Upon analyzing the statement that “God is love”, one can’t help but realize that this is a statement whose meaning can differ between different people. Unlike the statements “a bachelor is an unmarried man” or that “1 + 1= 2”- these can be proved true by logic and reason. To say however, that “God is love” is a completely different situation; firstly, God is a personal thing- interpretations and understandings of God differ from one person to the next, therefore to make a universal statement such as “God is love” that should apply to every persons idea of God would firstly seem preposterous, and secondly illogical. Secondly, the fact that this assertion cannot be disproved- as it is beyond the realms of human understanding and reason- this makes it very prone to the argument put forward by the theory of falsification; because it is a statement that no observation could ever count against and therefore asserts nothing, thus is meaningless.
Antony Flew put forward the parable of the garden to explain the idea of falsification in this sense. He said, suppose two people came across a garden with many flowers that show evidence of a ‘Designer’, and one of the people believes that there is a gardener, however, no matter how much they investigate there does not seem to be one, yet one of the people still believes in a gardener. The other gardener questions the believer saying an ‘invisible, intangible’ gardener exists and the other replies by saying that a ‘gardener’ who is ‘invisible, intangible etc’ is the same as an imaginary gardener, or no garden at all. This parable applies falsification to religious language and shows it to be meaningless. This can also be applied to the assertion that ‘God is love’- since falsification states that since religious language is considered to be meaningless according to logical positivists, trying to prove or show God’s qualities or existence with language which itself is meaningless (as it cannot be observed- such as love), therefore there is no way to falsify religious language, and therefore that makes it meaningless.
Criticisms have however been raised to Flew’s approach. Basil Mitchell makes one such criticism. Mitchell attacked Flew’s ideas for different reasons. Mitchell argued that there is in fact evidence that counts against religious claims and that many religious believers are aware of this. As an example, Mitchell used the ‘Problem of Evil’, he said, why doesn’t an omnipotent, omni- benevolent God remove evil? Mitchell argued that clearly the believer would take this as evidence against the existence of an all-loving God. Religious statements are therefore not meaningless according to Mitchell, because evidence does count against them.
Another criticism was put forward by R.M. Hare. Hare accepted Flew’s idea that falsification could be used to determine the meaningfulness of statements. However, he argued that falsification did not apply to religious statements. Hare suggested that when Flew looked at religious statements, he was taking them to be factual statements that could either be true or false i.e. assertions. However, Hare did not consider religious statements to be factual ones. He argued that although nothing can count against religious statements (i.e. they are not falsifiable), this did not imply that they had to be meaningless, rather religious statements must be something other than assertions. In other words, religious language could not make factual claims. However, Hare believed that that religious statements could still have some sort of meaning. The ‘meaning’ of religious statements is not, he argued to impart knowledge about the world, rather meaning arises from the way that religious statements are used and the impact they have on people’s lives. Hare coined the word ‘blik’ to help explain his point. He said a ‘blik’ is a particular way of looking at the world, and if someone adopts some sort of blik, he may interpret his actions differently. Hare illustrates his idea of ‘bliks’ by a story of a lunatic who is convinced that all university dons want to kill him; the lunatic is introduced to numerous kindly dons, but he still believes that they want to kill him and that they are being kind so that they can lure him into a trap- in this example, the lunatic has adopted a ‘blik’ and this affects the way that he looks at all the evidence presented to him. His claim that all university dons want to kill him is not falsifiable, but it does have an impact on the way he views all things and therefore does have meaning. Religious statements are according to Hare, like bliks (ways of looking at the world), and they are therefore meaningful because they have significance for the people using them.
Both Hare and Mitchell when responding to the idea of falsification accepted, to a certain extent, that it could be used as a criterion for determining meaning. However, there do seem to be problems with the Falsification Principle itself. Many have argued that statement can have meaning even if they cannot be falsified. Richard Swinburne illustrated this idea with the story of ‘Toys in the Cupboard’; where these toys only come out and move around when nobody is watching them. (In other words, the fact that these toys come out could never be falsified- however Swinburne argued that it is clear that we understand the idea of these toys coming out- the claim is meaningful and this shows that the falsification principle cannot work.
