An Investigation into the Meaningfulness of Religious Language

In recent work on the philosophy of religion, there has been a great deal of concentration on what John Hick, in his Philosophy of Religion calls "the peculiarity of religious language". Hick is referring to the fact that when language is used either to describe God, or to make any kind of religious statement, it is used in ways that quickly reveal difficulties of meaning. These problems have to do with the fact that while …

…for example, that "There exists a transcendent God" is merely asserting that he or she is experiencing a kind of sense-content. The proposition cannot be regarded as possessing literal significance of any kind, since it allows no possibility of any form of verification and so cannot be significantly contradicted. Such sentences, like statements of a religious kind, make use of metaphysical terms and can, therefore, be accepted as neither true nor false, but only nonsensical.