It is cosmogony, historical narrative, myth, moral discourse, as well as blessing and cursing, confessing, adoring. It crucially involves metaphor, symbol, analogy, parable, paradox. Given the diversity of religious language, there can be no single way of confirming or rebutting its many and complex claims. It should not surprise one that the language we use to describe temporal events, material objects, and our dealings with them will not suffice also to describe the God of Judaeo-Christian theism and our supposed encounters with him.
Obliqueness is uneliminable from discourse about deity.
Even attempts to ground all the 'revealed' talk and all accounts of religious experience in a cosmologically argued 'uncaused cause' requires an analogical extension of that basic category of cause, beyond its home in everyday and scientific explanation. A decision about accepting or rejecting the claims of theistic language to have a real object must be based on a holistic judgement. 1 and index. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy 2. The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology 4.