To what extent do the verification and falsification principles demonstrate that religious language is meaningless?
Religious Language is a topic within philosophy which has been greatly debated over time by many influential minds including Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Hick and A.J Ayer. This topic has two split viewpoints which are cognitive and non-cognitive. A cognitive view would be that language can only really be used to talk about things in this world otherwise the language is meaningless. A non-cognitive view on religious language would be that language can describe things other than physical objects; it can also be used to describe an internal feeling or way of life, meaning that all language is meaningful no matter what the subject.
The verification principle was created by the Logical Positivists a group formed from the Vienna Circle and inspired by the earlier work of Wittgenstein, Emanuel Kant and that of the Scottish Philosopher David Hume. The group was formed in the late 1920’s and was then carried on by A.J Ayer who then went on to write his book ‘Language, Truth and Logic’ in which he claimed that religious language meaningless because unless we have observations of something we cannot use the language we speak to describe it as our language is limited to the things we have seen, smelled, touched, tasted and heard, therefore we cannot use it to describe the attributes of a God we have no experience of. He claimed that a metaphysical world could not exist as the only things we can verify are things we have experience of and things which are necessarily true like mathematical statements. A.J Ayer said that we should not even talk about ones religious beliefs (agnostic, atheist or theistic) because we would then be talking about a metaphysical being which we have no way of proving their existence. Ayer said even though sometimes religious statements make perfect sense grammatically we often think therefore they are meaningful statements, however...