Responses

Flew's challenge is famous in philosophy and there have been numerous attempts to answer it, taking various approaches. Many of them are responses to the problem of evil itself, so I will not revisit them here (see the section on Evil).

However, some approaches have relied upon a differing perspective on the question involved. Amongst these is that of Welsh philosopher D. Z. Phillips, whose approach is to deny the idea that God is an empirical fact (that is, one that we can test for). We will look more closely at this view in the section on Language Games.

Another approach has arisen out of the general criticism of the notion of verifiability itself. Since, according to the Logical Positivists, a statement can only be meaningful if it can be proven, we are left with very few types of statement which we can call meaningful. Since we cannot in reality do without these - as they include such fields as ethics and art - we may question whether the verification principle is of any use.

Further criticisms were added by Karl Popper who argued that it was not merely the fact that a statement was verifiable which gave it meaning. Rather, the important thing in trying to acquire knowledge is whether we are potentially able to falsify our propositions. For instance, what if I say, "It only rains because I do a rain-dance"? If I dance and it doesn't rain, then I may attribute the failure to rain to an incorrectly performed dance. Furthermore, if every time my dance fails to cause rain I simply come up with another excuse, then Popper would say that my belief is unfalsifiable. It should be noted, however, that Popper is not here proposing an alternative theory of meaning, but simply pointing out that what is important in the sciences is the ability to falsify a theory. So, apart from a priori truths, scientifically meaningful beliefs must be capable of being proven wrong. Those which cannot be proven wrong - and Popper would point to such things as astrology - must be considered pseudo science. Popper does not therefore simply replace 'verification' with 'falsification' as a criterion for meaning - and would not, for instance, say that all statements which cannot be falsified are meaningless (as the verificaionists did in relation to their own principle).

 

Theology and Falsification

One of the reasons the theories of Ayer and the Vienna Circle became so influential was the consequence they had for art, ethics and religion. Since statements in these areas are of a different type to scientific statements, it is very difficult to empirically verify them. For instance, how can we prove that it is better to suffer evil than to be evil, to prove that Shakespeare was a great dramatist or that belief in God provides salvation? The conclusion reached by Ayer and others was therefore that these statements were meaningless.

One of the main exponents of this approach was the English Philosopher Antony Flew. In a famous essay, Theology and Falsification, Flew asked the question: "What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or of the existence of God?" Flew's point here is that if we say "God loves humanity" then we are entitled to ask: "What form does his love take?" If the answer is, "As a father loves a child", we may reply, "Would a father let his child die if he had the power to save it?" If any other example of a loving attitude is given - a mother's love, a teacher's, etc. - it is easy to find some example of suffering in the world which seems to contradict it (this approach relies mostly on the problem of evil).

Introduction

In the 1920's in Vienna a group of philsophers, scientists and mathematicians - who later became known as the Vienna Circle - proposed a radical new theory to do with logic and language. Influenced by the ideas of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, the group proposed a way in which it could be decided what it was meaningful to say, and what was pure nonsense.

In his book Language, Truth and Logic, A. J. Ayer, a member of the group, became famous for popularising its ideas. One of the central theses of the book is that for a sentence to be meaningful it must be - at least in principle - empirically verifiable. This is called the Verifiability Principle. What this means is that some sense experience must be relevant to deciding its truth.

So, to take the example of the sentence "I am 6 feet tall", for this to be meaningful there must be some way of experiencing the truth of this - which, in this case, would be perhaps to measure my height against a tape measure.