Critisizm of verification and falsification approaches in the religious language

The title "Criticism of Verification and Falsification Approaches in the Religious Language" has been deemed appropriate for our thesis. The study consists of an introduction and two exclusive parts. Considering the chronological course of the Analytical Philosophy tradition in general, the debates about the meaningfulness of the religious language are examined descriptively and critically. The aim of the thesis is to evaluate the criticism of the Logical Positivism claims that the religious language is meaningless, and to examine whether the meaning of the religious language is possible within the tradition of analytical philosophy principles. In the introduction, the historical background of the issue, the nature of the language in general and the religious language in particular are mentioned in order to understand the discussions on the meaningfulness of the religious language in a more systematic way. In the first part, Wittgenstein's "picture theory" and his approach to the religious language in line with the that theory is discussed and the Logical Positivists interpretations of the religious language, influenced by his image theory and suggesting that a linguistic expression must be verifiable and/or falsifiable in order to be considered meaningful, were examined in the context of Ayer and Flew. In the criticism part that constitutes the second part, firstly, as an introduction, Wittgenstein's possibility of talking about God in reference to his theory of language games was emphasized and some criticisms made on the religious language interpretations of the verification and falsification theories in the Analytic tradition were evaluated. In the first part of this section, which we divided into three categories, Hare's "blik theory" and Braithwaite's "conative religion theory" are included; In the second part, Hick's "eschatological verification" thesis and Mitchell's views, which defends the falsifiability of religious discourse in principle, are examined; In the last part, the "Reformed Epistemology" theory of Plantinga, who defends that the religious language is a basic belief that does not need to be proven by directing its criticism to the epistemological preconceptions of Logical Positivism is evaluated. As a result, it was concluded that the meaningful language discourses of the verification and falsification theories have a reductionist attitude and in order to accurately determine the significance of the religious language, which has many uses of the language, the different aspects of the language in question should be evaluated in a holistic manner.