1. THE VIA NEGATIVE STRENGTHS WEAKNESSES
Speaking about God in terms of what he is not like, for example, ‘God is not mortal’.
STRENGTHS
WEAKNESSES
Believers want to talk about what God is like, speaking only about what he is not like fails to say anything meaningful about him.
Avoids the pitfalls of using inadequate human language to describe an almighty and transcendent being.
If we only speak in negatives about God, we can end up having to deny the existence of God which is counterproductive.
This is confusing because God’s love is not the same as human’s love which would mean that we would have to say that ‘God is not love’. This is not a rational description of God and so highlights how speaking about him only in the negative can cause problems.

2. UNIVOCAL WEAKNESSES STRENGTHS
Speaking about God using words in their everyday sense, for example, using God’s love to mean the same thing as Jane’s love.
WEAKNESSES
STRENGTHS
Falls into the trap of anthropomorphism as to reduces God’s love to the level of human love and it is considered to be far superior – Aquinas ‘But no name belongs to God in the same sense that it belongs to creatures’.
Because we understand what human love is like, we can then apply this to God’s love and so it is easy to understand.

3. EQUIVOCAL STRENGTHS WEAKNESSES
Speaking about God using the same words that we would use to describe humans but considering these words to have a different meaning, for example, believers understand that when we talk about God’s love and Jane’s love, God’s love means something different to Jane’s.
STRENGTHS
WEAKNESSES
This way of understanding the words used to describe God avoids anthropomorphism because it is implied that the words mean different things when talking about God to when talking about humans.
Changing the meanings of the words used to describe God can be confusing as if the meanings are too different from our everyday use of them, this can make it difficult to understand God.

4. ANALOGICAL
Aquinas – ‘Gradation to be found in things’, he argued that all goodness in humans comes from God and therefore God and humans are analogously related.
All the good qualities in humans also belong to God but in a greater and more perfect way because God is the cause of goodness in humans.
Burrell described analogies as, ‘Proportional similarities which also acknowledge dissimilar features’. In other words when we use an analogy, we are implying that some things about the two subjects are the same but we are by no means claiming that they are identical.
ANALOGY OF PROPORTION
All good qualities belong to God and then to humans to a lesser extent. This means that, although we cannot fully understand God, we can at least begin to.
Aquinas – did not agree with either the use of univocal or equivocal language to describe God. Instead he argued the best way was to use words in a non-literal sense to show that there is a relationship between a word used to describe God and also to describe something else.
ANALOGY OF ATTRIBUTION
God’s attributes are a higher level of our own.
Hick – downwards analogy sees the attributes of God reflected downwards towards humans so that human wisdom is a pale reflection of God’s wisdom.

5. Symbols can be objects, pictures, words and actions.
SYMBOLIC LANGUAGE
Symbols should not be interpreted literally because they are not trying to describe a fact about the world, they are trying to describe a religious truth that is beyond our understanding.
A symbol is something that identifies a concept and also participates in the meaning of that concept. A symbol differs from a sign in that a sign only provides information, eg a road sign tells you a speed limit; whereas a symbol expresses what a believer feels about the concept being
Symbolic language is non-cognitive meaning it is not meant to be taken as factually true. For example, the statement ‘Jesus is the light of the world’ is not intended to mean that Jesus will illuminate people’s homes instead of lightbulbs.
CRITICISM
The meaning of symbols can become lost or trivialised, for example, the idea of a symbolic day of rest (people were not literally expected to remain in bed but the idea was that they would not be preoccupied with work) has been lost as many people now view Sunday as just another ordinary day.
Symbols can be objects, pictures, words and actions.
Cross – identifies the Christian religion but also conveys the resurrection of Jesus and the belief that Christians have in his sacrifice and the hope for their own salvation.
CRITICISM
Symbols can become the focus of worship, ie praying to statues themselves rather than praying to God. This could lead to idol worship which is considered a grave sin in religions such as Islam.
Tillich said ‘Symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate because it VVit directly’.
CRITICISM
Symbols can be seen as outdated, for example, the idea of God the Father is now criticised for reflecting patriarchal values that men are in control.

