Wrote this very recently. See what you think.
“The verification principle offers no real challenge to the validity of religious language.” Discuss.
Professor T.L.S Sprigge, of Edinburgh University, gives a handy summary of the verification principle:
Logical Positivism; verificationism; nonsense.
It originates from the ideas of the Logical Positivists and the Vienna Circle in the 1920's, who were partly inspired by the work of Austrian born philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. They talked of analytic and synthetic statements, the former being those that are not open to doubt or "closed" e.g. my brother is male and a sibling. Here, the statement is self-evidently true since in order to be a brother you must be male and a sibling. Synthetic statements, by contrast, are those which are "open" to doubt and which need external evidence for their verification. The basic line of argument in the verification principle is that statements about God are synthetic, but since they are not empirically verifiable (by your sense experience), they are therefore meaningless and nonsense. As such, all talk of this "invisible, intangible and insensible" God is meaningless, as is any religious language.
Initially, there seems to be a strong defence of this verificationist view. In particular, the early Wittgenstein lends some support. John Macquarrie sums up his argument well:
On Wittgenstein's view, all propositions which can say something meaningful and informative belong to the natural sciences. All other principles are either tautologies or nonsense.
Religious Language clearly doesn't "belong to the natural sciences." It is difficult, though, to claim that any religious statements are tautologies, because to do so you would have to prove that they are, in themselves, logically true. Therefore, according to his logic, religious language must indeed be meaningless. Wittgenstein sums up with the famous phrase, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereon one must be silent."
However, it is testament to Wittgenstein's great mind, and damming to the Logical Positivist claims, that the man is able to completely turn his opinions around after a space of only of few years. Returning to philosophy in the 1930's, he acknowledges that "we remain unconscious of the prodigious diversity of all the everyday language." He is saying that religious language is really much more complicated than the Logical Positivists would make out, and that it only makes sense to those who use it and not, for example, to the atheist looking in. Again Wittgenstein has a handy catch phrase to explain himself. When looking at language, "don't ask for the meaning, ask for the use."
Two other contemporary philosophers have drawn up defences of religious language along similar lines, R.M. Hare and Basil Mitchell. Hare devised a parable to explain what he meant by Bilks, where "a certain lunatic was convinced that all Oxford professors were out to kill him and was not dissuaded from his belief by various inoffensive and pleasant encounters with them." For Hare, a Bilk is an unverifiable, unfalsifiable assertion, but one which we just know to be true. Mitchell also uses parables to explain that if someone is convinced of religious language, they cannot be deterred from it by anything else that anyone says or does, but will continue to believe what they take to be truth.
It is possible, though, to accuse Hare, Mitchell and indeed Wittgenstein, of adopting positions that are simply too fidist, or in other words, too heavily based on faith.
Now is an appropriate moment to examine the work of the contemporary philosopher of religion, John Hick, on religious language. Hick adopts a unique standpoint, that of Eschatological Verification, which says that religious language is empirically justifiable because when the end of the world (or eschaton) arrives its claims will be verified:
The theist does and the atheist does not expect that when history is completed, it will be seen to have fulfilled a specific purpose, namely, that of creating "children of God."
At least Hick recognises that this theory will always rest on whether or not it is looked at by a religious believer; he does not allow for the uselessness of his argument at this moment in time because, as George Pattison puts it, the afterlife "is something we cannot now experience."
However, we do not need Hick's input in order to provide a strong defence of religious language. David Pailin proves his weight in gold by attacking the principle that religious language is meaningless. He cites the example of man's discovery of the conditions on the moon due to the invention of space rockets. Before the invention, "it was not possible in practice verify statements" about the conditions "but it was odd to suggest that any such statement is therefore meaningless." In other words, just because a statement about God is unverifiable, it cannot logically follow than it is a meaningless one.
Pailin also introduces our next point of discussion in that "a fundamental problem arises from considering the status of the verification principle itself." Let us take the logical positivist view point that "all statements about God are synthetic." Surely this is self-contradictory? If we say that we can know anything about God, how can we then dare to say that all such statements are synthetic? The answer, of course, is that we can't. Ayer and other logical positivists are trying to dismiss religious language are merely synthetic with the help of, ironically, another synthetic. Self-contradictory? Yes, but also plainly illogical. Dan Stiver rams the point home with reference to the Scottish philosopher David Hume:
When Hume's fork was applied to the verification principle, it was seen to be clearly unempirical. How can one use empirical proof to prove that every cognitively meaningful proposition can only be empirically proven? That would be circular.
In light of such a damming indictment of the principle, might it not be prudent to now refer back to Professor Sprigg's quote:
Logical Positivism = verificationism = nonsense.
And nonsense can pose no real threat to the validity of religious language.