It has been said that language is the very essence of what makes us human. If we are to fully understand what it means to be human, then, we must understand what language is, how it works, how we use it, or misuse it.

Linguistics, often defined as 'the scientific study of language', is a broad term covering a wide range of different disciplines. The traditional 'core' areas of the subject deal with the structure of human languages in terms of how speech sounds combine to form syllables and words (phonetics and phonology), how words combine into meaningful utterances such as sentences and phrases (morphology and syntax), and how we extract meaning from utterances we read or hear used by other people (semantics and pragmatics). But beyond this, linguists are also interested in matters such as how languages evolve and change over time, how they are learned by children and by adults, how languages are used in social settings, the historical and contemporary relationships between languages, the roles of language in nation-building and identity marking, the development of writing systems, how the brain processes speech and language, how communication is possible when speech and language are impaired, etc. Linguistics therefore has close links to many other fields of enquiry in the social, physical and medical sciences, philosophy, and the arts and humanities. Our understanding of language origins, structure and use changes constantly with new discoveries in neuroscience, animal behaviour, archaeology and palaeontology, sociology, and psychology, etc.

William Lycan begins his remarkable book The Philosophy of Language (p. 4) with the following observation:

Not many people know that in 1931, Adolf Hitler made a visit to the United States, in the course of which he did some sightseeing, had a brief affair with a lady named Maxine in Keokuk, Iowa, tried peyote (which caused him to hallucinate hordes of frogs and toads wearing little boots and singing Horst Wessel Lied), infilterated a munitions plant near Detroit, met secretly with Vice-President Curtis regarding sealskin futures, and invented the electric can opener.

There is a good reason why not many people know all that: none of it is true. But the remarkable thing is that just now, as you read my opening sentence—let us call it sentence (1)—you understood it perfectly, whether or not you were ready to accept it, and you did so without the slightest conscious effort.

Remarkable, I said. It probably does not strike you as remarkable or surprising, even now that you have noticed it. You are entirely used to reading words and sentences and understanding them at sight, and you find it nearly as natural as breathing or eating or walking. But, how did you understand sentence (1)?

Apart from what Lycan himself has in mind concerning the meaning of meaning, one may take this example as some support for Ayer's claim that unless a sentence can be verified (in principle), it's meaningless (see Language, Truth, Logic, and God below).

But even sentences that can be verified can be tricky. What's tricky about them isn't our concern about what the individual words or sentences mean—a dictionary or encyclopedia can solve that problem—but what it means for us to infer meaning from an expression. Why do expressions have them meanings they have? Which expressions have the same meanings as other expressions, or how can identical expressions have different meanings? How can meanings—whether agreeable or disagreeable—be known? And what, really, does the word 'meaning' mean?

A closer examination of words, language, and meaning reveals that all words are abstractions, only the degree of their abstraction defers.

Throughout this site, you will hear me mention language and the artifice of words. Now the term 'artifice of words' may sound strange to some people, especially those who have no familiarity with the philosophy of language, linguistics, or aesthetics. While we are bombarded with hundreds of thousands of words a day, whether oral, written, or broadcast, very few of us have actually taken the time to consider the symbolic abstraction that underlies the meanings of the words we use and the rapid mental associations we make to interpret such generic terms like dog, tree, hot, bad, love, blue, and god.

Language, how things 'mean' something, and truth are important subjects of consideration not simply because they are used in everyday life, but because language shapes human development, from earliest childhood and continuing to death. Knowledge itself is intertwined with language, its transmission and distribution. Notions of self, experience, and existence mostly depend on how language is used, what is learned through it, how it is interpreted and on-going assumptions derived from interpretation. The topic of learning language leads to all kinds of interesting questions. Is it possible to have any thoughts without having a language? What kinds of thoughts need a language to happen? How much does language influence knowledge of the world and how one acts in it? Can anyone reason at all without using language? Does language influence the "primal experience of being" (i.e., the animalistic pre-language state) in such a way so as to distort one's experience and worldview in order to confirm language's abstractions? The philosophy of language deliberately considers these types of questions. It is an important point of study because language is inseparable from how one thinks and interprets the world. People in general have a set of vital concepts which are connected with signs and symbols, including all words (symbols): "object," "love," "good," "God," "masculine," "feminine," "art," "government," and so on. By incorporating "meaning," everyone has shaped (or has had shaped for them) a view of the universe and how they have "meaning" within it. In a great many cases—especially when considering religion and politics—people infer meaning from words alone, from the abstractions inherent in language, because the objects of the describing words (entities or agencies like "god" or "afterlife" or "angels") are nowhere in evidence in the 'real world'.

