entirely focused on a discussion occurring within the Christian perspective. It either needs to be mentioned in the title or early on that this article is only related to the Christian religion, since similar discussions in Judaism and Islam might diverge. As such, the article might not reflect the full range of the discussion, even within the Abrahamic religions.

I will however say that I do think the article is biased against non-Abrahamic religions. Not all religions even agree on the existence of a God figure, let alone if such things are "Incorporeal, infinite, or timeless." Such an assertion without at least nodding to the fact that the discussion covered in this article is constrained to (an) Abrahamic religion is misleading. Pretty much what Lycurgus said, though I don't know if everyone could get what was intended. 67.239.127.121 (talk) 01:59, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

'Problem of Discussing Monotheism'

Monotheism ~ Fanaticism vs Discussion ~ Diplomacy , see the problem? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.0.143.69 (talk) 05:16, 12 September 2014 (UTC) :

67.239.127.121, assume for 'accurate' you meant effective, appropriate, better, etc. 89.0.143.69, no, I don't. Lycurgus (talk) 08:41, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

Even before reading this discussion, I had two main concerns after reading this article:

(in disclosure, I am Jewish, although not overly observant. I do not know whether this informs or biases my response to the article)

1. It seems as though virtually all of the individuals mentioned in the article are philosophers, with a few theologians. I did not see any mention of the views of experts on literature, especially religious literature or (even better, in my opinion) ancient literature or history (or archaeology, as archaeological finds may uncover evidence of how individuals and societies thought/wrote about the issues discussed in the article). This somewhat dovetails with my second observation, which was similar to yours...

2. Aside from Maimonides and a token mention of one Sikh text and one Buddhist parable, the article is almost entirely focused on philosophers from a European-Christian background, and focuses virtually exclusively on critiques of Christian theology and beliefs. To be clear, I have no problem with the fact that the article focuses on critiques of religion or on critiques of the descriptions of various deities. My concern is that the article seems to be pretty much entirely focused on Christianity. I did not even see a single mention of the Talmud or Mishnah, I think there might have been one or two token references to the Quran, and I don't even think that the words "Rigveda" or "Bhagavad Gita" appear even once. According to Wikipedia, Hinduism is the world's third-largest religion, and given that it has so many deities, one would think that there must be at least some discussion amongst Hindu philosophers over problems in their religious language used to describe at least one of their many deities.

Oh, and I do have a third concern, but somewhat minor: at some point the article switches from using terms like "religious believers/adherents" or "members of <religion>", and simply begins to use the term "theists". I am not familiar with actual scholarly work that uses the term "theist", as I have only seen that term used in explicitly sociopolitical atheist writings. As the term itself is vague and (pardon the pun) meaningless, and as it is also demonstrably not a term that encompasses all religious beliefs (or even all beliefs of some individual religions), it strikes me as an odd term to use, unless it is one that the sources are explicitly using. I could be mistaken, but as I said, I am not familiar with this term being used in scholarly works.

But overall, this article reads (to me, and recall my disclosure at the beginning of this comment) as being almost exclusively focused on European-Christian authors, European-Christian religious beliefs and practices, and almost exclusively focused on the writings of theologians and philosophers at the expense of experts on literature, archaeology, and history. I am very surprised that this was a featured article given such fairly obvious shortcomings. Hyperion35 (talk) 04:07, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

Flew and religious language

May I suggest that the article - good as it is - really needs to make explicit reference to Flew's retraction of his wholly atheistic conclusions; although , as understand him, he continued to maintain the falsifiability criterion. Consequently, he came to the view that a (very restricted) set of religious statements were indeed falsifiable; and since most recent scientific findings tended to indicate that they would not be falsfied, a consistent application of the falsfiabilty principle would accept them as meaningful (and hence possibly true). Flew therefore concluded that there can meaningfully be said to be a 'God' in the Aristotolean sense of the creator and designer of the Universe. Flew's revised falsifiability proposals are essentially about time; he accepts the claims of physicists to be able to estimate the age of the universe (and also of our Earth), by extrapolating backwards from its current physical state, applying known physical processes and empirical findings as to their rates of change. Such age estimates have precise confidence intervals. By analogy, Flew argues, we ought to be able to extrapolate backwards from the current observed complexity of biological organisms, including ourselves, applying the known properties of the biological drivers of evolutionary change to estimate the biological age of life on Earth - again with confidence intervals. If the Earth's biological age is consistent its physical age, then biolgical theory is an adaquate explantory basis for observed rates of evolutionary change; and religious claims would be redundant. But if extrapolated biological age precedes physial age (and there is no overlap of confidence intervals) then some sort of 'intelligent design' may meaningfully be proposed. "the latest work I have seen shows that the present physical universe gives too little time for these theories of abiogenesis to get the job done." TomHennell (talk) 11:16, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

