Non-Cognitive Approaches to Religious Language

Hare's bliks, Braithwaite's moral-intention account and Randall's functional analysis all provide genuinely valuable insights for interpreting certain types of religious text — particularly ethical, wisdom and liturgical literature — by revealing dimensions of meaning that purely cognitive, literal interpretation misses.

R.B. Braithwaite argues in "An Empiricist's View of the Nature of Religious Belief" (1955) that religious statements are not descriptions of God's nature but expressions of moral intentions: "God is love" is not a metaphysical claim but a commitment to live lovingly. Religious stories — parables, narratives, myths — function as imaginative supports for moral commitment, not as historical reports. Applied to biblical texts, this is a genuinely illuminating interpretive lens: the parables of Jesus (the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son) are not best read as historical reports but as moral orientation tools — their meaning lies in the commitment to compassion and forgiveness they evoke, not in whether the events described literally occurred. Randall extends this: religious language arouses emotion, motivates moral action, stimulates community solidarity, and clarifies individual experience of the transcendent — functions that purely cognitive, truth-apt reading ignores. A liturgical text like the Psalms is not primarily a set of factual claims but a form of communal and emotional engagement with ultimate reality, and reading it as a series of propositions to be verified loses most of its meaning.

However, both Braithwaite and Randall face the objection that their accounts reduce religious texts to ethics or psychology, stripping out the specifically religious and theological content. Braithwaite's claim that "God is love" is merely a moral commitment makes it indistinguishable from secular humanism: the reference to God adds nothing if it is not a truth-claim about a being whose nature is love. As Flew would note, if "God is love" cannot be falsified and does not describe an actual divine being, it is functionally equivalent to saying "I intend to be loving" — the word "God" is doing no genuine work. Similarly, Randall's functional account cannot explain why the specific content of different religious traditions matters: if the function is to inspire and unite, then any sufficiently inspiring narrative would do as well as the Gospels or the Qur'an.

The non-cognitive response is that different types of text require different interpretive frameworks, and that Braithwaite and Randall are not claiming that all religious language is non-cognitive — only that non-cognitive reading recovers dimensions that purely literal reading misses. A Wittgensteinian would add that the specific content of different religious traditions matters because it shapes distinct forms of life — the Gospels and the Qur'an produce different communities, practices and moral orientations, and this difference is itself meaningful even on a non-cognitive account. The non-cognitive approach is most valuable as a supplement to, not a replacement for, cognitive interpretation.

This concession is important and largely correct: non-cognitive approaches are most convincing as illuminating one dimension of religious texts rather than providing a complete hermeneutic. Braithwaite's moral-commitment reading of parables genuinely enriches interpretation; Randall's communal-function analysis illuminates liturgical and wisdom literature. The reductive objection — that non-cognitive reading removes God from the equation — is telling for systematic theology but less damaging for the specific task of interpreting literary and performative religious texts. The claim that non-cognitive approaches provide valuable insights is therefore well-supported for a significant range of religious literature.

Non-cognitive approaches thus provide genuine and valuable insights into the interpretation of ethical, liturgical and wisdom literature, but their reductive tendency limits their value for texts that are explicitly making historical or metaphysical claims about God's nature and actions.

Hare's blik theory reveals both the further strengths and the decisive limitations of non-cognitive interpretation: it illuminates how believers hold religious commitments, but applied to historically specific texts it fails to account for the truth-apt, cognitive core that traditions themselves insist upon.

R.M. Hare argues in the 1950 Falsification Symposium that religious beliefs are bliks — deep-seated, non-falsifiable orientations towards the world that shape how everything is seen. His example of the student who believes all dons are out to get him illustrates that bliks are not asserted as falsifiable propositions but as fundamental interpretive frameworks that precede and condition evidence. Applied to religious texts, this is genuinely illuminating: the Book of Job, the Psalms, and apocalyptic literature are not primarily propositional reports but existential orientations towards suffering, praise and ultimate hope, and reading them as blik-expressions better captures their meaning than reading them as empirical claims. Hare concedes that some bliks are sane (rationally coherent within experience) and others insane (distorting and life-denying), which gives limited capacity for evaluating religious texts non-cognitively.

However, Hare's account struggles seriously with historically specific religious texts: the Resurrection narratives in the Gospels, the Exodus account, or the claims of the Qur'an about the nature of God are not intelligible as bliks — they are intended as reports of actual events and actual divine speech. St Paul himself writes in 1 Corinthians 15: "If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile" — explicitly treating the Resurrection as a falsifiable historical claim whose truth is essential to the religion. As Flew's falsification principle correctly identifies, a tradition that insists its central claims are historically and metaphysically true cannot simultaneously retreat to non-cognitive blik-talk when pressed for evidence. Hick's eschatological verification offers a more adequate alternative for these texts: religious claims about God's existence, love and resurrection are cognitively truth-apt, and while they cannot be verified empirically now, they are in principle verifiable after death. This preserves both the cognitive seriousness of religious texts and the insight that their meaning is not reducible to scientific reportage.

The non-cognitive interpreter can respond that the literalist reading of resurrection narratives is itself a contested hermeneutic: many contemporary theologians — including those in the Wittgensteinian tradition — read resurrection language as expressing the community's transformative encounter with the continuing significance of Jesus, not as a scientific report of a resuscitated corpse. The blik framework can accommodate this: the resurrection stories are an expression of ultimate orientation towards life-through-death, and their "truth" lies in their power to orient and transform communities across centuries.

This response is theologically creative but ultimately unconvincing as a general hermeneutic: it works for readers who are already committed to a non-realist theology, but it misrepresents the claims of the vast majority of Christians, Muslims, and Jews who regard their sacred texts as making genuinely truth-apt assertions about God, history and creation. Hick's point is decisive here: if eschatological verification is possible, there is no need to retreat to a non-cognitive account — religious language can be both meaningfully cognitive and irreducible to scientific verification. The non-cognitive approach therefore provides valuable insights as a partial tool for interpreting certain genres of religious text, but as a complete interpretive theory it distorts the cognitive core of most religious traditions.

Non-cognitive approaches thus have genuine but limited value for interpreting religious texts: illuminating for non-propositional genres, distorting for historical and metaphysical claims — and Hick's eschatological verification better handles the full range of religious textual claims without sacrificing cognitive seriousness.