By definition, then, and necessity, language is abstract and assumptive. The linguistic meaning of words is presupposed and inferred. There are essentially two different types of inferences when it comes to words we use: conceptual meaning and associative meaning.

The conceptual meanings of an expression have to do with the definitions of words themselves, and the features of those definitions. This kind of meaning is treated by using a technique called "semantic feature analysis." The conceptual meaning of an expression inevitably involves both definition (also called "connotation" and "intension") and extension (also called "denotation").

The associative meaning of an expression has to do with individual mental understandings of the speaker. Such mental understanding can be broken into six sub-types: connotative, collocative, social, affective, reflected and thematic (see Alice Mwihaki's MEANING AS USE: A FUNCTIONAL VIEW OF SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS in PDF).

One issue that has bothered philosophers and ordinary people for as long as there have been words is the problem of their vagueness. Often, meanings expressed by the speaker are not as explicit as the listener would like them to be. The consequences of vagueness can be disastrous to classical logic because they give rise to the Sorites Paradox (in which the definition of a word like "heap" can be constructed or deconstruction one grain of dirt at a time until the object in question can no longer be considered a "heap" by definition but becomes something else).

Most people don't think about the abstractive and assumptive properties inherent in language although both are constantly used in day-to-day interaction. This is best demonstrated by an example similar to Lycan's sentence above, except the objects of this sentence are neither invented or improbable. Consider the sentence:

The Dog Chased the Ball into the Street and Got Hit by a Car.

If you're like most people, the sentence above makes perfect sense to you. You know precisely what it means. You can imagine it, almost picture it in your mind's eye. But how? Every element of this sentence is completely abstract.

I say "dog" but you've been given no description of the breed of dog or its size, whether it is a small Boston Terrier or a large Doberman Pinscher, or sleek or fat, or old or young. You have a fuzzy nebulous "feeling" for the idea of "dog" even though you know nothing about the animal in question beyond the word.
I say "ball" but you've been given no description of the ball regarding it's type or size, whether it was rolling, bouncing, or flying through the air. It could just as easily be a tennis ball as a basket ball, or any other type of ball a dog is apt to chase.
I say "street" and once again you know nothing about the type of street, its size, or the materials used in its construction.
I say "car" and know nothing about its make or model, size or shape, color or speed.

What makes this kind of abstraction possible is your awareness of having actually had physical interaction with specific dogs and balls and streets and cars. You can conceptualize based on this interaction and thus infer the meaning from a broad abstract sentence like "The dog chased the ball into the street and got hit by a car."

Now, here's the kicker:

When it comes to supernatural religion it may be surprising to most believers to consider the simple fact that religion is all talk, only talk, and nothing but talk. Supernatural religion consists only of words, an ancient collection of words mostly recounted in anonymous third-person narratives (a fictional technique or unwarranted hearsay), and that's it. Because supernatural religion is comprised only of words, there's nothing empirical, physical, nothing of substance that you can point to besides art (derived from the word artifice or artificial) in any of its aspects: literature, poetry, music, painting, sculpture, theater, motion pictures, television, etc.

So, when believers talk about the "Will of God" or say things like "God is Love" or "God is Omnipotent and Omniscient" or ask "What Would Jesus Do?" not only are they utilizing a generic abstraction (like using the words 'dog', 'street', and 'ball') they are using an abstraction twice-removed because they are inferring God's godliness only from the artifice of words and not from any actual associations in the 'real' world. Ask a believer to describe "God" and to drill down to the particulars (as with the description of "dog") and you will be handed a list of generic abstract terms that are by themselves quite meaningless until they are weighed against 'real' properties that exist in the physical world.

I realize this is heady stuff, so let's try to make it a clearer with another example.

When believers explain that "God is Love" where are they getting this information? Are they observing God in action, then deducing from His behavior that he is a loving god? No. They are quoting and interpreting words in the Bible to make their case for a loving god while ignoring or conveniently forgetting other words in the Bible that make a case for a petty, judgmental, infantile, and merciless god. In either case, the very idea of a loving god was not derived from any behavioral evidence apparent in the 'real' world (with it's illness, disease, war, pain, suffering, cruelty, etc) but only from the artifice of words. Now, who wrote the words from whence believers derive the interpretation that 'God is Love'? In nine out of ten times, they don't know who wrote the words because the various authors are anonymous or the words subject to centuries of editing and redaction. In other words, believers are basing their interpretations of the attributes of God only on words written thousands of years ago by who knows whom? And apologists like to carp that rationalists and skeptics rely too much on naturalistic presuppositions!

