Religious Assertions: A Linguistic Approach

This article makes an attempt to understand religious assertions from a linguistic perspective. The terms that are applied to God in religious discourse are being used in special ways, different from their use in the scientific or in the ordinary day-to-day contexts. Religious assertions could be viewed as explanations, self-justified, derived from authority, analogical statements, faith statements, symbolic, non-cognitive and as language-games. The pertinent question is whether religious utterances or assertions are verifiable. Religious assertions are not verifiable in the sense of being publicly verifiable, namely there being publicly agreed methods of verifying them. However this does not entail that they are not informative. As far as religious assertions are concerned, one should concentrate more on the practical usefulness of these beliefs and utterances rather than questioning their truth and verifiability. For those with faith in the religious assertions, no proof is required, but for those without faith no proof is possible