The Use of Analogy in Religious Language

Religious language has been rejected by many philosophers as meaningless, due to an emphasis on the importance of language being cognitive, or factually significant, and supported by empirical evidence.
However, theologians have maintained that is possible to communicate meaningfully about God through the use of analogy.

An analogy is a comparison between one thing and another, and is not used in a literal sense, but for explanatory purposes. Thomas Aquinas proposed that it is possible to use an analogy to talk about God, as long as we recognise that the divinity has a distinctive quality of reality to humanity, because humankind was created by God in the imago Dei (i.e. in the image of God). Therefore, although human language and understanding of God is limited due to the epistemic distance between humans and God, we can still draw meaningful connections between creature and Creator. Aquinas had previously rejected other manners of talking about God as they were inadequate.

• First he rejects univocal language, which means that language is used in a spatio-temporal context and does not differ in the case of God at all.
  For example, to say "God is good" in the same way that "John is good".
  This is a fallacy because the language then anthropomorphises God and limits him to human understanding and language, when in fact God is a being transcendent of the realms of human understanding. 
• Secondly he rejects equivocal language, which means that language is used in a completely different sense to talk about God than ordinary objects of the world and that language has different meanings in different contexts.
  For example, "That bird is a crane" uses 'crane' in a different sense to "The crane lifted the skip".
  It is vital that you have the right context in order to understand the meaning of a statement, Ferdinand de Saussure would argue that we need the same sign for an object in order to communicate meaningfully. Therefore, it is not possible to speak of God in these terms because we do not understand God's nature and cannot speak about something beyond our experience.

For Aquinas, the correct way to talk about God is in analogical terms, whilst always remembering that this is a limited way to speak about God. In the Bible, God is often personified and seen to have behaviour like humans. 

Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden. 

- Genesis 3:8

This demonstrates the likeness of humans to God because God is pictured as walking through the garden of Eden just as Adam or Eve would have. In addition there are other qualities that humanity shares with God, such as knowledge and kindness: 

If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given to him. 

- James 1:5

There are two ways in which we can use analogy to discuss God and they are analogies of attribution and analogies of proportion. An analogy of attribution is used to attribute qualities that are valued by humans to God. We are able to do this because God is the creator of the universe, and therefore all valuable traits in humanity are connected to the valuable traits of God. For example, we believe that mercy, power and love are admirable, so we say that God is merciful, powerful and loving. However, when using analogies of attribution it is recognised that although these qualities are not a magnified version of those possessed by humanity, but that they are different to the human qualities. Ludwig Feuerbach would argue that humans take all the best qualities of humanity and project them onto an external being who they feel is worthy of their praise and devotion, when in fact the analogy of attribution is really only a reflection of the pleasant side of humanity.

The analogy of proportion differs to attribution, because it recognises the quantitative difference between humans and God. In Aquinas' First Way of the Cosmological argument, he argues that all living things in the world have potential (i.e. they could be the 100% greatest) whereas God is pure actuality and does not have potential (i.e. he is that than which nothing greater can be conceived, he is 100% of everything that it is to be God). Therefore, in an analogy of proportion it is possible to say that whatever God is, for example, loving or powerful, he is infinitely so because he fulfills everything that it is to be God. Aquinas uses the biblical example of God speaking to Moses:

"I am who I am" (Exodus 3:14)

Which he interpreted that God perfectly fulfills his own nature. An issue to be raised here is whether we can really know God's nature in order to discuss him, because God is a transcendent reality beyond the realm of ordinary experience and therefore, we cannot have sufficient knowledge of God to say what he is like. 

The Verification Principle

First, I will discuss a group of philosophers and scientists, known as the Vienna Circle. They met throughout the 1920s and into the '30s to examine subjects including logic, language and meaning.
The thinkers were influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein, who believed that we can only use language to explore natural scientific propositions and trying to talk about the metaphysical, or that beyond our world, is impossible. They belonged to a movement called Logical Positivism, which maintains that language and conversation is only meaningful if it can be verified (i.e. proved to be true) empirically. Therefore, all religious language, or "God-talk", is meaningless because it does not relate to a reality that can be verified by a posteriori reasoning.
For a logical positivist, claims such as:

-"God is love"
-"The soul is non-physical" 

are completely meaningless because there is no observation or experience that could demonstrate the sentences are true or false, and whether they are true or not makes no difference to our experience. As these statements are not confined within the limits of human experience, therefore they are nonsense.

The most notable principle that is associated to logical positivism is The Verification Principle, which was famously argued by A.J. Ayer in his book, "Language, Truth and Logic".

All statements can be categorized as either:
1) Analytic (i.e. a statement is true by definition) - it is a tautology and the wording of the statement verifies the truth of it.
2) Synthetic (i.e. a statement can be verified through empirical evidence) - it is meaningful and factually significant because they can hold verifiable truths.

Therefore, the Verification Principle states that if a statement is neither true a priori, nor empirically verifiable, it says nothing about reality and therefore is meaningless. This can be used to identify claims that appear to tell us something about the world we live in, but really if it's truth cannot be known then it is not worth discussing. An example comes from John Hick, "The universe doubled in size last night", which illustrates how a statement can appear to attempt to tell us something about our world at first, but after deeper analysis, it is revealed that a claim like this does not truly say anything about what the world is like.

What are the implications for religion?

As God is a transcendent being, completely beyond human understanding, all conversations about God will fail because humans do not have an adequate understanding of his nature. For Ayer, no matter whether a person has a perspective of theism, atheism or agnosticism, any "God-talk" is meaningless because there is no empirical verification of religious propositions. He would reject religious concepts such as life after death, and the belief in a non-material soul, simply because they are not verifiable. Religious language related claims are subjective (i.e. they are not factually significant) and therefore, they cannot be practically verified (i.e. conclusively verified using empirical evidence), or even verified in principle (i.e. shown to be highly probably by observation). However, the fact that the verification principle allows this loophole for scientific propositions - which often can only show that they are the most probable explanation, rather than conclusively prove they are right - greatly weakens, because many claims could be verifiable 'in principle'.
Hick would argue that all religious propositions will be verified eschatologically, and therefore they can be considered to be factually significant and meaningful. This suggests a distinctly different understanding of 'verification' to Ayer's, and indeed, for Hick something can be verified if it is possible to remove reasonable doubt of the truth of the claim. As it is possible that God exists and there is the possibility of an eternal life in heaven, then all religious claims are potentially verifiable and meaningful. Therefore, for a Christian who believes in an after-life it is possible that all their beliefs will be verified after their death, and therefore conversations about their faith are truly meaningful.