But the artifice of words goes further than just the attributes of God. The artifice of words runs throughout the entire Bible, but is nowhere clearer than in third-person narrative accounts that describe events no one actually witnessed or historical settings that are centuries passed. In this case, the artifice of words applies to so-called "revealed" scripture once again composed by who knows whom.

The book of Genesis is a good example of this. Conservative Christians like to believe that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible (the Pentateuch or Torah), which includes Genesis. On the other hand, Bible scholars have ascertained that the first five books of the Bible were compiled, edited, and redacted over hundreds of years by several unknown authors and editors. In either case, neither Moses nor the unknown writers and editors were physically present to report the following example from Genesis (Genesis 1:1-5):

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day (NRSV).

As far as content goes, it makes no difference who or whom the authors or authors were in relation to the above passage because it is not based on any actual historical reporting (i.e., the author or authors were not parked somewhere outside the uncreated universe and observing God during the act of creation). As such, it is either (1) an invented myth or legend used etiologically to explain the existence of the world, (2) an appropriated older myth and legend altered to "fit" a particular tribal tradition, or (3) supernaturally "revealed" to the fortunate author or authors in which case we are suppose to trust (have "faith") that the lucky author or authors did in fact receive special revelations that eventually found their way into the Bible (a compiled book which references itself to prove its own authority) and were not otherwise politically or socially motivated, artististic, superstitious, fraudulant, or hallucinatory.

Once again, such passages rely fully on the artifice of words since there is no natural way the author or authors called have ever witnessed such fantastic events. As an exercise, read through the entire book of Gensis. If it was written in the third-person hundreds of years after all it's events transpired, it is not an eyewitness account, but an artificial account. It is art, not history. To believe otherwise only because anonymous passages of the Bible direct you to believe otherwise is to become ensnared in the artifice of words and the self-referential loop of circular reasoning. The presupposition here is that the Bible is authoritative only because the Bible's own words tell you it is authoritative, words that reference non-historical events based on "supernatural" revelations given to anonymous authors who wrote and edited using standard story-telling techniques (third-person narratives) two thousand years ago in an age of crass superstition, political upheaval, and social agendas.

One final consideration —

On several occassions I've had believers debate points of theology by relating third-person narratives, even the parables of Jesus, as if the described events and "recorded" conversations occurred as written! Not understanding that anonymously constructed third-person narratives prove nothing, being hearsay, believers assume that in quoting these anonymous third-person narratives they are quoting words that were actually uttered. Part of the problem here is that most believers do not realize that it is a tradition and not the facts that have attributed the names of the authors of the gospels to the Gospels. In other words, Matthew did not write The Gospel According to Matthew, Mark did not write Mark, and so on. Tradition alone attributed these names to the Gospels in the second century CE because early Christian leaders did not relish the fact that these were third-person narratives written anonymously, therefore hearsay, and as such completely lacking in any authoritative power! By attributing names to the gospels, the Christian leaders could make them appear as if they were written testimonials even though they were still third-person narratives (i.e., still hearsay). In time believers began to assume the gospels were, in fact, written by those persons whose names were attributed to them, and of course most church groups don't make any effort to explain otherwise, or else have never taken the time to step outside their narrow circles of faith and actually do some research.

When believers quote a passage from the Gospels as "proof" of something what they don't understand is that they are not quoting the words of Jesus—they are quoting the words of the anonymous author who has attributed those words to a third-person character called Jesus! For example, apologists will often quote John 14:6 to "prove" that Jesus is the only way to God, but they are not quoting Jesus—they are quoting the anonymous author of the book of John. Just because this unknown author attributes words to Jesus it does not mean that Jesus ever spoke these words. All it means is that the unknown author wrote them. Since we have no idea who this author is we have no way of knowing if any of the words attributed to Jesus were actually spoken by a person called Jesus, especially when considering the fact that Bible scholars have ascertained the Gospels were written at least thirty-five years after Jesus' death (in a time where the average life expectancy was forty-two years). The only first-person testimonial account by someone who claims he "saw" Jesus was made by Paul in his letters, and then he never actually "saw" Jesus in the flesh, but only in a interior mental vision. There is no genuine first-person testimony anywhere in the New Testament that comes out and says "I knew Jesus and I saw him in the flesh." All accounts are either third-person narratives (the hearsay of the Gospels), first-person "hallucinatory" states (the letters of Paul, the book of Revelation), or pseudonymous (books attributed to a known person but actually written by anonymous followers or students: Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, 1-2 Timothy, Titus, 1-2 Peter, Jude, James, and Revelation). To quote any of these as historical "proof" defies reason, logic, even common sense.

