The Verificationist And Falsificationist Challenge Of...

the verificationist/falsificationist challenge to religious beliefs Religious language describes a way in which much of the writings, particularly that of the Christian Bible use a particular way or mode of language in order to present a message, teach certain doctrines, but most importantly for the prospective believer, and most troublesome for the philosopher or the scientist, metaphysical assertions. That is, claims about the truthful nature of reality. A problem, as it has been and continues to be, because religious beliefs are often presented with the challenge of meaning. The discussion has lead to four easily distinguishable positions over the spectrum from hardline verificationism to the more popular falsificationist series of†¦show more content†¦Rudolf Carnap and A.J. Ayer were the key proponents of this position, but were swiftly rejected by Alonzo Church and Richard Swinburne, who contested that with this standard for truth, no metaphysical statement could ever be probed true or false empirically religious or not, and that even i f a theory about reality is verifiable based on prior observations and validations, empirical evidence does only to reaffirm a belief about reality based on a structure of propositions verified in the same way - in this way, they can never be conclusively verifiable. Swinburne’s excellent criticism, that a statement only has to be intelligible to be meaningful, even if it is untrue. If someone intends to communicate something to another, the prime directive of language, as long as they agree upon the meanings of the terms and the context in which they are given structure, the statement is coherent and thereby has evoked meaning in that it can be responded to. As such, the verification-able requirement for meaningful statements has been abandoned. With a remaining desire for discrediting the meaningfulness of religious language, the falsificationist requirement came about, and is still held by many current thinkers. There is however some diversity amongst opinion which often gets separated into the equivocal, univocal and analogous ways in which Gods proposed attributes are interpreted. All of the solutions mentioned here, deal with a comparative descriptions of men and