Religious language practice questions.

In the parable of the invisible gardener, Flew's challenge to the believer is best stated as a demand to say

• which experiment would show the claim to be true
• why the claim cannot be put into ordinary language
• what would have to occur to count against the claim
• how the claim differs from an ordinary scientific hypothesis

Answer: what would have to occur to count against the claim

Flew borrows Popper's falsification requirement: a claim compatible with every possible observation asserts nothing and dies the death of a thousand qualifications. The demand is for falsifiability, which is what separates Flew's challenge from Ayer's verification principle.

Aquinas holds that when the word 'good' is applied to God and to a human being, it is being used

• univocally, in exactly the same sense in both cases
• analogically, in related but not identical senses
• equivocally, with two entirely unconnected senses
• symbolically, as a pointer that participates in what it names

Answer: analogically, in related but not identical senses

Univocal predication would place God in the same category as creatures, while equivocal predication would leave religious speech unintelligible; analogy is the middle path. It must not be merged with Tillich's account of symbol, which abandons literal predication altogether.

Braithwaite proposes that a religious assertion is primarily the declaration of an intention to live in a certain way, with the associated stories serving to hold that intention before the mind. His account is non-cognitivist because it holds that such assertions

• are true only for the community that makes them and false for everyone else outside it
• cannot be understood by anyone outside the practice in which they are made
• are meaningless, since no observation could confirm or disconfirm them
• do not state facts that could be true or false, but announce a policy of conduct

Answer: do not state facts that could be true or false, but announce a policy of conduct

The standard objection is that believers take themselves to be asserting something about how things are, and that on this account two people could share the whole intention while disagreeing entirely about whether God exists — which suggests the account has changed the subject.

Austin distinguishes utterances that describe from utterances by which an act is performed. Which of these religious utterances is performative in his sense?

• 'I baptise this child in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.'
• 'God created the heavens and the earth.'
• 'The soul is immortal and survives the death of the body.'
• 'There is a moral order that governs the consequences of every action in this life and the next.'

Answer: 'I baptise this child in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.'

In saying the words, in the right setting and by the right person, the baptism is performed; the utterance is not a report that can be checked for accuracy but an act that can succeed or misfire. Recognising that some religious language is of this kind narrows what a theory of religious assertion has to account for.

Bultmann's programme of interpreting the mythological elements of scripture in terms of the understanding of human existence they express, rather than as reports of events in the world, is motivated by the claim that

• the texts were composed much later than their traditional attributions suggest, so their authority for the matters they report is weak
• religious language is meaningless unless it can be verified by observation
• the events described in the texts are of no interest to a modern reader
• the mythological framework belongs to a world picture no longer available, while what it expresses can still be stated

Answer: the mythological framework belongs to a world picture no longer available, while what it expresses can still be stated

The programme is a translation rather than a deletion: the myth is retained as a vehicle and its existential content restated. The standard objection is that some claims in the tradition are meant to be about events, so translating them into an account of self-understanding abandons what was asserted.

The verification principle and the falsification challenge differ in what they demand of a meaningful statement. The falsification challenge asks the speaker to say

• which observations would establish that the statement is true beyond doubt
• which authority in the tradition guarantees the statement
• what would have to occur for the statement to be given up as false
• whether the statement is analytic or synthetic in form

Answer: what would have to occur for the statement to be given up as false

The shift matters because a claim can be unverifiable and still meaningful — universal generalisations are — so Flew's version is the sharper instrument: what he presses is that a claim compatible with any state of affairs asserts nothing. Hare and Mitchell reply by disputing that assumption in different ways.