- So specialised it can only be understood on its own terms
- Many philosophers have argued rel lang meaningless
- Believers would disagree
- Anti-realist philosophers would argue rel lang does hold truths which can be discovered
- Opponents would argue can only be understood by the members of the faith community
- God talk is different from musical language or string theory because God is so different
- It is characterised by its use of symbol analogy and myth to appeal to the affective (emotional) faculties
- Rel lang reveals deeper truths than ‘my border collie is black’; ‘Jesus is the Good Shepherd’ has behind it a whole realm of historical experience
- The dangers are that those outside the rel community misunderstand – bread and wine to Romans were a cannibalistic ritual
- Wittgenstein said ‘for a blunder that’s too big.’
- Those inside the faith community know when an assertion is symbolic or not and decode it automatically
- Rel lang needs to be understood by its own rules and cannot be assessed by scientific criteria
- Rel people are concerned to about ‘why’ God created; scientists are concerned with ‘how’; 2 different language games at work and participants must recognise the different rules
- Truth becomes relative to the game being played
- Non-believers can debate religious issues without holding to them as a matter of faith but believers find an emotional content which opens up a whole new level of meaning
- Peter Vardy ‘the believer when he converts from non-belief comes to find a use for language about God where previously that language had not meaning in his or her life.’
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