T h e   T o w e r   o f   B a b e l   b y   P i e t e r   B r u e g e l

1.  The verification and falsification principles:  discussions of the meaningfulness of religious language.

2.  The use of symbol, analogy and myth to express human understandings of God.

3.  The apophatic way (via negativa).

I n t r o d u c t i o n

There is one problem pervading this section of the syllabus:  Can we talk meaningfully about God, and if so, what can such ‘God talk’ tell us?  This question arises on account of God’s [transcendent or infinite] nature and our [limited or finite] nature.  Divine transcendence implies that God is not a part of our normal, physical world of sense experience.  Christians also claim that God is immanent, which means that God can act within the world.  Part of the problem concerns how we can acquire knowledge or experience of God as the basis for our talk about God; this question has links with the religious experience section.  More acutely, the problem is to consider how can we speak at all meaningfully of anything that is beyond our experience.  How can language rooted in sense experience speak of something beyond it?  How can we account for the apparent paradoxes which are thrown up when the words we use to describe God are interpreted within the limits of our experience.  Shouldn’t an omnipotent God be able to create an unliftable object, and then go on to lift it?

Philosophers have responded differently to these problems.  For the logical positivists (verification and falsification) religious language has no cognitive meaning, and therefore no real meaning at all.  For mystics God is simply beyond our conception and therefore we cannot describe God in human terms (the via negativa), but only point the way to an experience of the divine.  For others language is a challenge to be overcome.  Religious language can give us insights, hints about the true nature of God using analogy, metaphor, symbol and myth.

The purpose of this section is decide whether ‘God talk’ is meaningful, and if so, what it can say to us.

The Verification and Falsification Principles

A.J. Ayer (1910–1989) wrote the book Language, Truth and Logic when he was only 25 years old; yet it had a huge impact on many areas of philosophy and theology.  Ayer was a logical positivist.  This group of thinkers held the that the [scientific] model of truth, one that required empirical evidence in order to establish facts (statements of cognitive meaning), was the best and indeed only one capable of providing real knowledge.

In his book Ayer puts forward the ‘verification principle’ as a method of telling sense from nonsense.  In Ayer’s terms, sensible statements are those we know how to verify (check), at least in principle, while statements we do not know how to verify are simply nonsense.  In Ayer’s own words, ‘We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express.’  In this sense the statement, ‘There is an elephant dancing on the roof in a pink tutu’, is a meaningful (though probably false) statement because I know how to check whether there is an elephant on the roof, whether it is dancing, and whether it is wearing a pink tutu..

Ayer recognises there are certain problems with this theory.  Firstly, there is the problem of historical statements. I could not go back in time to verify that there was a battle in Hastings in 1066, yet Ayer would still wish to allow that this was a meaningful statement. He therefore introduces ‘verification in principle’. This states that if, in principle, I would know how to verify a statement, although I may not actually be able to verify it, then it is meaningful. So, there was a battle in Hastings in 1066 stays meaningful because IF I had been in Hastings in 1066 then I would know how I could have verified it, thus it is meaningful.

Secondly, Ayer realised that some scientific theories did not have a lot of evidence in their favour, but were made more likely by ad hoc or coincidental evidence. Ayer still wanted to allow this type of theory, so he made a distinction between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ verification. Strong verification is where there is no doubt a theory is true because it could be backed up with clear evidence. The weak theory is for theories where there is some evidence, but it is not conclusive. Thus, historical statements about events which happened a long time ago and can only be backed up with a few historical records would count as weak verification.

When applied to other areas of human knowledge the results of the verification principle are more startling. Ayer says that statements of religion, ethics and art are meaningless because we do not know the circumstances under which we would verify them. If one person loves the Mona Lisa and one hates it there is no way to settle the argument, equally, if a believer says God loves them this statement offers no method of verification. Therefore these statements are non-cognitive and meaningless.

Assessment

This theory sparked much debate, but key amongst the critics were religious believers who simply felt they were saying things of profound meaning when they spoke of God. A serious criticism of the theory was that it was self-contradictory. After all if the criteria is true then we should be able to verify the verification principle, but it is hard to see how. If the principle is not true (verifiable) then why should we follow it?

John Hick made the observation that, in principle, statements about God are verifiable eschatalogically. That is, when we die we will know if there is a God and a heaven etc. It does not matter that we cannot verify it until after death, because on the verification principle I only have to know how I would check it.

Lastly, many religious statements would count as weakly verifiable. The Biblical miracle stories are weakly verifiable because there is historical documentation that they occurred. Thus in the end it appears that the verification principle either excludes too much, or too little.

