Religious Language article

• doctrine of divine simplicity

  -the medieval doctrine of divine simplicity claims God doesn't have any intrinsic accidental properties

  -acquisition/loss of a Cambridge property by a subject doesn't entail a change in that subject, but intrinsic properties do -a subject would still be a member of its species if it were to acquire/lose an accidental property, but not with essential properties
• doctrine of divine simplicity examples

  -'God is P', where P is an intrinsic accidental property, would be ruled out by divine simplicity

  -'Kofi Annan is good' means some property goodness is a property of Kofi. With 'God is good', it would appear that some property goodness is a property of God. If the doctrine is true, it's impossible that God have the intrinsic accidental property of goodness. Rather, God is goodness (God’s essence includes goodness and God is identical with his essence)
• issue with doctrine of divine simplicity

  Whenever someone applies a positive attribute to God, they are speaking falsely, for God does not have properties in the way that creatures have properties.
• associates with doctrine of divine simplicity

  -classic statements of the doctrine of divine simplicity are found in Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas

  -Aquinas is often thought to represent the historical peak of the doctrine's articulation and defense

  -although divine simplicity is a doctrine associated with medieval thinkers, it has been defended in the twentieth century by Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, among others
• 1st solution to the problem of religious language

  -some philosophers have argued that statements about God do not have truth-values and are thus meaningless or unintelligible. These claims are derived from the views of the Vienna Circle, a group of early twentieth century logical empiricists who developed a test for the truth-value of statements known as Verificationism

  -Carnap argued the only way one could be certain of a statement’s truth or falsity was by verifying those statements through perceptions, observations, or experience
• Carnap's example of the process of verification

  -P1: 'This key is made of iron'. Many ways of verifying: e.g.,: place the key near a magnet; then perceive that the key is attracted

  -deduction made in this way: Premises: P1 & P2: 'If an iron thing is placed near a magnet, it is attracted'; this is a physical law, already verified

  -P3: 'This object – a bar – is a magnet'; already verified

  -P4: 'The key is placed near the bar'; now directly verified by our observation

  -from these 4 premises we can deduce the conclusion: P5: 'The key will now be attracted by the bar'
• Carnap's process of verification analysis

  This statement is a prediction which can be examined by observation. We either observe the attraction or we do not. In the first case we have found a positive instance, an instance of verification of the statement P1 under consideration; in the second case we have a negative instance, an instance of disproof of P1. (Carnap 1966, 208).
• Rudolf Carnap statement 


  Having established the principle of verification, Carnap then argues that metaphysical assertions such as, 'The principle of the world is water', can't be verified. (Ibid. 210). Since metaphysical assertions can't be verified, they are meaningless. One can't assess the truth-value of a metaphysical assertion because such assertions cannot be empirically verified.
• agreements with Carnap

  -Ayer agreed with Carnap, and inferred that since all statements about God cannot be verified, they too are meaningless

  -on the basis of Verificationism, statements about God don't have truth-values that can be verified and, thus, are unintelligible expressions

  -so at least one solution to the problem of religious language is to claim that statements about God are unintelligible
• Ayer on Verificationism

  “But the notion of a person whose essential attributes are non-empirical is not an intelligible notion at all. We may have a word which is used as if it names this ‘person,’ [God] but, unless the sentences in which it occurs express propositions which are empirically verifiable, it cannot be said to symbolize anything” (Ayer 1946, 144)
• Verification disagreements

  Verificationism was challenged by philosophers such as Church and Swinburne and largely abandoned in the 20th century.
• Ayer on weak verification

  -Ayer identified and defended a “weak principle of verification” in his seminal paper, “The Principle of Verifiability”

  -admitted that empirical propositions are not conclusively verifiable, but argued that in order for a claim to be factual, and to have its truth-value determined, it must be verifiable by some possible observations

  -Ayer didn’t specify exactly what those possible observations must be, but argued they need to be the kinds of observations that could verify an assertion
• Swinburne response

  -argues that the premises defending weak Verificationism are false -offers this example of an argument in defense of weak Verificationism: 'It is claimed that a man could not understand a factual claim unless he knew what it would be like to observe it to hold or knew which observations would count for or against it; from which it follows that a statement could not be factually meaningful unless there could be observational evidence which would count for or against it'
• Swinburne analysis

  -Swinburne then argues that the above premise('It is claimed that a man...') is false, since one could understand a statement if one understands the words forming that statement and if those words are organized in a grammatically significant format

  -thus, there could be factual statements that do not have evidence either for or against them and one could understand them. Consequently, metaphysical assertions invoking God and his properties cannot be ruled out as meaningless by weak Verificationism
• Verification summary 


  -Ayer modified his principle of verification for the 2nd edition of his book, 'Language, Truth,and Logic'

  -Church’s objection to this was so devastating, that Ayer’s definition of verifiability from the 2nd edition of his book was largely abandoned. Despite repeated attempts by various thinkers such as Kai Neilson to reformulate a principle of verification successfully, Verificationism has been continually rejected as an inadequate methodology. As Ruth Weintraub points out recently, almost no one defends Verificationism in the twenty-first century. (Weintraub 2003, 83)