Concept

Theological noncognitivism

Overview

Theological noncognitivism is the non-theist position that religious language, particularly theological terminology such as 'God', is not intelligible or meaningful, and thus sentences like 'God exists' are cognitively meaningless. This would also imply that sentences like the negation of 'God exists' or 'God does not exist' are likewise meaningless, i.e., neither true nor false. It may be considered synonymous with ignosticism (also called igtheism), a term coined in 1964 by Sherwin Wine, a rabbi and a founding figure of Humanistic Judaism.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

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1. In the proposition, "Wine is good," it is understood with equal readiness, though for somewhat different reasons, that the assertion is not intended to be universal, but particular.[16]

   John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic

   States what Theological noncognitivism is.

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2. This climax is the religious consciousness. At the giddy height of this conception, whose latest and best known form is the Hegelian philosophy, definite words fail to serve their purpose; and the ultimate goal,--where object and subject, worshipped and worshipper, facts and the knowledge of them, fall into one, and where no other is left outstanding beyond this one that alone is, and that we may call indifferently…

   William James, The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy

   Close in meaning to Theological noncognitivism; the term itself is not named.

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3. Transcendental theology aims either at inferring the existence of a Supreme Being from a general experience, without any closer reference to the world to which this experience belongs, and in this case it is called cosmotheology; or it endeavours to cognize the existence of such a being, through mere conceptions, without the aid of experience, and is then termed ontotheology. Natural theology infers the attributes…

   Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason

   States what Theological noncognitivism is.

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Philosophers who discussed Theological noncognitivism

• Donald Davidson (philosopher)
• Islam

Related ideas

• Religion
• Theology
• Paul Kurtz
• Nonsense
• Meaning (philosophy)
• Humanistic Judaism
• God
• Agnosticism
• Negative and positive atheism

Place in the tradition

Part of Outline of philosophy.

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