2. Assess the relationship between the verification and falsification principles on religious language. (12)
2 Assess the implications for religion and human experience of Ayers argument 'God Talk is evidently nonsense'. (12)
Who is Ayer to say what knowledge is and what counts as knowledge? Despite being a non-believer myself I cannot but disagree with Ayer! It seems to me to be utterly arrogant to dismiss so completely so much of human experience as ‘nonsense’ meaning of literally no importance!
In my opinion he couldn’t be further from the truth. He might be right that religious experiences are not exactly ‘intelligible, ‘ but to say they are not ‘genuine cognitive states’ is going too far. Dr Michael Persinger with his so called ‘god-helmet’ has demonstrated sufficiently that complete sensory deprivation can induce a ‘religious’ like state and VS Ramachandran has demonstrated that stimulation of the temporal lobe can also induce trance like states in which a religious like experience can be had. These both show that there is a genuine neurological element to the experience and that the effects can be repeated. While Ayer may be right that they needn’t necessarily be attributed to ‘God’ that doesn’t mean all can be dismissed as entirely explicable. As Shakespeare said in Hamlet ‘there are more things in heaven and earth Horatio than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’
Although religion can be blamed for many horrible things which have occurred in history, from the Crusades, through wars, to persecution of ‘infidels’ or people with a different coloured skin; to mass genocide perhaps best exemplified by the atrocities of the concentration camps of WW2 or the Serbo-Croat war of the 1990s, to the way that fundamentalism of both Islam and Christianity are on the rise in the 21st century, it can also be credited with some of the most amazing endeavours our history has seen.
The crusades enabled Byzantine art forms to spread into cathedrals and other religious buildings, yet as the Catholic encyclopaedia suggests religious art began to disappear after the pre-Raphaelite era: ‘The reason for this impoverishment of religious art must not only be sought in a diminution of the Christian sentiment’ the paintings of Da Vinci e.g The Last Supper, Michelangelo painter of the Sistine chapel ceiling, the sculpture of Rodin whose piece The Thinker draws on both Adam and Prometheus mythology, and Botticelli who as one of the followers of the deeply moralistic monk Savonarola is famed for his religious paintings and Sistine frescoes. Then there is a plethora of literature with religious themes to name just a few: Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales‘, Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy‘, Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost‘, Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein‘ and Salman Rushdie’s ‘Satanic Verses‘ – many of these have been banned at some time somewhere in the world (footnote 3); and in poetry with the work of John Donne, Coleridge’s the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Wordsworth and many others.
Where would we be without the inspiration of the architects of the world’s greatest buildings: the Taj Mahal, The Parthenon, the Vatican, the Great Mosque of Djenne, The Sagrada Familia in Barcelona and our own St Paul’s Cathedral? Or the music of Handel’s ‘Messiah’ or ‘The St Matthew Passion’ by Bach?
Then there is science and for example the scientific discoveries made by Galileo and Newton who began to describe and explain the natural and physical laws by which the earth operates. These discoveries drastically changed the way that man viewed the world and nature. (footnote 4)
In view of these and so many other examples it is ludicrous to accept Ayer’s point of view that it is meaningless because it quite clearly isn’t meaning-less to the people who have built, painted, written, discovered, adventured, sung, composed all ‘supposedly’ in the name of God.
Religious feeling has inspired as much as it has been the justification for abominable acts such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks. For better or worse the world we have today with its history, societies, laws and political systems is the way it is because of religion and whether or not there is a real basis for believing that there is a transcendent God at the heart of everything the effect of such beliefs cannot be doubted. As Dawkins said: ‘We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.’
2. Assess the significance of the verification and falsification criticisms of religious language . (12)
2 Assess the strength of the logical positivist critique of religious language. (12)
2 Assess the credibility of the verification and falsification criticisms of religious language. (12)
One of the most obvious flaws in the verification principle is that it doesn’t allow for claims such as emotional ones: ‘I love him’; opinions: ‘that is a great work of art;’ statements of intent: ‘I had intended to come to school to do my timed essay but I had a cold…’ and many others, although the falsification principle can render some of them meaningful if we can ascertain what might count as evidence against them. (For example if I run into you in the pub and you are hale and hearty!!!)
But rather more importantly the claims of a believer even that they ‘just know’ God exists are not so easily rendered meaningless because they have an importance in their life. They may live their life by a particular code or creed based on an ‘unverifiable’ belief. It is not meaningless to them. RM Hare illustrates this idea with his concept of bliks. These are beliefs which are unverifiable and sometimes paradoxical but which nevertheless dictate our behaviour. He gives the example of ‘the Paranoid student and the Dons’ in which he describes the odd behaviour of a student who believed, against all his friends attempt to dissuade him, that the university dons were attempting to kill him. His behaviour was completely dominated by this unfounded belief. A bit like if you are afraid of spiders no amount of people telling you they won’t hurt you will prevent you checking the room before you go to sleep at night!! It might be meaningless or incomprehensible to an arachnophile but not to you!!
Ultimately of course Ayer retracted his position on the verification principle realising that there was a lot more to language than he had allowed for originally. Wittgenstein even invented a whole new area which he called language games theory in which he suggested that you had to know the rules in order to play the game – a bit like cricket then! But once you did know the rules you were unlikely to find them meaningless, indeed they are likely to enhance your enjoyment of the game. The same is true of religious language – you have to be in it to understand it and once you are you are unlikely to be just a neutral observer.