Anthony Flew (1923–    )proposed a solution to the problems of the verification principle, saying that the falsification principle was a better tool for telling truth from falsehood.

The falsification principle says that when someone proposes a theory or makes a cognitive statement we do not need to know how to prove (verify) it, but instead how to falsify or disprove it.

Flew borrows John Wisdom’s parable of the gardener in order to explain his theory:

“Let us begin with a parable.  It is a parable developed from a tale told by John Wisdom in his haunting and revolutionary article ‘Gods’.  Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle.  In the clearing were growing many flowers and many weeds.  One explorer says, “Some gardener must tend this plot.”  The other disagrees, “There is no gardener.”  So they pitch their tents and set a watch.  No gardener is ever seen.  “But perhaps he is an invisible gardener.”  So they set up a barbed-wire fence.  They electrify it.  They patrol with bloodhounds.  (For they remember how H. G. Well’s The Invisible Man could be both smelt and touched though he could not be seen.)  But no shrieks ever suggest that some intruder has received a shock.  No movements of the wire ever betray an invisible climber.  The bloodhounds never give cry.  Yet still the Believer is not convinced.  “But there is a gardener, invisible, intangible, insensible, to electric shocks, a gardener who has no scent and makes no sound, a gardener who comes secretly to look after the garden which he loves.”  At last the Sceptic despairs, “But what remains of your original assertion?  Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?”  

In this analogy the gardener is God and the Believer represents the religious believer and the Sceptical explorer the falsificationist.  In the end, the Sceptic claims that the Believer’s belief in God is not cognitive, because there is no evidence that could disprove it.  Every time evidence is gathered, the Believer gives a reason why the evidence does not count against his belief.  The assertion God exists suffers what Flew calls, ‘death by 1000 qualifications’.  In other words, the nature of the gardener has to be qualified so many times that nothing real is left at the end of it.

Assessment

Philosophical theologians responded to Flew in a number of ways.  Many simply claimed that religious language was non-cognitive and thus to assess religious claims as cognitive claims, as Flew did, was simply mistaken.  More specific criticisms include:

q   Richard Swinburne describes a toy cupboard and puts forward the hypothesis that when we are not looking the toys come to life.  By definition the hypothesis cannot be falsified because the toys only come to life when NOT being observed, so it makes sense to say the toys come to life despite our inability to falsify that hypothesis.  Thus statements can have meaning even though they are not verifiable.  In just this way God may choose not to show himself to us, or to be falsified, but it still makes sense to say there is a God.

q   Basil Mitchell said Flew was wrong in his assertion that believers do not count evidence against Gods existence, but pointed out that they assess evidence from a faith standpoint. This faith standpoint means they weigh the evidence in favour of God (just as the atheist weighs it against).  Mitchell tells the parable of the ‘Stranger’ to illustrate this:

‘During the war in occupied France a man has a chance meeting with a stranger who claims to be a member of the resistance fighting the Germans. So convincing is this stranger that the man is totally convinced of what he says. In the future the man never talks to the stranger again, but sees him around the town. Sometimes the stranger appears to be helping the resistance, sometimes to be helping the Germans. However, the mans faith in the stranger lets him interpret the strangers actions as always helping the resistance, despite appearances.’

Clearly the man is in the position of the religious believer and the stranger represents God. The point being made is that just as the mans experience of the stranger makes him interpret the strangers actions in a positive light, so the believers faith standpoint will make him interpret Gods actions in a positive light.

q   R.M. Hare supported falsification as a way of assessing cognitive statements.  He did not believe religious statements were cognitive.  He claimed that religious statements were non-cognitive statements which made no claim to fact but had the purpose of guiding human behaviour.  He called this type of statement a ‘blik’.  Although many believers might be unhappy about Hare’s assertion that they cannot make factual claims about God, Hare does at least allow religious language some kind of non-cognitive (ethical) meaning.

q   R.B. Braithwaite also believed that religious language was non-cognitive.  He thought it had meaning nonetheless.  He said that all religious statements could be reduced to cognitive ones.  Saying ‘God loves me’ can be reduced to saying ‘we should treat others in a loving way’.  Braithwaite would not necessarily please religious believers with this analysis as most would say they are making a claim to facts about an actual being called God and not just dressing up cognitive ethical statements.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) has been described as the last philosophical genius, because in his lifetime he developed two distinct and brilliant theories.

