Responding to Critiques of Religious Language: Beyond Verification and Falsification

Can religious language be held to the same standards as scientific claims? This question sits at the heart of one of the most important debates in 20th-century philosophy of religion. The verification principle, championed by logical positivists like A.J. Ayer, insisted that only statements verifiable through sensory experience or logical proof carry meaningful content – effectively ruling out religious claims as nonsense. Anthony Flew’s falsification challenge pushed further: if no possible evidence can count against a belief, it conveys no real information at all. These were sharp, unsettling critiques. But several philosophers refused to accept that religious language had been defeated on these terms. Their responses – through the philosophy of symbols, language games, and moral commitment – opened entirely new ways of understanding what religious language actually does.

Why the verification and falsification challenges matter 🔗

Before examining the responses, it helps to be clear about what was at stake. The logical positivists argued that a statement is meaningful only if it is either empirically verifiable or analytically true (true by definition). Since claims like “God is eternal” or “God loves humanity” cannot be confirmed through direct observation or logical necessity, they were dismissed as cognitively meaningless – not false, but empty of content. Flew’s falsification challenge made a related but distinct point: a claim with genuine factual content must be capable of being falsified, meaning there must be some possible state of affairs that could count against it. When believers appeared to accept no possible evidence as counting against God’s existence, Flew argued their assertions effectively died what he called “the death of a thousand qualifications.”

The philosophers discussed below each found this framing inadequate – not because they denied the importance of meaning, but because they thought verification and falsification were the wrong tools for evaluating religious language in the first place.

Paul Tillich: religious language as symbolic 🔗

The German-American theologian Paul Tillich (1886-1965) offered one of the most philosophically sophisticated defenses of religious language. His central argument was deceptively simple: religious language is not literal, so testing it against literal criteria misses the point entirely. In his Dynamics of Faith, Tillich argued that humanity’s ultimate concern must be expressed symbolically, because symbolic language alone is able to reach what is ultimate. That which is truly ultimate transcends all finite categories; therefore no finite concept or ordinary description can adequately capture it.

Signs versus symbols 🔗

A key move in Tillich’s argument is the distinction between signs and symbols. Both point beyond themselves to something else, but they differ in a crucial way. While a sign merely points to something (a stop sign, for instance), a symbol actually participates in the reality it represents – and symbols can only arise organically through communal life; they cannot be invented arbitrarily. Religious symbols like the cross, baptism, or the concept of atonement are not decorative flourishes around a core of literal doctrine. They carry meaning that literal language simply cannot reach.

What religious symbols do 🔗

In Systematic Theology, Tillich argued that God’s transcendent nature means any conventional language rooted in human experience is insufficient for speaking about the divine. Consider the word “atonement.” In strictly literal terms it conveys little. But within a religious community that understands sin, estrangement, and reconciliation, the term carries transformative weight. Tillich’s definitions of faith, symbol, and ultimate concern have since been used in major philosophical debates about religious belief and the non-propositional aspects of faith.

The implication for the verification challenge is direct: religious symbolism tries to show how religious language can be cognitively significant, but its mode of signification is participatory rather than descriptive. Asking whether “God is love” is verifiable in the same sense as “water boils at 100°C” is a category mistake. The statement does not describe a measurable property; it opens up an entire orientation toward life.

Wittgenstein and the autonomy of language games 🔗

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later philosophy offered a different but equally powerful challenge to the verification and falsification frameworks. In his Philosophical Investigations and his Lectures on Religious Belief, Wittgenstein developed the concept of language games – the idea that language is not a single uniform system but a complex of distinct practices, each with its own internal rules, purposes, and criteria of sense.

Meaning as use, not as picture 🔗

According to Wittgenstein’s theory of meaning, to understand what a word or sentence means, one should not ask what it “pictures” in the world but what job or task it performs. Language games are logically distinct from one another, yet they are also interdependent – woven together with forms of life, with the practices and ways of living in which they are embedded. Religion, for Wittgenstein, is one such form of life. Religious language has a depth grammar quite distinct from its surface grammar – its surface can look empirical, as though (like science) it is talking about objects and states of affairs, but this appearance is misleading.

The misuse of language in philosophy 🔗

Philosophical problems often arise when an expression from one language game is judged by the rules appropriate to a different language game. When logical positivists applied the verification criterion – a criterion developed within the context of scientific discourse – to religious language, they were committing precisely this error. They were trying to make religious language perform a task it was never designed to perform. The aim of separating religious speech from science by referring to a difference in grammar between language about God and physical-object language was to reject the application of scientific rationality to the realm of religion.

D.Z. Phillips and the Wittgensteinian school 🔗

Wittgenstein himself wrote relatively little about religion, but his ideas generated an influential school of thought in philosophy of religion. Thinkers in this Wittgensteinian school agreed that religion constitutes a form of life, and that the religious language game has a unique grammar that is utterly misrepresented in standard philosophical discussions. The philosopher D.Z. Phillips developed these ideas explicitly. Phillips argued that talk of God only makes sense within religious practices – to understand religious language is to understand the place of certain statements in the life of the believer and the religious community. On this view, a statement like “God exists” is not a claim about an object existing in the world; it is a foundational expression of an entire way of living and seeing.