6. MYTHS
Myths are not concerned with expressing factual truths but rather the more difficult cosmological concepts such as the Second Coming of Jesus.
A myth is a story that expresses a truth when no one is sure what exactly happened. They attempt to explain the unexplainable and give insights into human existence.
Myths are the most common form of symbolic language because they combine symbols, metaphors and imagery together.
CRITICISM
They are considered by some to be an outdated form of expression as people cannot be realistically expected to believe in certain ideas in the modern world. Bultmann made this point in relation to religious language and called for it to be stripped of all myths so that the nature of God could be properly understood.
DEFENCE
Religious language is argued to be anti-realist and so it is not concerned with making factual statements. Therefore myths are still valuable because they help us to describe ‘other worldly’ concepts in the world that we currently live in.
DEFENCE
Myths are part of a language game and so our focus should be on how to interpret them rather than their factual basis.
CRITICISM
Dawkins agreed with the removal of myths from religious language; he believed that, ‘Much of the Bible is just plain weird’.

7. AYER – THE VERIFICATION PRINCIPLE
Ayer devised the verification principle and said that a sentence only had meaning if:
1, it was a tautology, ie true by definition such as a circle is round
2, it could, even if only in principle be verified to be true or false.
Ayer’s work was heavily influenced by the Vienna Circle; a group of philosophers who followed a logical positivist rationale and believed that much of the language used in philosophy was nothing but gibberish. The Vienna Circle argued that language was only meaningful if it confined itself to talking about what was within the human experience.
Ayer’s point was that for language to be meaningful, it had to say something about the world; it must say that the world is a certain way.
Ayer argues that the statement it snowed in London last week is meaningful because we can check this by asking someone who was in London last week.
Much of science deals with entities that are not directly observable. Ayer gets round this problem with the ideas of strong and weak verification. Strong says that we can say a statement is meaningful if we can verify it by observation. Weak says that a statement is meaningful if there are some observations that can establish the probable truth of it.
Statements that cannot actually be verified in practice such as there being life on Pluto are still classed as meaningful as we know how we would go about verifying them if we had the necessary technology.

8. AYER – CRITICISMS AND DEFENCES
Hick – there are many aspects of religious language that can be verified upon death. This is known as eschatological verification. Hick agreed that whilst there may be no satisfactory way to prove that there is life after death whilst we are still living, when we die, we will find out (refer to parable to of the Celestial City).
Hick’s idea of eschatological verification is contingent on some part of our consciousness surviving the physical process of death. This is problematic as it remains debatable whether this actually happens and, even if it does, how much of this surviving part could be said to be ‘us’?
Sutherland – Ayers ideas are ‘conceptually restrictive’ in that they not only make religious language meaningless but also many other areas of language such as emotions, art, poetry etc. This would mean that it would no longer be meaningful to say to someone that you loved them as this would be an unverifiable statement as you would not be able to prove it through the senses.
If we are talking about proof that God exists, eg through religious experiences, then it is reasonable to demand that any proof offered is of a factual basis rather than based on the feelings of a particular individual.
(We cannot verify through our senses whether someone has encountered God or not)

