(a) Analyse R. M. Hare's concept of ‘blik’ and assess whether it successfully defends the meaningfulness of religious language…

(a) Hare's concept of a blik and the meaningfulness of religious language (20 marks)

The context is Antony Flew's challenge in "Theology and Falsification" (1955): a religious assertion, like that of the invisible, undetectable gardener in Wisdom's parable, is emptied of meaning if nothing could count against it, because it "dies the death of a thousand qualifications". Believers, in his view, make claims about God's love that they protect from any evidence of suffering, and so say nothing.

R. M. Hare, replying in the same volume, accepts that religious claims are not falsifiable assertions but denies that they are meaningless. He introduces the blik: a fundamental, unfalsifiable way of seeing the world, an attitude or framework of interpretation, that determines how one takes all experience but is not itself an explanation. His parable: a lunatic is convinced that the university dons want to murder him; each kind, harmless don he meets is taken as proof of their cunning, and no evidence can dislodge his blik. A sane person has a different blik, that dons are friendly, which is likewise not an assertion open to refutation. Yet the difference matters: it is important which blik one has, since bliks shape action and one's response to the world; the lunatic's blik is wrong, and the sane one right, though neither is verified. Our belief in the uniformity of nature and in the regularity of the world is such a blik. So religious language expresses a blik, a way of living and seeing, and is meaningful in that role.

Assessment. Success: Hare shows that unfalsifiable statements can be meaningful and important, since they underlie all empirical inquiry and shape conduct; he identifies the regulative and attitudinal function of religious talk, and he changes the debate from evidence to commitment.

Failure. First, Flew replies that if religious belief is only a blik, it says nothing about how the world is, so the religious person cannot claim that God exists or loves; the believer's claim is factual and the blik makes it non-cognitive, which believers reject. Second, Basil Mitchell (the parable of the Partisan and the Stranger) argues that religious belief is not immune to evidence: the believer takes suffering as a real strain, holds his faith by trust, and so his claims are cognitive though not conclusively falsifiable. Third, Hare gives no criterion for sane against insane bliks, so the view risks relativism or irrationality; and if religious bliks are just attitudes, no rational choice between them is possible. Fourth, it leaves out the difference between being a Christian and a naturalist who holds the same practical attitudes.

Conclusion: the blik defends religious language against the charge of meaninglessness only by relocating it to non-cognitive ground, a costly defence which preserves significance but not the truth-claim that believers make.

(b) Personal and impersonal notions of God and devotion (15 marks)

A personal God is a being with will, knowledge, love and responsiveness, one to whom the believer stands as an "I" to a "Thou" (Buber): the Christian, Islamic and Vaishnava God. An impersonal God is an ultimate reality without personality or attributes: Shankara's nirguna Brahman, Spinoza's God-or-Nature, Tillich's ground of being, the Tao.

In devotion (bhakti) the two differ. With a personal God, devotion is a loving relationship: prayer, surrender, worship, gratitude and trust in grace; there is a distinction between devotee and deity, which Ramanuja treats as real, since love needs an object who can respond. The experience is emotional, intimate and moral, and the problems are anthropomorphism, the problem of evil and divine partiality. With an impersonal God, there is nothing to love or address; the path is contemplation and knowledge (jnana), aiming at realisation or identification, and devotion is a reverence for a truth or a meditation, not a dialogue; the risk is that it lacks warmth and comfort and cannot answer prayer. Shankara himself allows worship of saguna Ishvara at the practical level as a preparation for knowledge. The Bhagavad Gita (12.5) acknowledges that devotion to the unmanifest is possible but harder for embodied beings. Kabir and Nanak show a synthesis: nirguna bhakti, love for a formless God. Thus personal notions support the bhakti of relation, impersonal notions support the path of knowledge or meditation, and many traditions use both.

(c) Conflicting truth claims and religious pluralism (15 marks)

Religions make claims that seem to conflict: on God's nature (Trinity against strict monotheism, theism against non-theism), on Jesus (divine, prophet, or neither), on the afterlife (resurrection, rebirth), and on salvation. Pluralism must reconcile them if all are equally valid.

Attempts at reconciliation. Hick draws on Kant: the Real an sich is beyond human concepts, and different traditions experience it through different cultural lenses, the personae and impersonae of the Real; so the doctrines are different phenomenal descriptions and are not literally competing. He reads doctrines like the Incarnation as myth or metaphor, and holds that they are judged by their soteriological fruits, the transformation from self-centredness. Jain anekantavada, the doctrine of many-sidedness, and syadvada hold that any claim is partly true from a standpoint (the blind men and the elephant); Vivekananda and Ramakrishna offer a Vedantic version of unity beneath diversity.

Criticism. First, some claims are historical or factual and contradictory: Christians say Jesus died on the cross and rose, while the Quran (4:157) denies it; both cannot be literally true. Reconciliation by treating them as myth denies the traditions' own self-understanding, so pluralism is a revisionary claim. Second, Plantinga argues that pluralism is itself a competing truth claim, since it excludes exclusivism, and that it cannot be known if the Real is beyond concepts. Third, the notion of the Real is not neutral: the non-theistic traditions and the theistic ones do not all agree that there is a transcendent Real. Fourth, alternative responses are exclusivism and inclusivism (Rahner's "anonymous Christians").

Pluralism can reconcile conflicts on the level of function, salvation and practice, and on symbolic or non-literal readings, but not fully on the literal, factual claims; a modest pluralism, treating traditions as partial and revisable, is better placed than a strong one.