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Ms To what extent have logical positivists proved that "God talk" is meaningless? When Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote "The world is all that is the case. The world is the totality of facts and not of things" he was not only beginning a book but also a movement in philosophy called Logical Positivism. Wittgenstein was not the founder of this new movement but rather it came from a group of thinkers in Vienna in the 1920's (called the Vienna Circle) who took his ideas to create, what they called, the Verification Principle. In the theological domain their greatest challenge to religion came in the form of a refutation of metaphysics, thus it is a philosophy that places a great deal on that which can be tested and observed by the senses (rather than postulated by reason). The Verification Principle tried to show that the meaning of a statement lies in its method of verification. For example, the statements, "All cats are cats" and, "2 + 2 = 4" are necessary statements. They state nothing beyond the meaning expressed in the content of the statement and can be proved to be true. There are however other statements such as, "It rained on Tuesday" that need to be tested to know if they are true. These statements only become true if after testing they can be found to be true (E.g. I saw it raining on Tuesday). Thus the Verification Principle locates sense and meaning with experience. Despite variations on the theme of the Verification Principle (E.g. soft and hard versions) this was the distinctive doctrine of Logical Positivism. The statement "God exists" is not proveable, or unfalsifiable. We cannot say whether it is true or false. This is because God is not a 'fact that can be observed and subjected to testing. People do not see God in this way. Theology might be considered by many people to be a science but to then say that God is an object to be studied (like one would study a flower or the stars) is to misunderstand the nature of things. God is spirit and cannot be observed in this way. Therefore the statement, "God exists" is meaningless. Even the word 'God' (referring to something that lies beyond the physical realm) is stripped of meaning and, '... as it is not given a new meaning, it becomes meaningless' In terms of the debate concerning the existence (or non-existence of God) Logical Positivism makes an interesting contribution. Traditionally the debate is divided up into theism (God exists), atheism (God does not exist) and agnosticism (God could or could not exist - not sure). These positions all derive from the assumption that the statement "God exists" has some meaning. The theist says its true, the atheist says its false, the agnostic says it may be true or false but we can't tell. But if, as the Logical Positivists claim, the statement, "God exists" is meaningless then these three 'states' are meaningless too. Therefore the Positivists are neither theist, atheist or agnostic and have discharged the argument concerning the existence of God altogether. It has been suggested that despite the attraction Logical Positivism has for those seeking a more human-centred approach to religion, there are other implications of adopting the Verification Principle. For example, by rejecting metaphysics we are also rejecting the possibility of there being an ethical foundation to society. An ethical claim would only have meaning insofar as it spoke of something capable of empirical verification (E.g. 'It is good' ('I like it') which can be verified by studying the behaviour of the speaker). But this leads us into the realm of relativism. The statement 'It is good' cannot refer to anything 'permanent' beyond the physical realm. Ethical statements do not have intrinsic meaning but are merely functional in that they express something for the moment. In the light of this it is difficult to know how we would begin to judge 'It is bad (or evil)' other than by observing its effects. The outcome of this would be that if killing someone was seen to have beneficial effects ('It is good') for the one doing the killing, i.e. we observed the pleasure this brought to the killer ('It is good' ('I like it')), we could not condemn the behaviour as being morally wrong (as there is no basis for doing so - nothing beyond the moment by which to judge the moment). Our moral basis (killing another human being for our own pleasure is wrong) - is simply not there! In terms of a response to theism's claim, "God exists" the Verification Principle has come under attack in two main ways. Firstly, the theory cannot pass its own test: What is the meaning of "meaning"? If we claim a statement has meaning (E.g. 'Cats are cats' and '2 + 2 = 4') then we are making a metaphysical claim. We are saying meaning lies beyond the statement. Secondly we have the problem of verification. If statements are meaningful so long as their content can be verified what are we to make of 'quarks' and 'black holes' which are not directly observable? To counter this Positivists allowed for indirect verification (verification did not have to be conclusive E.g. scientific laws which cannot be proved true (theories) by finite observation) but by doing so they allow that religious statements can be meaningful also. It is hard to see how one could state a version of the Verification Principle liberal enough to include scientific statements but rigid enough to exclude religious ones. It seems there are two levels of attack on Logical Positivism. The first is linguistic, since it attempts to root all problems of knowledge in language itself. Are its conceptions of language and language acquisition necessarily correct? Do they survive the scrutiny of empirical discoveries we have from contemporary linguistics research? Are there theoretical linguistic conceptions which match better the significant empirical evidence we have accumulated? The second point of attack is broader and more immediately metaphysical. Positivism believes that language and "extralinguistic fact" (sense data) are the originator/boundary of all meaningful human understanding. Cognitive meaning is grounded in precise language and verifiable sense experience; emotion, religion, intuition, subjective knowledge are all suspect. "Where's the beef?" "Where's the evidence?" "Where does this knowledge practically take us?" anchor this dominant, secular belief system. By using the idea of "meaningfull" and "meaningless" Logical Positivists can attempt to disprove "God talk", but this is as far as they can go. The contradictions in the Logical Positivists' arguments make their arguments indeed meaningless. Bibliography:

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