ABSTRACT
Over a long period philosophers and theologians in the West have re ected on a range of issues concerning how human beings can talk of God. The underlying problem they address arises from the assumption that God is a transcendent entity. If God is transcendent, how can human language be t for describing and identifying the divine? This root problem branches into more speci c ones, as can be illustrated if we take a sample statement about God. Consider ‘God is wise.’ This statement appears to attribute the property wisdom to God. Given that God, if he exists, is a transcendent entity and quite unlike the normal, everyday things that we could intelligibly call wise, does ‘wise’ retain any meaning when used of God? If so, how might that meaning be xed? These questions relate to what I shall call ‘the problem of predication.’ Answers to the questions within the problem of predication have included appeals to negative theology, to analogical meaning, and to metaphor. Within ‘God is wise’ there is a subject term and we might ask how that subject term serves to identify what we want to attribute wisdom to. This is ‘the problem of reference.’ Consider the whole statement: we may wonder how it can be anchored in evidence. What, if anything, might show such statements to be true or false? The anchoring of such statements in evidence seems problematic, given that their putative subject is remote from experience. If we accept that knowing the meaning of a statement involves knowing what would show it to be true or false, then this worry about the anchorage of God-statements generates a further worry about how they can be understood. This is ‘the problem of veri cation.’ So far we have three broad problems in religious language: those of predication, reference, and veri cation. All three, but particularly the last, give rise to a fourth set of issues: those to do with realist versus anti-realist interpretations of religious language. We may wonder if the intent and function of ‘God is wise’ are analogous to those of ‘Pluto is a planet.’ The latter statement, whether true or false, is an attempt to state what is the case about a mind-independent reality. Whether it is true or false
depends on what is the case quite independently of human concepts and beliefs. We can interpret it realistically. Debates in philosophy of religion since the 1960s have raised the question of whether statements about God can be interpreted in the same fashion.
