The verification principle arose from a movement in the 1920’s known as Logical Positivism and, in particular from a group of philosophers known as the Vienna circle. They applied principles of science and mathematics to religious language and argued that, like human knowledge, religious language also had to be empirically verified through experiences if it were to be considered meaningful. They believed that this was the basis of all forms of empirical testing. From this, Vienna Circle established that truth and meaning can be identified as two distinct concepts when referring to religious language. Consequently, statements such as ‘God exists’ may have meaning to a believer, however, it would be a completely different matter to state that this statement is true in a factual sense. A.J. Ayer was enormously influenced by the Vienna Circle and became extremely involved with the verification principle and the logical positivist approach. He noted that verification means achieving a statement to identify whether it’s true. He argued that the verification principle declared that: “a statement which cannot be conclusively verified is simply devoid of meaning”. He also pointed that “no sentence which describes the nature of a transcendent God can posses any literal significance” (Ayer, 2000). For Ayer and the Vienna Circle the verification of a proposition was “the criterion which we use to test the genuineness of apparent statements of fact.” In effect, the verification principle of the Vienna Circle would reveal whether a proposition was meaningful or meaningless. It was a new Humean Fork. (Ayer, 1952)
The verification principle was therefore clearly based on the idea that statements can only covey factual information if they can be ...
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...sible to verify the destination whilst on the road; the journey is still meaningful for the believer (Hick, 2009) & (Hick, 1989). Moreover, Keith Ward in ‘Holding fast to God’ (1982) argued that God’s existence could be verified in principle since ‘If I were God I would be able to check the truth of my own existence’. (Ward, 1982)
It would appear that logical positivism and the verification principle has failed. Bryan McGee in ‘Confessions of a Philosopher’ (1997) writes: “People began to realise that this glittering new scalpel (the verification principle) was, in one operation after another, killing the patient”. In other words, what first appeared to be a decisive blow against religious, moral and ethical, emotional, historical statements i.e. the verification principle, it soon became apparent that it was in fact a decisive blow against itself. (Magee, 1998)
If as believers we fail to completely trust the Word of God and form our life under its direction then our witness will become misleading and even confusing. Believer’s effort in diligently understanding, applying and holding full trust to the word of God in all aspects of our life will be instrumental in building our faith. Such a faith will elevate us to enable us rise above the unrelenting wave of our culture’s non-biblical ideologies. Biblical worldview is very important in order to develop a life, which can be emulated by others in diligence, integrity and honesty in the modern society (Tackett, 2014).
8- McDermid, Douglas. "God's Existence." PHIL 1000H-B Lecture 9. Trent University, Peterborough. 21 Nov. 2013. Lecture.
...w. There is nothing enabling a scientist to say that induction is a suitable arrangement of evidence in which there is no way to account for the evidence, therefor being no liability in using induction to verify the statement.
... uses the lack of proof of Gods existence for God’s existence. This then essentially leads to a battle between science and religion on the idea of whether or not God can be proven to exist and whether that proof is essential to determine if science or religion has the right answer.
Descartes was the first western philosopher to attempt to educate others on a puzzling question: how can one know with certainty anything about the world around us? “I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last” (Med 1, 12). In writing this meditation Descartes freed his mind of all information, and encourages the reader to do so as well, so that he could destroy established opinions. In order to determine whether there is anything we can know with certainty, he concludes that we must disregard all we were taught and then rebuild our knowledge into new and exciting philosophical foundations. If there was any notion that cannot be questioned, we should, for the time being, pretend that everything we know is disputable. However, Descartes did find the possibility of fully doubting absolutely everything unachievable, as one cannot truthfully fake all studied knowledge. However, he suggested that we, as skeptics, should doubt individual principles and think for ourselves.
hat for a belief to be true knowledge, it must be supported by evidence. Evidentialism also claims
In order to be considered a non-evidentialist, one must believe that actual evidence is not required for all of our beliefs. Pascal believ...
In addition to logical consistency, testability is an important piece when evaluating a theory. According to Akers & Sellers (2013), “a theory must be testable by objective, repeatable evidence” (p.5); thus, if the theory is not testable then it has no scientific value. There are several reasons why a theory might not be testable; such as its concepts may not be observable or reportable events and tautology. Tautology refers to a statement or hypothesis that is tr...
Gettier indicates at the beginning of his selection, he is concerned with attempts to provide sufficient conditions for someone knowing that a proposition is true (Gettier, 43). He is responding to several accounts that have it that a proposition being true, a person’s believing that proposition to be true, and that persons justification in the belief of the truth of the proposition are jointly enough for the subjects of knowing the proposition. Gettier argues that these kinds, while they may initially seem plausible are in fact false. A is false in the conditions stated therein do not constitute a sufficient condition for the truth of the proposition that S knows tha...
If I say, for example, 'Up there on the cupboard there is a book', how do I set about verifying it? Is it sufficient if I glance at it, or if I look at it from different sides, or if I take it into my hands, touch it, open it, turn its leaves, and so forth? There are two conceptions here. One of them says that however I set about it, I shall never be able to verify the proposition completely. A proposition always keeps a back door open, as it were.
In order to understand the Verification Principle, one must first become familiar with Logical Positivism. Logical Positivism is a school of philosophy that combines empiricism, the idea that observational evidence is indispensable for knowledge of the world, with a version of rationalism incorporating mathematical and logico-linguistic constructs and deductions in epistemology, the study of knowledge (Wikipedia).
Some of the objections, such as the ones made by Edmund Gettier, claim that three conditions are not nearly enough to justify a true belief, and that at the very least a fourth must be added. Gettier presents a very valid criticism of the JTB theory of knowledge, and his counter examples highlight flaws in the JTB theory that make it an inadequate theory of knowledge. Gettier claims takes an issue with the third part of the JTB theory, which states that proposition P must be true. Gettier makes the interesting observation that person S may very well be justified in believing in proposition P even if P is false
There are therefore absolute distinctions between what is true and what is false in such fields where a distinction matters and is significant, but circumstances also arise when truth must be relative to a certainty continuum where one may find a middle ground.
to trust what you cannot trace. It leads you to rely on the character of God.” When peace
The argument that is used in the idea of skepticism has comparable and incompatible views given from Augustine and Al-Ghazali. Both monologues cover and explain the doubts one should have, due to the