Why? Because anyone can create an unsigned document, write it in the third-person, and populate it with remarkable characters, supernatural events, and sublime conversations, but this does not mean that anything it contains actually occurred. It's an anonymous third-person narrative. At best, it's hearsay; at worse, it's a complete fiction, but we have no way of knowing since we don't know who wrote it, or when, or why! There's no reason to assume that anything contained in such a document occurred as written, therefore it is ludicrous to quote from it as if it is historical fact. The same holds true with religious visions. Anyone can claim they saw Jesus in a dream or vision, but this does not mean they really saw Jesus and talked to him. It only means that they think they did, a strictly personal and subjective matter. To base one's behavior and life choices on what someone else has asserted they saw in a dream or vision is a dangerous proposition, and to do so with blind faith is both infantile and pathological.

The parable of Abraham and the rich man in Hell (Luke 16:19-31) demonstrates several of these issues clearly when considering hearsay, the artifice of words, and the idea of abstract language being twice (even thrice) removed:

‘There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table; even the dogs would come and lick his sores. The poor man died and was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried. In Hades, where he was being tormented, he looked up and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side. He called out, “Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in agony in these flames.” But Abraham said, “Child, remember that during your lifetime you received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony. Besides all this, between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.” He said, “Then, father, I beg you to send him to my father’s house — for I have five brothers — that he may warn them, so that they will not also come into this place of torment.” Abraham replied, “They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.” He said, “No, father Abraham; but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.” He said to him, “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.”’ He said, “No, father Abraham; but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.” He said to him, “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead. ” ’ (NRSV)

Assumptions and Issues in the Above Passage:

ASSUMPTION: Luke wrote the Gospel of Luke: This is the imputed traditional assumption, although the books of Luke-Acts were unsigned, the author anonymous. Irenaeus of Lyons (130-200) was the first to attribute this gospel to Luke in his apologetic Against Heresies (3.1.1-2) around 180 CE, nearly 120 years after it was composed. Irenaeus based his evidence on the "we-passages" in Acts (16:10-17; 20:5-15, 21:1-8 and 27:1-28:16) which makes it look like the companian of Paul was the one writing Acts. Furthermore II Timothy 4:11 ("Only Luke is with me"), Colossians 4:14 ("Luke the beloved physician...greet[s] you") and Philemon 24 ("Luke, my fellow worker...) all apparently mention Luke who seems to be Pauls' close companion. Since Acts and the third gospel is generally accepted as being written by the same person, this makes the author of the third gospel Luke, the physician. We note that the "we-passages" are limited only to stories which involve travel by sea. It is strange if Luke was only present during sea voyages and nowhere else in Paul's ministry. In fact it has been structurally shown by textual scholars that the author of Acts is merely following an established convention of his (or her) time. Analyzing examples from Mediterranean literature (both Roman and Greek) around the time of Luke's composition, the "we-passages" turn out to be a stylistic device in common use and in no way indicate the author of Luke was present in any of the journeys. There are also a number of factual errors in Acts which weigh heavily against the author being a companion of Paul: Acts mentioned five trips to Jerusalem by Paul while the Pauline epistles only presupposed three such trips. (Acts 9, 11, 15, 18:22, 21 versus Galatians 1:18, 2:1 and the (planned) visit to Jerusalem in Romans: 15:25). In Acts 15:2-21 James was portrayed as the mediator between Paul and the Pharisees but in Paul's own account (Galatians 2:9) James was placed squarely on the side which opposes Paul. Acts 10:1 -11:18 stated that the mission to the Gentiles was started by Peter, yet in Galatians 2:1-10 Paul is called to defend his mission to the Gentiles against the "three pillars" (James, John and Peter). Why would he have to defend a mission to the Gentiles when Peter had already started it? It can be concluded that while the author of Luke utilized traditional material to compile and compose the third gospel (see Luke 1:1-3) he was not the companion of Paul of that name.
ISSUE: The Gospel of Luke is hearsay: All four gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John) are hearsay in that they are third-person narrative accounts. Third-person narrative accounts are by their very nature hearsay because the events, characters, and conversations are twice removed from the reader: you are the first-person, the gospel writer is the second-person, and the characters and events contained within the gospel are the third-person. The anonymous gospel writer stands between you and the characters in the gospel therefore anything these characters do or say is hearsay and hearsay, being twice removed, is inadmissible evidence! This is the same as saying "Someone said that someone said that such and such happened" or to apply it to the above parable: Someone said (the anonymous gospel writer) that someone said (Jesus) that such-and-such happened in a place not present in the 'real world' (a rich man and Abraham had a conversation in Hell). Not very convincing, is it?
ISSUE: The conversation between the rich man and Abraham is thrice removed: If the words of Jesus are legitamitely hearsay being part of a third-person gospel narrative (i.e., twice removed), then the events and words attributed by Jesus to the rich man and Abraham are thrice (three times) removed: Someone said (the anonymous gospel writer) that someone said (Jesus) that someone said (the rich man) to do such-and-such (send Lazarus with drop of water to cool tongue).
ISSUE: Bible scholars have long recognized that the second half of this parable is a parabolic addition, a literary device meant to foreshadow Jesus's future 'return' from the dead. However, portions of it can also be seen as a crafty allegory: the five brothers represent the five books of the law (the Pentateuch) which represent Judaism as a whole, the very Judaism which has rejected Jesus and His resurrection.

