RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE197that guides its practitioners into what it
describes as a saving, illuminating, or
emancipatory relationship to this reality
through a personally transformative life
of prayer, ritualized meditations, and /
or moral practices like repentance and
moral and personal regeneration.
RELIGIOUS AMBIGUITY. A term
introduced by John Hick for the thesis
that the cosmos may be equally well
described and explained from a religious
or a secular, naturalistic point of view.
If the cosmos is religiously ambiguous,
then there is no independent conclusive
evidence for embracing either naturalism
or religion. While some would conclude
that religious ambiguity entails agnosti-
cism, others (such as Hick) defend the
permissibility of embracing either reli-
gion or secularism. Hick’s own position is
that of a radical pluralism in which many
ostensibly competing accounts of the
cosmos may all turn out to be leading us
to the same end, the Real.
RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE. Apparent
sensing or apprehending of a sacred
reality. These may be monistic or mono-
theistic. Experiences that are part of
Buddhist meditations on the self may also
be seen as religious or philosophical
experiences. A key issue in modern
philosophy of religion relates to the evi-
dential character of religious experience.
When can, for example, an apparent
experience or perception of God count as
evidence that this experience is veridical?
Philosophers reflect on the analogies and
disanalogies between religious experi-
ences and moral experiences (the ostensi-
ble experience of the goodness or evil of
some act or event) and perceptual experi-
ences of ordinary objects.RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE. Language
about the sacred and our relation to the
sacred; for example, God, Brahman,
Allah, karma, reincarnation, and so on.
Religious texts and practices include
almost all the main ways of using lan-
guage: expressive, descriptive, referential,
reformative, and so on. Terms may be
used literally, metaphorically or analo-
gously, or even equivocally. Some (such
as John Duns Scotus) claim that terms
like “cause” may be used univocally of
God and creatures as in “God caused the
cosmos to be” and “Lightning caused a
forest fire.” Calling God a “father,” how-
ever, is more of a metaphorical or analo-
gous attribution. Philosophers debate
the extent to which religious language is
analogous to other domains of discourse.
In the aftermath or World War II and
with the advance of positivism, there was
a major debate over whether religious
language is meaningful. Some philoso-
phers today challenge the coherence of
referring to God as a purposive reality or
person or person-like subject that is
nonphysical. In today’s more pluralistic
intellectual climate, religious language is