It's unclear what change you are suggesting for the article Tom. Zounds like ur makin' a confused and fallacious semi-argument for intelligent design, and you know WP:Forum. If that's not the case my apologies and you may want to wait till it goes off front to add your changes. Lycurgus (talk) 11:34, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

As you say, better not to make any changes while the article is on show. Flew's revised position is discussed in that article; and I don't see much more need than a simple additional para to the effect that he subsequently reversed his previously published opinion - with a reference to his book and a link to Antony Flew. At the core of Flew's argument - both in its original and reversed form - is the scholastic argument that 'God cannot be other than he is'; and consequently that the attributes of God cannot be contingent. Hence, to argue the meaninglessness of the proposition 'God', Flew sought to demonstrate the non-falsifiability of the proposition 'not-God'. When subsequently he came to believe (in my view correctly, though few theologians would agree) that the proposition 'not-God' is indeed falsifiable; he drew the revised conclusion that the proposition 'God' is meaningful.

Of course Flew's revised argument neatly turns the 'invisibile gardener' on his head. When Flew presented his view that biological complexity and evolutionary dynamics could not be reconciled with the physical age of the Earth, the response of many evolutionary biologists was to deny that the implied precision could ever be achieved in biological description. So the arguments of the skeptic gardener are also exposed as subject to a death by a thousand qualifications. TomHennell (talk) 13:15, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

- suggested edit -

The falsification principle has been developed as an alternative theory of meaning which attempts to establish the meaninglessness of religious language. It casts religious language as unfalsifiable because there is no way that it could be empirically proven false. Analytic philosopher Antony Flew argued in a paper first published in 1945 that a meaningful statement must simultaneously assert and deny a state of affairs; for example, the statement "God loves us" both asserts that God loves us and denies that God does not love us. Flew maintained that if a religious believer could not say what circumstances would have to exist for their statements about God to be false, then they are unfalsifiable.

Using John Wisdom's parable of the invisible gardener, Flew attempted to demonstrate that religious language is unfalsifiable. The parable tells the story of two people who discover a garden on a deserted island; one believes it is tended to by a gardener, the other believes that it formed naturally, without the existence of a gardener. The two watch out for the gardener but never find him; the non-believer maintains that there is no gardener, whereas the believer suggests that the gardener is invisible and cannot be detected. Flew contended that if this interpretation is accepted, nothing is left of the original gardener proposed by the believer. He argued that in a similar fashion, religious beliefs suffer a "death by a thousand qualifications" because religious beliefs are qualified and modified so much that they end up asserting nothing meaningful. Flew applied his principles to religious claims such as God's love for humans, arguing that if they are meaningful assertions they would deny a certain state of affairs. He argued that when faced with evidence against the existence of God, such as the terminal illness of a child, theists will qualify their claims to allow for such evidence; for example they may suggest that God's love is different from human love. Such qualifications, Flew argued, make the original proposition meaningless; he questioned what God's love actually promises and what it guarantees against, and proposed that God's qualified love promises nothing and becomes worthless.

Flew continued in many subsequent publications to maintain the falsifiability criterion for meaning; but in later life retracted the specfic assertion in his paper that all religious language is unfalsifiable, and so meaningless. Drawing specifically on the emerging science of Molecular genetics (which had not existed at the time of his original paper), Flew eventually became convinced that the complexity this revealed in the mechanisms of biological reproduction might not be consistent with the time known to have been available for evolution to happen; and that this potentially provided an empirical test by which the assertion "that there is no creator God" might be falsified; "the latest work I have seen shows that the present physical universe gives too little time for these theories of abiogenesis to get the job done." Flew nevertheless continued to maintain the non-falsifiability of religious assertions purportedly derived from divine revelation; all of which he rejected as meaningless.

TomHennell (talk) 19:32, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

References

This is an article that gets it all upside-down

Why? Because this is only true inside science while deeply untrue under the header of Religion and Theology. One should make a marker of this in the introduction so that people know that this article is arcane material, only the "academic" interest remaining. Still then, even more so, science remains the ways of God under Religion, this posing no problem whatsoever to religious people. Cheers! 109.189.211.44 (talk) 18:41, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

Hence Theism, that belief has been or is central to religious conviction... 109.189.211.44 (talk) 18:55, 12 September 2014 (UTC)