All of these present interesting topics for study. But philosophers have been narrowly
selective in their approach to the field. Dominated for the most part by epistemological
and metaphysical concerns, they have concentrated on what look to be factual statements
about God or other objects of religious worship. They have been preoccupied with two
questions. (1) Are such apparent statements the genuine article? Can they be construed as
making genuine truth claims or are they to be understood in some other way? (2) If they
are what they seem to be, just what claims are they making? This second concern plunges
them into the most fundamental issues in the philosophy of language. Take the putative
statement, “God made the heavens and the earth.” If this is a genuine truth claim, it raises
two basic questions. (1) Just who (or what) are we referring to by “God,” and how, if at
all, is this reference secured? This is an instance of the general problem of understanding
singular reference. (2) How are we to understand the predicate “made the heavens and the
earth”? More generally, what sorts of predicates, if any, can be intelligibly, and possibly
truly, applied to God? We may call this the “problem of theological predication.” The
organization of this chapter reflects these dominant philosophical concerns.
Many philosophers and theologians have protested against the concentration of
philosophers on religious statements to the neglect of other religious uses of language.
Their complaint can be briefly summed up as follows. The heart of religion is found in
talk to God in prayer, worship, and liturgy. Talk about God is a secondary phenomenon
that gets its religious significance by its dependence on the former. I find this criticism to
be valid if, but only if, the study of religious statements is divorced from its connection
with more basic aspects of the religious life, as too often it is in philosophical treatments.
But it need not be so. The valid concerns of philosophers with statements about God can
be pursued while recognizing their connections with the rest of religion.
Instead of speaking of predicates of religious statements, we could speak of religious
concepts. Because predicates express concepts, problems about the meaning of the
former are translatable into problems about the content of the latter. Instead of asking
how predicates applied to God are to be understood, we could just as well ask about the
content of concepts applied to God. And because genuine statements express beliefs,
instead of asking whether our efforts at religious statements make claims to objective
truth, we could ask whether alleged beliefs about God are capable of objective truth
value. Because of the “linguistic turn” that has been so prominent in twentieth-century
philosophy, the linguistic style of formulation has been much more prominent. But the
fact that speech gets its meaning by virtue of the thoughts it expresses is a reason to think
that the for
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mulation in terms of thought is more fundamental. I will be moving freely from one of
these formulations to the other, except in those cases, like the question of whether certain
statements about God should be understood literally or figuratively, that require a
linguistic formulation.
One other preliminary point. I said that the central concern of philosophers with religious
language had to do with statements about God or other objects of religious worship. That
second disjunct was added because to give a truly comprehensive treatment of religious
statements, we must range over religions that recognize an ultimate reality that is not