The first theory was during a period of Wittgenstein’s life known as the early Wittgenstein.  In this period of his life he developed the picture theory of language, put forward in his book, Tractatus logico-philosophicus.  The basic idea of the picture theory is that if we can ‘picture’ or visualise a situation then language about that picture makes sense.  This theory claims that, since we cannot visualise God, we cannot speak meaningfully of God.

The early Wittgenstein was a logical positivist like Ayer.  Wittgenstein’s early theory avoided the pitfalls in Ayer’s, but still implied that God-talk can not make sensible, cognitive assertions.  As Wittgenstein grew older and experienced more of the world he came to appreciate more the intense meaning that religion can give to people’s lives.  He realised that his early theory simply did not explain the experiences people had.  Thus, in the second phase of his career, the later Wittgenstein came up with the theory of language games.

This theory said that every area of language, such as science, religion, art, mathematics, etc. had its own truth criteria.  Thus, if I say ‘God loves me’ this statement has meaning in a religious context, but not necessarily in a scientific, artistic or mathematical context, etc.  The language employed in different spheres of life is like a game played by its own rules.  It is no fairer for the scientist to criticise the believer for talk of God than it is for the poker player to criticise the chess player for not playing chess according to the rules of poker.

This theory rejected the logical positivists’ intention to show that religious language is meaningless and accounted well for the depth of meaning which many people do feel that religion holds.

Assessment

After Wittgenstein, the attack of logical positivism on religious language lost the initiative.  In coming up with the best theory in the positivist tradition and then rejecting it completely, Wittgenstein effectively silenced the (intelligent) logical positivists.

Analogy, Symbol and Myth

Analogy

Saint Thomas Aquinas (1224–1274) believed there were three distinct types of religious language.

q   Univocal Language is language with one uncontroversial meaning.  If I say my dog is loyal, I mean my dog brings me slippers, protects me, etc.

q   Equivocal Language is language that can have more than one meaning.  If I ask for a bat and you give me a vampire rather than a cricket bat, I might be surprised, but I shouldn’t complain.  My use of the word ‘bat’ was equivocal.

q   Analogical Language is language that compares one thing to another so that the second can be understood in terms of its similarity to the first.

Aquinas said that talk about God cannot be univocal because God is completely different to us.  When we say that God loves humanity, we cannot mean that God loves in the same way we love.  On the other hand, religious language cannot be wholly equivocal.  If God’s love is nothing like our love, then we might as well use the word ‘phlumph’.  At least we would not then be fooled into thinking we knew what was being said, when really we have no idea.  Aquinas therefore thought that we need a third way to speak of God:  analogically.  In other words, when we say something about God (e.g. God loves humanity) we are saying that there is some similarity between God’s love and human love that enables us to partially grasp what is meant without losing sight of the fact that Gods love is in important respects different to human love.

Ian Ramsey (1915–1972) has developed Aquinas’s ideas further.  He said that an analogy is like a model of God that helps me to understand.  God’s love is a ‘model’, an example which helps me understand my love and God’s relationship with me.  However, because God’s love is not exactly like mine I need to ‘qualify’ it by adding that while God is loving (model), God is loving in an omni benevolent (qualifier) way.  Ramsey’s theory is thus known as the theory of models and qualifiers.

Assessment

Analogy falls foul of its own simplicity.  Aquinas makes it seem that analogy is a necessary third way of speaking; however, that does not make it easy to understand how it works.  While analogy does make it clear that God is different to all that I can learn from the world of experience (transcendent), but similar to me because of His immanence (e.g. the imago Dei or image of God in humanity) it is not clear in the case of each quality how How is like us.  If God loves us, God’s love may vary from human love in attribution and proportion, but to what degree? and if that degree is too great can I really understand divine love at all?  After all, to hear that I am loving and God is all-loving seems to refer to two concepts so different it barely makes sense for me to think of one as an illustration of the other.

Symbol

Paul Tillich (1886–1965) believed that symbolic language could help towards an understanding of God.  Because religious language tries to interpret religious experience it is closer to poetry than to prose; it is mythical and imaginable and it reminds a person (connotes the feelings) of the experience it is supposed to describe.  Tillich argues that symbol goes beyond their external appearance to an internal level of reality.  If we think of the symbol of heaven, then we can see that contemplation of that symbol can lead us to connect with what heaven means for us, it unlocks the meaning of our soul.

