The implications of this for religious language, if it is taken to be true, are huge. Going on the verification principle nearly all religious statements would become meaningless. This is not to say that they are right or wrong; more simply that they cannot be proven either analytically or synthetically, so it is pointless to talk about them at all because only these two types have real meaning. The other problem with religious language here is that when you use statements such as ‘God’, because they are not immediately and unequivocally defined, there is often wide difference in interpretation between people. This creates further problems for religious language because it means that even if we are to say that religious terms are meaningful despite their lack of evidence, which definition are we to go by?
Ayer’s other contribution to verification was to split it into two categories, namely ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ (these distinctions apply mostly to synthetic statements). Strong verification (the type put forward by the Vienna circle) is when a statement is absolutely provable through evidence, for example ‘I smell’ is provable by visiting me and having a sniff. Weak verification applies to statements that are probable but not entirely provable, such as historical statements like “Henry VIII was king of England” or statements about the future such as “I will be alive tomorrow.” These statements are not actually provable as we cannot visit them and see for ourselves, but they are still meaningful because they can be backed up by empirical evidence.
A problem with verification that immediately arises is the fact that the principle itself cannot be verified using the Verification Principle, so it commits a kind of suicidal philosophical error, because to say “the verification principle is meaningful” is meaningless because there is no evidence to back that up, and it is not true by definition. Another problem is that this principle jars with another put forward by John Hick who claimed that God’s existence will be proven at the end of life (eschatological verification), so there is certainly evidence for his existence. In reply a logical positivist could argue that it is still meaningless because God is still not provable in empirical terms, but in reply the Hick view could be backed up by Ayer’s weak verification – that if something could conceivably happen in the future then the statement is still meaningful, even if it turns out not to be actually true.
The other major challenge against meaningful religious statements, which bears a lot of resemblance to the first, is the falsification principle. This is a kind of development of the verification principle in that it incorporates the ideas of the logical positivists into its argument. It was first put forward by Anthony Flew in the 1950s. He said that since statements can be verified as true, they must also be able to be falsified as, well, false. However, he believed that religious statements cannot be falsified because whenever there arises some evidence against a religious belief the believers simply qualify their belief under other terms, so their belief in, say, God dies “the death of a thousand qualifications”. Flew used John Wisdom’s Parable of the Gardener to explain his theory. I will briefly paraphrase it to save time.
Two people come upon a garden that shows some signs of order, and yet others of randomness and disorder. One of the people believes that there is a gardener at work in the garden, but the other points out that there is absolutely no sign of him except in the fact that there are signs of order in the garden. Both people are looking at exactly the same garden with exactly the same ratio of order to disorder, and yet one concludes that there is an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener, while the other concludes that there is no gardener at all. The difference between them is that the believer keeps qualifying the gardener in other ways despite the fact that the sceptic keeps coming up with new evidence to suggest that he does not exist. In the end it simply comes down to a question of faith on the part of the believer – he is willing to continue his belief despite the fact that there is no real evidence for it.
The implication here for religion is that even in the face of almost undeniable evidence the believer still continues to believe, and many would deem that nothing more than blind unconsidered loyalty – not a very respectable philosophical position.
Some problems with falsification have arisen due to its focus on the actual act of falsification rather than our understanding of the situation. Richard Swinburne argued this point using the analogy of the toy cupboard. He said that when we are not looking it is impossible to prove whether or not the toys in a cupboard come out and run around, but just because this cannot be falsified does not mean that we do not understand the concept of the toys moving.
However, there are three arguments in response to verification and falsification that are far more compelling. The first, sometimes referred to as capitulation, was first put forward by R. M. Hare. He believes that a foothold can be found for religion elsewhere, though he openly concedes that Flew is almost certainly correct in his assertion. He uses a parable of a lunatic to explain his idea. A lunatic is paranoid that all his university professors want to kill him, and even when shown the nicest of profs he still irrationally believes that they wish death on him. Despite all evidence, religious believers still have an irrefutable belief in God. Of course, Flew’s test still stands up here; the lunatic’s behaviour is based on nothing and is therefore meaningless. However, the point is to show that a person’s behaviour will not change in spite of evidence, and Hare defines this characteristic behaviour as a blik, and it is in terms of bliks that we should understand religious belief.
This is perhaps not the best way to define religious belief, as it equates it with irrational lunacy, so a better version of capitulation is found in R. B. Braithewaite’s essay ‘An Empiricist’s View of the Nature of Religious Belief.’ Braithwaite’s idea is that religion is somewhat akin to the logical positivist’s view of ethics – that it is entirely emotive in character (Ayer’s ‘stealing. Boo!’ idea). Religious statements simply serve as a kind of moral guide for the believer, and they are no more than that. Braithwaite fully accepts that religious statements are non-cognitive (i.e. they are not fact-asserting). In doing all this he neatly finds a place for religion in the positivist world, but the major problem is that his theory reduces religion to nothing more than a few nice moral stories, where many people believe that religion goes a lot deeper – that things are said to be right and wrong because they simply are.
The second response to Flew’s challenge is often called accommodation. It is a view mostly put forward by Basil Mitchell and John Hick. Mitchell claims that religious faith is not just blind lunacy, it is a considered decision that every believer makes before choosing whether to believe in God. He uses the parable of the partisan to illustrate his point. In a war situation a member of the resistance meets a stranger who convinces him that he is in charge of the resistance and to have faith in him even when he is playing the other side. The partisan sometimes sees the stranger helping the resistance, but at other times he is seen helping the opposition. However, despite his friends’ dissentful murmurs, the partisan remains convinced that the stranger is on his side really. This is similar to the gardener parable, but it differs in that the partisan has had personal and intimate contact with the stranger – or God, so his decision to remain faithful to him is much more rational. This also links in with Hick’s eschatological verification idea because it suggests that at the end of the war (or world) the stranger will verify the partisan’s beliefs, even though it is ambiguous at the moment.
This idea does reintroduce some evidence for the idea that religious language is meaningful, but only if you accept the idea of eschatological verification. This in itself is something of a leap of faith, and going right back to the beginning of this paper it is very difficult to prove that such an idea has any meaning.
The third response is often referred to as repudiation – an idea touched upon earlier that basically says that verification is just as meaningless as religious language in itself, as there is no way of verifying the statement “verification is true” on its own terms.
At this point Wittgenstein returns with a completely different idea about language. He now rejects the verification principle, and his own earlier picture theory of language. He now believes that the meanings of words lie not in their definition but in their use in society, and therefore each society has its own rules about language or its own ‘language game’. Language games are not restricted to entire cultures; there can be many games within a culture, which an outsider would simply not be able to understand. A good example of a game like this is religion. It has it own rules or uses for words, so the only people who can truly understand their full meaning are those taking part.
However, problems with this vie include the fact that if it were true dialogue between religions would be impossible, as they would be mutually incomprehensible, religious believers are not all monks and nuns; they are involved in many aspects of life and none of the games they take part in are mutually exclusive, and finally non-believers may have a better view of religious language because they have an objective standpoint from which to view religion.
From all of this it seems to me that religious language is faced with much criticism despite the fact that it has done nothing really very wrong. We all know how difficult it is to talk about God and other supernatural metaphysical religious ideas, but just because they cannot be defined or justified in this world does not mean they have no significance. They not only putting people on the right moral track, they are and have had a long history of being guides and gurus for millions of people over the years, and to dismiss them on the grounds that they are improvable is to reject thousands of years of human moral and linguistic development.
