The Verification Principle Offers No Re
“The verification principle offers no real challenge to religious belief” Discuss
Verification is a philosophical theory about the nature of language and meaning that was popular in the first half of the twentieth century. It maintains that for a statement to be meaningful it has to describe a state of affairs that can be tested or verified, i.e. can be shown to be true or false by sense-experience. This is called the verification principle. The verification movement was influenced by science, which emphasized the importance of confirming any statement by observation e.g. through experiment.
A J Ayer formed the verification principle which was influenced by the Vienna circle, he set out the idea of logical positivism and set the rules to state whether statements had meaning or not. A major problem with verificationism is that most scientific statements become meaningless. Scientific statements tend to take the form of general statements such as ‘water boils at 100 degrees’. A general statement of this form is meaningless, according to verificationism, because though it is possible to prove empirically that a given volume of water boils at 100 degrees, it is impossible to prove empirically that water generally boils at 100 degrees. A J Ayer distinguishes between two types of verification, strong and weak verification. Strong verification refers to statements which are directly verifiable through empirical observation e.g. birds can fly. Strong verification would conclude that an assertion only has meaning if it can be verified according to empirical information. Anything else is meaningless. Statements in the Bible such as “Jesus is the lamb of God” would be interpreted as Jesus literally being a Lamb who belongs to God.
This led A J Ayer to produce a weaker version of verification principle. The idea was that, for a statement to be meaningful, instead of having to definitely prove it to be true, it was sufficient to produce evidence that made it probably
Verification is a philosophical theory about the nature of language and meaning that was popular in the first half of the twentieth century. It maintains that for a statement to be meaningful it has to describe a state of affairs that can be tested or verified, i.e. can be shown to be true or false by sense-experience. This is called the verification principle. The verification movement was influenced by science, which emphasized the importance of confirming any statement by observation e.g. through experiment.
A J Ayer formed the verification principle which was influenced by the Vienna circle, he set out the idea of logical positivism and set the rules to state whether statements had meaning or not. A major problem with verificationism is that most scientific statements become meaningless. Scientific statements tend to take the form of general statements such as ‘water boils at 100 degrees’. A general statement of this form is meaningless, according to verificationism, because though it is possible to prove empirically that a given volume of water boils at 100 degrees, it is impossible to prove empirically that water generally boils at 100 degrees. A J Ayer distinguishes between two types of verification, strong and weak verification. Strong verification refers to statements which are directly verifiable through empirical observation e.g. birds can fly. Strong verification would conclude that an assertion only has meaning if it can be verified according to empirical information. Anything else is meaningless. Statements in the Bible such as “Jesus is the lamb of God” would be interpreted as Jesus literally being a Lamb who belongs to God.
This led A J Ayer to produce a weaker version of verification principle. The idea was that, for a statement to be meaningful, instead of having to definitely prove it to be true, it was sufficient to produce evidence that made it probably