Verification

• Purpose of language:

  • Communication
  • Show intelligence
  • Express opinions/ emotions
  • Explain or describe things
  • Creating a picture of the world
• "God is faithful" describes God in the Bible
• "We believe in one God" reaffirms the idea of monotheism in the Creed
• "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name" found in the Lord's Prayer
• Songs of worship and praise is used to speak about God
• Observable facts

  • What we experience
  • What we have learnt/ know
• Metaphysical- The philosophy of concepts beyond the physical, e.g. the nature of time, space and reality
• Metaphysical claims

  • Nature and existence of God
  • Miracles
  • Life after death
• Step outside the world of science and empirical facts into the world of metaphysics
• The Vienna Circle

  • 1920s-1930s
  • Academic Philosophers
  • Logical Positivists
• The Vienna Circle claimed metaphysical and theological language is meaningless and that God is not worthy of serious philosophical discussion
• Moritz Schlick

  • Founded The Vienna Circle
  • Philosopher and physicist
• Schlick published a paper commenting on Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity
• Schlick was assassinated by his formed student who claimed Schlick had loosened his grip on morality by attacking metaphysics
• Schlick got his ideas from Hume
• Hume's fork

  • Synthetic propositions require evidence (a posteriori)
  • Analytic propositions are true by definition (a priori)
• Verification Principle

  • A meaningful statement can be verified through experience
• "God exists" is a meaningless statement as it cannot be verified, it is a belief.
• A.J. Ayer wrote "Language, Truth and Logic" in 1936
• A.J. Ayer said "theism and atheism are equal nonsense"

  • Links to Anselm and psalm 14:1
• Ayer accepted the basic idea behind the verification principle, and agreed with Hume and the Vienna Circle that metaphysics should be rejected
• Ayer argues that for a statement to be meaningful it must be a:

  • Tautology
  • A priori
  • A posteriori
• John Hick wrote a response to Flew's "University Debate"
• Hick's view is that the Christian concept of God is "in principle verifiable" because it is verifiable eschatologically
• John Hick

  • English philosopher and theologian
  • Became a liberal Christian- member of the quakers
  • Pluralist view
• Hick makes 2 claim

  1. Claims of God's existence are indeed cognitive/factual
  2. Those claims are subject to eschatological verification
• The Parable of the Celestial City:

  The kingdom of God will be shown to be true one way or the other at the end of time
• Weaknesses

  • What about the view of the atheist
  • The idea that there is so much evil that verifies the existence of a celestial city seems a very remote concept, arguably not worth considering