2. Assess the credibility of the claim 'statements about God are neither analytically true, nor open to verification by observation.' (12)
"The verification principle is itself unverifiable, and therefore meaningless." - Karl Popper
"The verification principle is too restrictive, and it excludes many statements that are clearly meaningful, such as moral statements and statements about the past." - W.V.O. Quine
"The verification principle is arbitrary, and it is based on a particular view of what is meaningful that is not universally shared." - Hilary Putnam
"The verification principle is self-refuting, because it cannot be verified itself." - Ludwig Wittgenstein
2 Assess the ways in which EITHER verification OR falsification can be used to discredit the meaningfulness of religious language. (12)
Flew used the Falsification Principle to attempt to prove that religious statements are meaningless because a religious believer will allow nothing to count against his or her beliefs, for example, believers give reasons that maintain God’s goodness whatever evidence is offered to the contrary and Flew stated that these constant qualifications render religious statements meaningless, because they die the ‘death of a thousand qualification’.
Flew used Wisdom’s Parable of the Gardener to illustrate how believers will not allow evidence to count against theological statements. Flew argues that the believer is guilty of the same error as the man who believed in the presence of a gardener. Failure to prove God’s existence doesn’t lead to a withdrawal of the believer’s faith claims, rather they continue to believe in a God, who like the Gardener can only be described in negative terms.
Flew also used the provocative example of a child dying of a terminal illness. The believer fails to acknowledge that their assertions about God are threatened by the prevailing circumstances, but in order to maintain their claim that ‘God loves us’ they qualify the nature of His love. For Flew, it is better to recognise that conceivably there are grounds which present a real faith challenge.
The Falsification challenge is based upon the insight that to assert something is to deny something else. In the context of religious belief, asserting God’s existence is to deny his non-existence. Flew asks that the proof of the existence of God must be based upon what the believer knows and not just believes.
Many philosophers argue that religious statements are non-cognitive and so wrong to treat them as such. It is argued that religious statements still have meaning even if they do not contain facts that could be proved true nor false.
The Falsification Principle does not work for all statements but they are still meaningful. They cannot be falsified but yet we still understand the meaning behind them. Swinburne uses the example of toys in the cupboard, although one cannot prove that the toys do not leave the cupboard and move around when unsupervised, and cannot falsify whether they move or not; the concept of their movement still has meaning because we can understand it. Similarly although it may not be possible to falsify religious statements, the concepts that they convey still have meaning for they can still be understood.
R.M. Hare proposed that a believer’s statements were ‘bliks’: ways of regarding the world that in principle are neither falsifiable nor verifiable. Hare illustrated the point with the example of a university student, convinced the dons were trying to kill him and rejecting any evidence to the contrary. Although the student would not accept any evidence that because it influenced his perception of the university. Hare felt that religious beliefs are ‘bliks’ because of the impact that they have on the way in which people look at the world and their lives.
Basil Mitchell wanted to show that religious statements are meaningful even if they are neither straightforwardly verifiable nor falsifiable. Mitchell argued that Flew was wrong in his supposition that believers never allow anything to count against their beliefs. Using the Parable of the Partisan and the stranger, he claimed that Flew had missed the point that like the partisan, believers had a prior commitment to trust God based on faith. Mitchell claims that believers do not allow anything to conclusively falsify their belief in God, but this does not mean it is meaningless because they do show, like the partisan, that there is a real problem of which they must be aware.
It does not seem that the Falsification Principle can be used to discredit the meaningfulness of religious language because it has been shown that religious statements can still have meaning even if they cannot be falsified, nor does it fully appreciate the role that faith must play in the life of a religious believer.
2 Assess the weakness of claim 'no sentence which purports to describe the nature of a transcendent God can possess any literal significance. ' (12)
2 Assess the strengths of the claim that only analytic and synthetic statements are meaningful so religious language is meaningless. (12)
2 Assess the strengths of the claim that the weak verification principle conclusively shows religious language is meaningless. (12)
2. Assess the significance of the weak verification principle. (12)
2 Assess the strengths of Ayers claim that religious claims are meaningless as they cannot be verified in principle. (12)
2. Assess the view that religious language is meaningless. (12) 2020 Q
2 Assess the claim Wisdom's parable of the gardener successfully shows that believers definitions of God 'die the death of a thousand qualifications' . (12)
2 Assess Flew’s views on religious language . (12)
2 Assess the importance for religious langague of claim that bliks as unfalsifiable ways of framing our interpretation of the world. (12)
2 Assess the claim that ways of regarding the world which are in principle neither verifiable nor falsifiable but make a significant difference to a believer's life successfully show how religious language can be meaningful. (12)
2 Assess the strengths of the weak verification principle. (12)
2 Assess the weaknesses of the Ayers weak verification principle . (12)
2 Assess how far it is the case that Swinburne's 'realist' example of the toys in the cupboard shows there are plenty of statements that cannot be falsified but are still meaningful to those who use them. (12)
2 Assess how far it is the case that theist have good reasons to be realist rather than anti-realist in there approach to religious language. (12)
2 Assess the significance of the claim that Hicks parable of celestial city means religious language can have eschatological verification . (12)
2 Assess how it is the case that strong verification cannot be successfully challenged. (12)
2 Assess the credibility of the weak verification approach to religious language. (12)
2 Assess Mitchell’s contribution to the falsification symposium. (12)
2 Assess how far it is the case that Mitchells parable of the partisan and the stranger demonstrates that believers do recognise challenges to faith without allowing them to be conclusively falsified. (12)
2 Assess how far it is the case that a statement may be meaningful despite lack of verification. (12)
2 Assess how far it is the case that a statement which is a 'Significant articles of faith' for a believer may be meaningful despite lack of verification. (12)