The Falsification Principle argues that a statement is only meaningful if one accepts that evidence may count against it. In this way religious language is said to be meaningless as believers are not prepared to permit anything to count against their beliefs. This is a position held by Antony Flew who added that religious language dies the ‘death of a thousand qualifications’ with believers qualifying their beliefs when anything appears to count against them. Using John Wisdom’s Parable of the Gardener, Flew demonstrated how believers and unbelievers express different reactions to the same ‘facts’. Just like the man who refused to believe they was no gardener a religious believer refuses to believer there is no God and will allow nothing to count against their beliefs.
Q. Analyse and evaluate the ways in which EITHER verification OR falsification can be used to discredit the meaningfulness of religious language. (12)
The work of the Vienna Circle and A.J. Ayer had quite a traumatic impact upon the philosophy of religion, for they were not trying to assert that God did not exist, but instead all talk about God was meaningless. For Ayer, the statement ‘God exists’ cannot be proved true nor can it be proved false on the basis that there is no empirical evidence to support either claim.
However, it should be noted that verification does not seek to discredit the meaningfulness of all religious language on account that much is intended to be taken literally and so therefore causes no problems in the context of the verification principle.
For instance the claims that some priests wear black robes and Muslims do not drink alcohol can be shown to be true by observation or consultation with Muslim writings respectively. In short as long as the terms are understood, and there is evidence for what is said, there is no problem with this kind of descriptive language. One only begins to be faced with difficulty upon an attempt to get beyond such literal descriptions.
What in effect is being said by the empirical tradition in which the verification principle is based is that every word of language must picture something, which may be experienced. If there is nothing to which be physically or theoretically pointed to then the language becomes meaningless. This is not necessarily incompatible with all those who use religious language as they wouldn’t necessarily claim that religious language is simply as ‘picturing’ the world in quite this way. For instance, many mystics would agree withy Ayer for their language was never intended to be taken literally as this would have been far too crude and limiting way for what they meant by God.
The verification principle dismisses much of religious language as meaningless on the basis that for a statement to be meaningful it must be possible for it to be verified either analytically or empirically. However, the principle upon which verification is based, namely that the meaning of a statement is its method of verification is itself unverifiable. It is not analytical nor is there any evidence that can support it and so by its own arguments is therefore meaningless. Although, in response to this challenge logical positivists point out that the verification principle is not making a factual claim but simply a recommendation for the way in which words should be understood. This would seem to defeat the criticism as it is only logical to accept that in order to come to a conclusion one has to have a process for doing so, in this case the process is verification.
In many ways, the arguments of the logical positivists seem unable to convincingly discredit the meaningfulness of religious language. Verification has not so much been refuted, but bypassed. Towards the middle of the twentieth century, especially under the developments of Wittgenstein’s work, there was a growing recognition that giving a literal representation of the world was a small part of the task of language, and that its many other functions such as giving commands, expressing emotions and creating symbolic images required a very different approach.