Apologists don't like the charge of hearsay when it comes to the Bible, especially reagrding the Gospels, and will utilize all kinds of imaginative maneuvering in order to dismiss it, including legalese and deliberate obfuscation. One popular method they employ is to discuss whether the conversations held by the characters within the gospels are hearsay or not which, of course, deliberately circumvents the issue (as in J.P. Holding's hearsay argument). In making such an argument the apologists completely ignore (or purposefully fail to mention) that it is the words put into the mouths of these characters that are the hearsay, not the testimony of what the characters said or to whom, since the characters are constructed within a third-person narrative by an anonymous gospel writer. The very nature of a third-person narrative is inescapably hearsay because the events and conversations are twice removed from you (you are the first-person, the story-teller is the second-person, and all the characters in the story are the third-person). On the other hand, the genuine letters of Paul written in the first-person are not hearsay though portions therein may contain hearsay as in I Corinthians 15:6: "After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep." Just because Paul tells the Corinthians (who, being in Greece, are quite a distance from Jerusalem) there were five hundred witnesses does not mean there were five hundred witnesses because his mention of these witnesses have now become a third-person account: the Corinithians are the first-person, Paul is the second-person, and the five hundred witnesses are the third-person. Until one of these five hundred witnesses is presented to speak for him-or-herself (in the first-person) then someone else (Paul, in this case) is doing the talking for them and that is the hearsay. Until we hear from any of the five hundred witnesses we cannot be sure there were five hundred witnesses, or fifty, or even five, or any. All we have is Paul's word on it; that's what makes this portion of his letter hearsay and, like the third-person accounts of the Gospels, ultimately inadmissible as evidence or proof (see the transcripts of the Geisler-Till Debate for more discussion regarding hearsay).

This is exactly the philosophical point that Alfred Ayer is making in the section. Not only are these types of accounts inadmissible as evidence or proof, they are ultimately meaningless since they are relying on expressions that are neither representational or falsifiable.

Language, Truth, Logic, and God

by Alfred J. Ayer

The criterion which we use to test the genuineness of apparent statements of fact is the criterion of verifiability. 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—that is, if he knows what observations would lead him, under certain conditions, to accept the proposition as being true, or reject it as being false. If, on the other hand, the putative proposition is of such a character that the assumption of its truth, or falsehood, is consistent with any assumption whatsoever concerning the nature of his future experience, then, as far as he is concerned, it is, if not a tautology, a mere pseudo-proposition.

