Secondly, statements that can be verified using external sense data are said to be synthetic. For example, “Jane is a spinster”. We would need to find Jane and ask her about her marital status-this would provide the external sense data.
In both cases, we have everything that we need to prove whether the statement is true or false.
Logical Positivists believe that verification is not about the truth or falsity of a statement but about its provability.
The reason why it appears to offer a great challenge is because religious language appears to be neither analytic nor synthetic therefore Logical Positivists argue that it is completely meaningless. It is not internally logical and the truth or falsity also cannot be obtained from sense experience.
Logical Positivists hold, on the other hand, that if there is no evidence for a statement to be true then the statement is meaningless. They produced this theory of meaning known as the Verification Principle.
They argue that if they say that something is the case, they mean that, if you go and look, you will see that it is the case. This means that the statement can only be proved true or false through evidence.
This is the ‘strong’ form of the Verification Principle.
However, clearly, it is not always possible to check the evidence for a statement. Therefore, the Logical Positivists argued that for a statement to be meaningful, it was enough to be able to say what sort of evidence could count for or against it. This is the ‘weak’ form of the Verification Principle.
The main challenge to religious language was made by the philosopher, A. J. Ayer who was a Logical Positivist. He argued that the statement ‘God exists’ cannot be either true or false because there is no empirical evidence that can prove or disprove the statement. Therefore, he argued that it was a meaningless declaration.
I would argue that the Verification Principle doesn’t really offer a challenge to religious belief. One of the main reasons for this is the fact that some statements which we know are true cannot be proven through the words used.
The principle appears to make all historical statements meaningless since they are neither analytic nor synthetic.
For example, “William of Normandy won the Battle of Hastings”.
This statement cannot be verified through direct experience or through sense experience and it doesn’t contain any internal logic.
There has been many criticisms made to the Verification Principle over time and because of this, Ayer was forced to make some adjustments to his ideas. He adjusted the theory of weak verification and strong verification.
Ayer argued that strong verification meant that there is no doubt as to the truth of a statement since experimentation and reason show it to be so.
He then maintains that weak verification is that observation at the time counts to make the statements verifiable. For example, because William of Normandy was at the Battle of Hastings, he would have been able to verify statements made about the event.
This means that some religious language can be rendered meaningful so long as it has been experience. This would mean that the Verification Principle doesn’t offer any real challenge to religious belief since statements about Jesus and the apostles for example, because at the time there would have been sense experiences to render the statements meaningful. Even statements about God being the Creator could be seen as meaningful since it is possible to use your sense experiences to be subjected to the creation of the world.
However, it would seem that there is some logic in the principle. Since it challenges religious language, by saying that it is all meaningless, then it does offer a challenge to it. The main reason for this is that it is impossible to argue that religious language does have meaning, whilst still using the theory of the Logical Positivists.
It does seem logical since it does seem impossible to prove whether or not e.g. God exists. All the Logical Positivists have done is provided a theory as to why this is the case.
It could cause a challenge to religious belief since often statements cannot be verified at the present time for example statements about life and death can only be verified if there is an afterlife.
The Verification principle only questions a statement’s meaningfulness. It doesn’t actually make any claim about its actual truth. For example, “My dog is a Labrador” is meaningful because it can be verified but that doesn’t mean that it’s true.
Finally, it seems not to cause a great challenge to religious belief for the main fact that statements about the verification principle itself cannot be verified (or falsified)!
There are reasons here which challenge the principle and which make the principle appear logical. Therefore it is difficult to come to a firm decision about whether or not the Verification Principle offers a real challenge to religious belief.
