20th Century Questions

• Does the verification principle successfully demonstrate that religious language is meaningless?

  • theory itself does not pass the test and is not, consequently, a meaningful statement.
  • The verifiability theory cannot be verified by sense experience and so is not a meaningful synthetic statement. And if it is analytic, it is giving a new sense to the word 'meaningful', a new definition that we do not necessarily have to accept. If the theory fails its own test then it cannot be successful.
  • The idea that all meaningful synthetic statements have to be empirically verifiable also rules out far more than the logical positivists intended. The logical positivists wanted to dismiss as meaningless all claims that were made about God and the supernatural, while keeping scientific statements as meaningful.
• Does the verification principle successfully demonstrate that religious language is meaningless?

  • However, many of the claims made by advances in science, such as the existence and nature of black holes, cannot be verified by sense experience. The human senses are insufficient for many scientific experiments and need to be extended with the use of artificial 'senses', such as X-rays BUT even with these aids, there are still claims in science that have to be accepted without it being possible to test them using the senses.
  • Similarly, historical statements, where claims are made about events that happened in the past, cannot be tested using the senses. We cannot use our eyes and ears to verify whether Henry VIII died in 1547. We can read other people's accounts of his death, but that only verifies that someone wrote an account