The sentence expressing it may be emotionally significant to him; but it is not literally significant. And with regard to questions the procedure is the same. We inquire in every case what observations would lead us to answer the question, one way or the other; and, if none can be discovered, we must conclude that the sentence under consideration does not, as far as we are concerned, express a genuine question, however strongly its grammatical appearance may suggest that it does. As the adoption of this procedure is an essential factor in the argument of this book, it needs to be examined in detail. In the first place, it is necessary to draw a distinction between practical verifiability, and verifiability in principle. Plainly we all understand, in many cases believe, propositions which we have not in fact taken steps to verify. Many of these are propositions which we could verify if we took enough trouble. But there remain a number of significant propositions, concerning matters of fact, which we could not verify even if we chose; simply because we lack the practical means of placing ourselves in the situation where the relevant observations could be made.

A simple and familiar example of such a proposition is the proposition that there are mountains on the farther side of the moon. No rocket has yet been invented which would enable me to go and look at the farther side of the moon, so that I am unable to decide the matter by actual observation. But I do know what observations would decide it for me, if, as is theoretically conceivable, I were once in a position to make them. And therefore I say that the proposition is verifiable in principle, if not in practice, and is accordingly significant. On the other hand, such a metaphysical pseudo-proposition as "the Absolute enters into, but is itself incapable of, evolution and progress," [F.H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality] is not even in principle verifiable. For one cannot conceive of an observation which would enable one to determine whether the Absolute did, or did not, enter into evolution and progress. Of course it is possible that the author of such a remark is using English words in a way in which they are not commonly used by English-speaking people, and that he does, in fact, intend to assert something which could be empirically verified. But until he makes us understand how the proposition that he wishes to express would be verified, he fails to communicate anything to us. And if he admits, as I think the author of the remark in question would have admitted, that his words were not intended to express either a tautology or a proposition which was capable, at least in principle, of being verified, then it follows that he has made an utterance which has no literal significance even for himself. […]

It should now be clear that the only information which we can legitimately derive from the study of our aesthetic and moral experiences is information about our own mental and physical make-up. We take note of these experiences as providing data for our psychological and sociological generalisations. And this is the only way in which they serve to increase our knowledge. It follows that any attempt to make our use of ethical and aesthetic concepts the basis of a metaphysical theory concerning the existence of a world of values, as distinct from the world of facts, involves a false analysis of these concepts. Our own analysis has shown that the phenomena of moral experience cannot fairly be used to support any rationalist or metaphysical doctrine whatsoever. In particular, they cannot, as Kant hoped, be used to establish the existence of a transcendent god.

This mention of God brings us to the question of the possibility of religious knowledge. We shall see that this possibility has already been ruled out by our treatment of metaphysics. But, as this is a point of considerable interest, we may be permitted to discuss it at some length. It is now generally admitted, at any rate by philosophers, that the existence of a being having the attributes which define the god of any non-animistic religion cannot be demonstratively proved. To see that this is so, we have only to ask ourselves what are the premises from which the existence of such a god could be deduced. If the conclusion that a god exists is to be demonstratively certain, then these premises must be certain; for, as the conclusion of a deductive argument is already contained in the premises, any uncertainty there may be about the truth of the premises is necessarily shared by it. But we know that no empirical proposition can ever be anything more than probable. It is only a priori propositions that are logically certain. But we cannot deduce the existence of a god from an a priori proposition. For we know that the reason why a priori propositions are certain is that they are tautologies. And from a set of tautologies nothing but a further tautology can be validly deduced. It follows that there is no possibility of demonstrating the existence of a god.

What is not so generally recognised is that there can be no way of proving that the existence of a god, such as the God of Chrisianity, is even probable. Yet this also is easily shown. For if the existence of such a god were probable, then the proposition that he existed would be an empirical hypothesis. And in that case it would be possible to deduce from it, and other empirical hypotheses, certain experiential propositions which were not deducible from those other hypotheses alone. But in fact this is not possible. It is sometimes claimed, indeed, that the existence of a certain sort of regularity in nature constitutes sufficient evidence for the existence of a god. But if the sentence "God exists" entails to more than that certain types of phenomena occur in certain sequences, then to assert the existence of a god will be simply equivalent to asserting that there is the requisite regularity in nature; and no religious man would admit that this was all he intended to assert in asserting the existence of a god. He would say that in talking about God, he was talking about a transcendent being who might be known through certain empirical manifestations, but certainly could not be defined in terms of those manifestations. But in that case the term "god" is a metaphysical term. And if "god" is a metaphysical term, then it cannot be even probable that a god exists. For to say that "God exists" is to make a metaphysical utterance which cannot be either true or false. And by the same criterion, no sentence which purports to describe the nature of a transcendent god can possess any literal significance.