The critical objection often raised against this position is that it risks making religious belief immune to all rational scrutiny – a charge sometimes called Wittgensteinian fideism. If religious language operates within its own closed grammar, it becomes difficult to say how two different religious traditions, or religion and secular reasoning, can meaningfully engage with each other at all.

R.D. Braithwaite: religious language as moral commitment 🔗

The Cambridge philosopher R.D. Braithwaite (1900-1990) took a different route. Rather than defending religious language as symbolic or as a self-contained game, he sought to show that it satisfies empiricist demands in its own way – by functioning as a declaration of moral commitment. His 1955 Eddington Memorial Lecture, An Empiricist’s View of the Nature of Religious Belief, became one of the most widely cited works in this area.

Religious assertions as declarations of intent 🔗

Braithwaite proposed that religious statements are primarily declarations of adherence to a policy of action – declarations of commitment to a way of life. To say “God is love,” on this account, is not to make a metaphysical claim about a divine being’s properties. It is to express the intention to live by the highest moral ideals, specifically what Braithwaite called an agapeistic way of life – a life oriented toward unconditional love and ethical concern for others. Even if religious statements cannot be verified in the scientific sense, they can be empirically meaningful – their meaning is analogous to moral judgments, drawing on a policy of life.

The role of religious stories 🔗

Braithwaite recognized that religious traditions involve much more than moral maxims – they include parables, narratives about founders and prophets, and accounts of creation and salvation. He called these stories. These stories, according to Braithwaite, provide models of exemplary behaviour that serve as psychological assistance for the believer to act on their intentions – and their truth is not crucial to the action-guiding role they play: they are entertained rather than believed. A Christian does not need to affirm the literal historicity of every parable in order for that parable to reinforce a commitment to living generously or compassionately.

Braithwaite also noted a significant difference between secular and religious morality: secular morality is focused on outward conduct, whereas religious morality addresses both inner life and outward conduct – and this is precisely why religious conviction can be more powerful than the mere adoption of a moral code. The stories and practices of a religious tradition change what a person fundamentally wants, not just what they do.

Strengths and criticisms 🔗

The appeal of Braithwaite’s view lies in its neatness: it dissolves the question of competing truth claims between religions, since different traditions may entertain different stories while sharing broadly similar moral commitments. However, many theologians and philosophers argue that this account is reductionist – it strips religion of its ontological dimension entirely. Most religious believers do not understand their claims simply as expressions of moral intention; they understand them as claims about something real, something that exists independently of whether or not anyone is thinking about it. Braithwaite’s theory also runs into difficulty in distinguishing the meanings of different religious statements, since on his account all Christian claims effectively express the same agapeistic intention.

Comparing the three responses 🔗

Each of the three thinkers approached the verification and falsification challenge from a different angle, but they share a common conviction: the challenge fails because it rests on a narrow and misapplied conception of what language can and must do.

Tillich argued that religious language is symbolic and participatory – it points toward ultimate reality and shares in it, rather than describing it from the outside. Wittgenstein (and the tradition he inspired) argued that religious language belongs to a distinct form of life with its own internal grammar, and that judging it by scientific criteria is a philosophical confusion. Braithwaite accepted the empiricist challenge more directly and attempted to show that religious language earns its meaning through its connection to moral conduct and lived commitment.

Each position has genuine strengths. Together, they illustrate that the question of what religious language means cannot be settled by demanding that it behave like scientific language. Neither strict empiricism nor radical contextualism adequately captures the full semantic scope of religious discourse – a mediating posture that integrates symbolic reference, communal usage, and rational evaluation is more likely to do justice to it.

What do you think? If religious language operates through symbols and forms of life rather than factual description, does it still make sense to say that religious beliefs can be true or false – or does that question itself rest on a misunderstanding of what religion is for? And if Braithwaite is right that religious claims are fundamentally moral commitments, what distinguishes a religious way of life from a purely secular ethical commitment?

References

1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/religious-language/
2. https://peped.org/philosophicalinvestigations/extract-6-paul-tillich-on-symbol/
3. https://semperdiscentes.life/2020/01/11/paul-tillichs-theology-of-culture-a-summary-and-analysis/
4. https://peped.teachable.com/courses/307215/lectures/4994023
5. https://philopedia.org/thinkers/paul-tillich/
6. https://journal.philor.org/article_245079_en.html
7. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/206a/e8cdf93d6c8aba48ae3c6f9693ca0f2d49b3.pdf
8. https://www.alevelphilosophy.co.uk/handouts_religion/ReligionFormLife.pdf
9. https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/16/8/1046
10. https://philarchive.org/archive/OPPRLG
11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._B._Braithwaite
12. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/401518562_Dilemma_of_religious_language_A_critique_of_logical_positivists'_verification_ideology_and_Wittgenstein's_language_games_theory
13. https://www.philosophyzer.com/braithwaite-an-empiricists-view-on-the-nature-of-religion/