Tillich says that, in Christian terms, “the ground of being is God.”  Revelation mediates knowledge through human cognitive reason.  The knowledge of revelation, which is the knowledge of God, must be described symbolically.  ‘The Word of God’ is a symbol for God revealing itself in Jesus as the Christ, because the Word of God reveals God’s manifestation in Jesus as the Christ which is the meaning of the symbol.  For Tillich, symbols direct attention above themselves toward something else.  Symbols, unlike signs, participate in the power of that which they symbolize.  He says, “A symbol has truth:  it is adequate to the revelation it expresses.  A symbol is true:  it is the expression of a true revelation.”  Religious symbols can be true symbols only if they participate in the power of the divine to which they point.  Religious symbols are ‘double-edged’; that is, they point themselves to the infinite as well as to the finite; they drive the infinite toward the finite and the finite toward the infinite; they unveil the divine life for the human and the human for the divine.  Religious symbols communicate and transfer ultimate truth through things, persons and events.

When Tillich says ‘symbol expresses the ultimate’ he means a number of things:

q   Symbols are distinct from signs.  A sign simply gives an instruction by referring to something in the world.  Traffic signs, for example, simply tell us how to drive or what to expect next.  The Nike logo, on the other hand, functions as a symbol.  It not only points to Nike as a company, but because it is shaped like a tick-mark, it also conveys the sense that Nike is ‘good’ or ‘correct’.

q   Symbols connect those who understand them with the truth they convey.  The Nike symbol points upward to ‘goodness’ and horizontally to ‘Nike’, subconsciously linking the two together.  On the other hand, unlike a religious symbol, many believe that the Nike symbol is dishonest; it conveys a lie.

q   Symbols not only point to something beyond themselves, but it also participates in the reality of the things they points to.  Thus the symbol of the cross points to the death and resurrection of Jesus, but also plays a part in making the death and resurrection of Jesus real to believers.

q   Symbols open up different levels of reality and understanding.

q   Symbols reveal parts of ourselves that we cannot otherwise discover.

q   The role a symbol plays is participated in by others and shared in our collective unconscious.  In the sense of Hegel and Jung it means that the symbol plays a part in a culture and forms part of our basis for understanding ourselves in that context.

q   Symbols grow old and die.  That is, they can become stale and outdated and lose their power.  They then need to be reinvigorated or replaced..

This way of looking at symbols presupposes a ‘coherentist’ idea of knowledge.  This says that the truth of an idea comes from the way it fits in with all the other ideas in a culture, tradition or social context.  If the idea of resurrection pictured through the cross when taken on its own is meaningless.  If that idea is taken in context with other ideas such as salvation, messiah, creation, redemption, etc. in the Christian tradition then the symbol has meaning and can deepen our understanding.  Some philosophers have called this a ‘Gestalt’.  This is a term which refers to the ‘pattern’ or organisation that ideas make and how the fit together like pieces from a jigsaw. It is this ‘fit’ which gives meaning.

Assessment

Symbol seems to have the advantage that it can be more abstract and less literal than many forms of language, thus it does not fall foul of dragging the transcendent down to the level of the immanent. However, it depends how one wishes to interpret symbols.

1.    Tillich asserts that symbols are not meant to convey cognitive facts and therefore cannot be falsified or verified.  For people like Paul Edwards this is equivalent to saying that symbols mean nothing.  The reason for this conflict of views is that Edwards holds a ‘foundationalist’ theory of knowledge. Foundationalism contends that there are key facts (the foundation) upon which other ideas can be securely built up and verified.  It contrasts with the coherence theory of truth, the model that Tillich adopts.

2.  There is no way of verifying that a symbol correctly represents the transcendent reality to which it points.  This problem is a consequence of the dichotomy we are trying to solve.  If the symbol is too literal it reduces the transcendent to the immanent; if it is too abstract we cannot relate our immanent understanding to the transcendent.

3.   It is hard to explain the meaning of a symbol to someone outside its tradition.  Symbol is therefore a tool used by believers to understand better (participate more fully) and not for outsiders to gain insight.

Myth

What can be known of God via myth?  ‘Myth’ is notoriously difficult to define.  Here, we will take it to mean ‘a fictitious narrative about heroes or supernatural beings’.  For liberals Christians, Gospel myths may include the Virgin birth, the miracle stories and even the resurrection of Jesus.

The basic claim here is that religious myths point at truths which are hard to express in other terms. They point to something with truth value.  Myth therefore alludes to a source of reality beyond our normal understanding.

Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) was a famous German New Testament scholar who wrote a great deal about myth.  He asserted that myths need to be ‘demythologised’ (a fancy word for decoded or interpreted) if we are to express the truths they contain in a way that ordinary people can understand.  He described this as ‘making the transcendent immanent’; that is, bringing truths about the heavenly, transcendent reality we call God, down to our earthly, immanent level of understanding.