9. FLEW – THE FALSIFICATION
PRINCIPLE
Flew argued that if someone who will not give up their beliefs, no matter how much evidence they are presented with to the contrary , the belief is not factually significant because it is not connected to the real world.
Unlike Ayer, Flew did not concentrate on if we could verify whether statements were true, but if we could prove they were false.
Like Ayer, Flew believed that statements were only meaningful if they are factually significant, in other words, if they make a claim about the world in which we live in.
Flew said that many religious believers, when presented with evidence for why their beliefs might be wrong, will not give up their beliefs but alter or qualify them to take into account the new information.
WISDOM’S PARABLE OF THE GARDENER
Flew uses the example that many religious people hold fast to the belief that God loves us like a father loves his children. Flew believes that the amount of evil and suffering in the world should falsify this as no loving father would inflict such misery on his children. Many religious believers continue to maintain their faith in God despite suffering (Story of Job) and so, for Flew, their inability to acknowledge that God may not love them suggests that their beliefs are meaningless.
Many Christians used to believe that the Genesis story was literally true, that God made the world over 7 days. Developments in science have made this difficult to uphold and so many have since altered their belief to the idea that God made the world in stages and that evolution was the way in which he chose to create humans.

10. FLEW – CRITICISMS DEFENCE
Hare – just because a belief cannot be falsified, it is meaningful if it has a significant impact on a person’s life.
PARABLE OF THE PARANOID STUDENT
As with Ayer, all statements about emotion, art, beauty, poetry would be meaningless and so to fully embrace Flew’s view would take us too far away from the common consensus.
Hare – invented the word ‘blik’ to refer to beliefs that are unfalsifiable but are still meaningful to people in how they interpret the world and live their lives. Even if they won’t give the belief up in light of any evidence presented, the belief is still meaningful because of the impact it has on their lives.
Mitchell argues that religious beliefs are meaningful as many people can imagine situations in which they would doubt them and even give them up.
PARABLE OF THE PARTISAN
Hare – we all have fundamental beliefs that may be unfalsifiable that we base our actions on and will never give up. For example most people believe that everything has a cause. If something breaks and we are unable to find out what the cause was, we are unlikely to presume that it just happened and instead conclude that our inability to find the cause is simply that we have looked or thought about long or hard enough.
Mitchell also agrees with Hick in eschatological verification providing the answer to the question of God’s existence upon death.
DEFENCE
If we are talking about proof that God exists, eg through religious experiences, then it is reasonable to demand that any proof offered is of a factual basis rather than based on the feelings of a particular individual.
(We cannot verify through our senses whether someone has encountered God or not)

11. WITTGENSTEIN - LANGUAGE GAMES
He said that language had many functions and that it was a mistake to say that its only function was to describe the world.
Wittgenstein argued that there was no such thing as ‘the’ meaning of a word because there were many different ways of using the same word (for example, there are over twenty different ways of using the word ‘down’).
Wittgenstein called the different uses of language that take place in different social contexts LANGUAGE GAMES.
This idea of language games opened up the idea of what could be considered meaningful as now talk of art, poetry and emotions (although still not verifiable or falsifiable) was meaningful according to Wittgenstein because it formed part of a religious language game.
He argued that only people involved in a religious way of life could truly understand the meaning of religious language. For example, even the ‘the chairs exist’ and ‘the Creator exists’ look the same they actually have very different meanings as the second statement has far more resonance for how a person will live their lives than the first.
Each language game has its own rules, for example the way the word experiment is used in a scientific context means something different to if someone was to say that they were experimenting with a new hairstyle.
He believed that science and religion were not in competition with each other and that neither could be used to solve the problems of the other so it was futile trying to impose the rules of science onto religion.
He argued that the understanding the meaning of words lay not in a single definition but in our ability to be able to use the word appropriately in a variety of contexts.
Wittgenstein’s ideas about language are known as ‘anti-realist’ as he does not necessarily believe that language has to be factually significant.

12. WITTGENSTEIN – STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES
His view is more reflective of the human experience as to only class language as meaningful if it is factually significant takes away huge chunks of the language that we use on a daily basis.
It is possible for people within a particular group to talk meaningfully about things such as witches and wizards because they all understand the ‘rules of the language game’ that they are playing. This however does not mean that there are such things though.
Many religious believers object to religious language being termed a ‘language game’ or ‘anti-realist’ as for them, when they talk about the existence of God or the afterlife, they believe that such things are in fact real and not just part of a language game.