We might, equally justifiably, decide that the speaker was in a peculiar emotional condition quite inexplicable to us, mad, or that illegal chemical substances had upset the balance of his mind temporarily. What is clearly the case is that religious statements are not factual statements in the usual sense of this term, because they are not verifiable in any of the ways that lie behind our usual, mundane usage of language. If this is the case, they must either be meaningless statements, or factual statements of a very singular and special type, which have, perhaps, some sort of special emotive or mystical significance for those who use them. If we assume that, at least for believers, such statements of religious fact are meaningful, we are faced with the need to consider the ways in which they may be said to differ from, for example, statements of scientific or technical fact. St. Thomas Aquinas, who put forward in Part I of his Summa Theologiae what is known as the doctrine of analogical predication, a difficult-sounding concept but one that can easily be explained by reference to simple examples.
Man is good.
Dog is good. We cannot hope fully to understand the goodness of God, any more than we can fully understand that of a dog, but we can recognize the correspondence between them in terms of what they refer to and the ways in which statements about them require language to be used. In Aquinas's argument, therefore, language in religious contexts is used analogically. Its function is to illustrate correspondences of meaning between statements whose factual meanings may differ widely. Whilst doing nothing to prove the existence of God, it may, perhaps, be considered to allow those who believe in God or who wish to discuss religious matters, to do so in a way that makes use of shared meanings.