In his book My Philosophical Development, Russell said that he “had thought of language as transparent – that is to say, as a medium which could be employed without paying attention to it”. Perhaps most of the time we operate the same way: language is simply there. However, although language has, in a way, always been important in philosophy (when Socrates was asking “What is justice? What is knowledge?” and so on, the meaning of these words was obviously important), the twentieth century saw language in itself become a prominent feature of philosophical discourse.

Because of the prominence of language in modern philosophical debate, no book on the philosophical implications of the arguments for the existence of God would be complete without taking account of how language is used. Undoubtedly, the impact of critics of religious language has resulted in redefining what is meant by religious belief and the use of such statements as ‘God exists’, and it is this debate and reassessment that occupies much of contemporary philosophy of religion. Ultimately, the central question of this debate is what do we mean when you use such words as ‘God’, and it might seem somewhat surprising that many of the traditional arguments have failed to address this central question.

What is religious language?

Having a conversation about, say, the weather is nothing unusual. We talk about such everyday things all the time, and when we converse we generally follow certain rules of conversation.