Bultmann assumes Kants epistemology (theory of knowledge) and believes that there exists a ‘phenomenal’ world open to our senses and which we can know and a noumenal world beyond our senses which we cannot know. God inhabits this noumenal world. We cannot speak of God as-He-is, because we cannot know the noumenal world, so we bring knowledge of God down to our phenomenal world by describing Him in myth. God appears to us in the phenomenal world by making ‘incursions’ on it. So, for example, miracles are when the noumenal God interacts with the phenomenal world and these miracles form the basis of myth.

The question is do we have to demythologise myth or should we take the path of the mystic and accept that God is nothing to be spoken of? Bultmann says myth must be demythologised or we can understand nothing of it.

Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976), in his 1949 book Concept of Mind, says that to move myth, in other words to demythologise it is to make a ‘category mistake’. When we demythologise myth we take its idiom and transfer it into our idiom. Because the myth then loses its frame of reference (its own culture or tradition) it loses its meaning. Bultmann replies that he wants the Bible to speak to new generations to that each man can search for God in their own way.  Myth is therefore the attempt to discover oneself through a historical document.

Bultmann says that myth plays its part in faith.  Faith is not just something we have or not.  Faith must be constantly rediscovered and reinforced.  This reinforcement can come via the truths discovered in myth. God in Christ demythologised is said to be the church, whose job is to seek the truths and make them relevant to everyone.

Assessment

Myth appears to have a number of advantages over symbol and analogy.

q  In the first place it can be seen to make truth claims about what actually happened and it can be seen to give us messages clearly and in a less abstract way.

q   Secondly, myths seem to speak to us through story in a way that is easy to relate to and in a more detailed way than our usual analogy or symbol.

q  Thirdly, whilst it could be seen as a problem to remove myth from its idiom, the very struggle to understand it and place its idiom within our own can be seen as the necessary struggle for faith.

q    Problems with these three ways of talking about God are almost inescapable;

q How can we talk about the transcendent clearly when we have no knowledge of it? Even the contention that miracles and other RE are the noumenal infringing on the phenomenal makes no logical sense because for the noumenal to be phenomenal it must become phenomenal and therefore is not what we wish to have knowledge of, the noumenal.

q If these three ways of speaking are meant to describe God why is there not more consistency between them? If you took all the myths, analogies and symbols that are supposed to talk about God it would be hard to find a common relationship between them and indeed many from different traditions contradict each other. This would suggest they are not really about the same thing at all. It could be replied that God is simply appearing in an idiom the people will understand and contradiction is part of our problem understanding Him. This does not seem to help our problem of trying to make ‘God talk’ clearer!

The Apophatic Way (Via Negativa)

The apophatic way is a response to the difficulties we have talking clearly about God. As we have seen, as soon as we say anything about God we limit God and therefore we are no longer talking about God. The via negative says that we can therefore only talk about God in a negative way, saying what he is not and therefore not limiting Him by saying what He is. For example, if I say God is all loving, this limits God because it means He cannot be all hating (this is called the via positive and is the kind of language which says positive things about God and which we have been trying to understand so far). The via negativa would say that I should say God is not not loving. This language does say He is loving, but it does not say He cannot hate. This seems a strange way to talk as saying God is not not loving seems to imply He cannot hate, although it avoids saying it.

The mystics take a different approach to this problem and simply say that we cannot talk about God at all because our language makes no sense in relation to God. Adopting the Platonic idea that God and man are opposite ends of a spectrum, man being material, God non-material, us being fallible and imperfect, God being all perfections. Therefore God and man are too far apart for mans phenomenal and immanent experiences to allow us to understand Gods transcendent and noumenal experience. The mystic says we know God through meditation, prayer and devotion. We cannot describe the feelings from these things (see William James in RE section) because they are indescribable.

The mystic knows that experience of God is paradoxical and cannot be communicated or understood rationally.

C o n c l u s i o n

It seems that in finishing with the via negativa we have travelled to the opposite end of the spectrum to the verificationists. The verificationists demand rational proof of God and language about Him; the mystics say this can never be possible. In another way both have reached the same conclusion- God cannot be spoken of meaningfully.

The truth may lie somewhere in between these two.  Maybe it is hard to talk of God and most language is doomed to failure.  Maybe we should not be as free with religious language as it is rooted in the faith and experience of the individual.  Maybe scientific language and religious language should never be compared.  But maybe some language in some form can speak to some people on some occasions about God in some small way.  Judging when this happens is the difficult thing!