It is important not to confuse this view of religious assertions with the view that is adopted by atheists, or agnostics. For it is characteristic of an agnostic to hold that the existence of a god is a possibility in which there is no good reason either to believe or disbelieve; and it is characteristic of an atheist to hold that it is at least probable that no god exists. And our view that all utterances about the nature of God are nonsensical, so far from being identical with, or even lending any support to, either of these familiar contentions, is actually incompatible with them. For if the assertion that there is a god is nonsensical, then the atheist's assertion is that there is no god is equally nonsensical, since it is only a significant proposition that can be significantly contradicted. As for the agnostic, although he refrains from saying either that there is or that there is not a god, he does not deny that the question whether a transcendent god exists is a genuine question. He does not deny that the two sentences "There is a transcendent god" and "There is no transcendent god" express propositions one of which is actually true and the other false. All he says is that we have no means of telling which of them is true, and therefore ought not to commit ourselves to either. But we have seen that the sentences in question do not express propositions at all. And this means that agnosticism also is ruled out.

Thus we offer the theist the same comfort as we gave to the moralist. His assertions cannot possibly be valid, but they cannot be invalid either. As he says nothing at all about the world, he cannot justly be accused of saying anything false, or anything for which he has insufficient grounds. It is only when the theist claims that in asserting the existence of a transcendent god he is expressing a genuine proposition that we are entitled to disagree with him.

It is to be remarked that in cases where deities are identified with natural objects, assertions concerning them may be allowed to be significant. If, for example, a man tells me that the occurrence of thunder is alone both necessary and sufficient to establish the truth of the proposition that Jehovah is angry, I may conclude that, in his usage of words, the sentence "Jehovah is angry" is equivalent to "It is thundering." But in sophisticated religions, though they may be to some extent based on men's awe of natural process which they cannot sufficiently understand, the "person" who is supposed to control the empirical world is not himself located in it; he is held to be superior to the empirical world, and so outside it; and he is endowed with super-empirical attributes. But the notion of a person whose essential attributes are non-empirical is not an intelligible notion at all. We may have a word which is used, as if it named this "person," but, unless the sentences in which it occurs express propositions which are empirically verifiable, it cannot be said to symbolize anything. And this is the case with regard to the word "god," in the usage in which it is intended to refer to a transcendent object. The mere existence of the noun is enough to foster the illusion that there is a real, or at any rate a possible entity corresponding to it. It is only when we enquire what God's attributes are that we discover that "God," in this usage, is not a genuine name.

It is common to find belief in a transcendent god conjoined with belief in an after-life. But, in the form which it usually takes, the content of this belief is not a genuine hypothesis. To say that men do not ever die, or that the state of death is merely a state of prolonged insensibility, is indeed to express a significant proposition, though all the available evidence goes to show that it is false. But to say that there is something imperceptible inside a man, which is his soul or his real self, and that it goes on living after he is dead, is to make a metaphysical assertion which has no more factual content than the assertion that there is a transcends god.

It is worth mentioning that, according to the account which we have given of religious assertions, there is no logical ground for antagonism between religion and natural science. As far as the question of truth or falsehood is concerned, there is no opposition, between the natural scientist and the theist who believes in a transcendent god. For since the religious utterances of the theist are not genuine propositions at all, they cannot stand in any logical relation to the propositions of science. Such antagonism as there is between religion and science appears to consist in the fact that science takes away one of the motives which make men religious. For it is acknowledged that one of the ultimate sources of religious feeling lies in the inability of men to determine their own destiny; and science tends to destroy the feeling of awe with which men regard an alien world, by making them believe that they can understand and anticipate the course of natural phenomena, and even to some extent control it. The fact that it has recently become fashionable for physicists themselves to be sympathetic towards religion is a point in favour of this hypothesis. For this sympathy towards religion marks the physicists' own lack of confidence in the validity of their hypotheses, which is a reaction on their part from the anti-religious dogmatism of nineteenth-century scientists, and a natural outcome of the crisis through which physics has just passed.

It is not within the scope of this enquiry to enter more deeply into the causes of religious feeling, or to discuss the probability of the continuance of religious belief. We are concerned only to answer those questions which arise out of our discussion of the possibility of religious knowledge. The point which we wish to establish is that there cannot be any transcendent truths of religion. For the sentences which the theist uses to express such "truths" are not literally significant.

FROM: Alfred J. Ayer, Language Truth and Logic, pp. 35-37, 114-18.

March 19, 2006