Dilemma of religious language: A critique of logical positivists’ verification ideology and Wittgenstein’s language games theory

The dilemma of religious language is more prominent in two influential twentieth-century philosophical thoughts: logical positivists’ verificationism and Wittgenstein’s language-games theory. The contention is whether religious language can be meaningfully intelligible and cognitively credible in light of verificationist criteria of meaning and non-cognitivist interpretations of religious discourse. This paper analyses logical positivist claim that the verification principle renders metaphysical and theological statements cognitively meaningless and examines Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language-games and forms of life, as a response that relocates meaning within communal practice rather than empirical verification. It adopts philosophical analytic method by combining textual evaluation with comparative theoretical analysis. The study reveals that both Logical positivists’ and Wittgensteinian approaches are internally coherent yet philosophically insufficient when taken in isolation. The logical positivists’ principle of verification fails to account for non-empirical yet meaningful expressions of religious experience, while Wittgensteinian non-realist readings risk reducing religious language to expressive or regulative functions devoid of truth-claims. The paper contends that neither strict empiricism nor radical contextualism adequately captures the full semantic scope of religious discourse. Conversely, a mediating posture that integrates symbolic reference, communal usage, and rational evaluation is proposed, drawing insights from analogical and critical realist theories of religious language. The study concludes that religious language remains a legitimate subject of philosophical inquiry and requires interpretive models capable of sustaining both meaningful practice and claims to truth.