Religious Language: The Falsification Principle

1. Religious Language: The Falsification Principle • To know key language connected to the falsification principle • To understand the contribution of Flew • To evaluate what the Falsification Principle means for religious language

2. Falsification Opponents of Logical Positivists pointed out that many general statements which are used by science cannot be verified. For example how could we ever conclusively verify a statement such as “metal expands when heated”? It is always possible that the one piece of metal we have not tested will not expand. In Logic the following syllogism was used in the past. All swans are white This bird is a swan Therefore this bird is white

3. Falsification But when Europeans went to Australia they discovered black swans. The premise “all swans are white” seemed meaningful but had never been verified. Philosophers amended the rules and said that for a statement to be meaningful we have to say what would have to happen for us to admit that the statement was incorrect. This new principle is called falsification rather than verification.

4. Falsification The following story sets a challenge to religious people. When religious people make a statement that they claim to be historical would they in theory accept the test set out in the following story.

5. This story is taken from Chapter 52 of The Diaries of a Horse and her Friend

6. A short story One Friday evening a school teacher left a big city to escape the hustle and bustle of Christmas. He spent a few days at an inn on the edge of the moors. There was a cozy fire crackling in the hearth and he fell in love with the place at once. He arose early on the first morning, whilst it was still dark and went walking.

7. A short story It was cold but he had wrapped up well. It was as if the sun was ashamed that this stranger had appeared on the moors before it had and tried to make amends by shining more brightly than was usual for a December morning.

8. A short story He headed for one of the tors passing a disused water mill and a stone circle on his way. Knowing that there was an Iron Age hill fort in the area he got a feeling of walking into history. The frost coated limbs of the trees made it look as though the moor itself was a place frozen in time.

9. A short story He wondered if it was wise to be wandering so far from the beaten track as he had heard of how dangerous this moor could be in the winter when mist could descend rapidly and leave a visitor stranded. As he approached the tor, two ravens flew from the grey granite rocks and hovered for a while before flying north.

10. A short story He had heard these birds described as vultures in the past and he shivered. The granite tor reminded him of human work and as he looked at the cracked rock he could imagine how mysterious they must have looked to the people of the Iron Age. As he saw the mist spreading from the nearby river he reluctantly decided to return.

11. A short story As he walked back the frozen grass and moss crunched under his feet. The twisted branches of the sessile oak and the naked birch and rowan trees made him think of how harsh life would have been for the original inhabitants. As he descended the mist grew thicker and he started to worry.

12. A short story But the worry just served to enhance his delight when he felt the road beneath his feet again. He hurried to the inn and when he reached it he saw another man. The other man was sitting at the bar. He was about 60; was wearing a tweed jacket and horn-rimmed glasses. He was a retired scientist and hit it off with the teacher at once. He told the teacher that during the war he had been working for the government on a secret operation. He asked the teacher lots of questions about history including who in the past he would most like to speak to.

13. A short story He shrugged his shoulders and answered “perhaps Frederick Engels or Socrates”. The two men chatted through the afternoon and as the sun descended the scientist invited the teacher outside. It was very cold by this time and through the descending mist the two men could make out a few stars. The scientist asked the teacher if he realized that the light from the stars which they were looking at on that night had been travelling for many years. He asked him if he was aware that some of the stars whose light they were looking at might no longer exist. (The speed of light is 299,792,458 metres a second. This is roughly 300,000 kilometres or 186,000 miles a second. The sun is about 150 million kilometres from the earth so light from the sun takes 8 minutes and 19 seconds to reach the earth. Some of the stars are so far away that light from them takes years to reach us. If one of those stars ceased to exist tonight we would still see its light for years to come.)

14. A short story The teacher was aware and the scientist was delighted. The scientist then said that if someone on a planet 2000 light years away pointed a very powerful telescope at the earth they could see things that happened here 2000 years ago. The teacher agreed adding that he had never thought of that before. Then the scientist told the teacher a secret. He said that towards the end of the war a rocket had been developed which could travel faster than the speed of light.

15. A short story After the war, in a bid to deal a blow to atheistic communism this rocket was sent to a planet many light years away and then a powerful telescope (which had also been developed during the war) was pointed at the earth to receive pictures from the past, pictures of events which happened thousands of years ago and whose light was just now reaching those distant parts of the universe. The scientist asked the teacher to imagine seeing the Israelites passing through the Sea of Reeds; to imagine seeing Socrates standing before his jury in Athens; to imagine seeing the Prophet Muhammad (Pbuh) entering the cave on Mount Hira; to imagine seeing Hanuman’s army building the bridge to Lanka or perhaps seeing Jesus’ battered body placed in the tomb and keeping the camera fixed on it for the next three days.

16. A short story Who could fail but be transfixed by such images? The rocket was sent at a speed of 400 million miles a second and reached its destination in less than a year. The telescope was pointed at the town of Jerusalem to capture what happened after Jesus was crucified. Events were filmed from Jesus died on the cross until noon on the third day. The scientist told the teacher that the group had been unhappy with what they had seen and had asked for everything to be destroyed.

17. A short story However the scientist saved the film and told the teacher that he could show it to him in his room if he wished. The teacher was amazed and went into the scientists’s room where they settled down to watch images from Jerusalem on the feast of the Passover almost 2000 years before. The teacher felt as if thousands of years of history were weighing on his shoulders as he saw the dark clouds lift and the bloody body of Jesus being taken down from the cross and placed in a tomb. They saw the mother of Jesus fall heartbroken as the stone was moved in front of the tomb. A young unbearded man tried to comfort her.

18. A short story Then two guards took up positions on either side of the huge stone. Jesus’ mother rose to her feet and supported by the young man and some women she started to walk down the hill. The teacher was upset as the small party disappeared from sight. He would have loved to have known where the woman went to on that sad evening. Did she return to the rest of her family? Why were the disciples not at the tomb? The scientist was delighted with the questions and as he nodded eagerly the teacher knew he did not have the answers but had asked similar questions himself.

19. A short story It had been planned that the telescope would move with the rotation of the earth. They had calculated that at the time of the Passover Jerusalem was bright for 12 and a half hours a day. In order to catch the first light in the morning they had programmed the telescope to move so that whilst it remained pointing at the same latitude of 31.47 north, the point of longitude it was pointing at was changed from Longitude 35.13 east to Longitude 152.37 west. The film then showed pictures other than those of Jerusalem. They saw pictures of dawn from the Pacific Ocean, from Japan, China, Tibet, India, Afghanistan, Persia, Mesopotamia, Arabia until eventually they were looking once again at pictures from outside the tomb in which Jesus lay.

20. A short story The second day did not show much because it was one of the holiest days in the Jewish calendar and people would not visit a tomb on such a day. It was interesting to observe the two soldiers. At one stage they brought out a little board game and started to play it as they shared a bottle of wine. Around midday two other soldiers came to take over. They each took the dice and rolled it once and then drank a number of times from the bottle. The teacher was captivated and although he talked excitedly about the pictures he rarely took his eyes from the screen.

21. A short story When they started to see pictures of the Pacific Ocean again for the second night the teacher had to lie down. He knew that it would be nearly 12 hours before they would see more pictures from Jerusalem. He went to his room, set his alarm for 10 hours and went to sleep. When the alarm went off he jumped out of bed and was horrified to see that it was already bright outside. Then he remembered that he only had to wake up before the film showed dawn in Jerusalem. He rushed to the scientist’s room and knocked on the door. As the scientist greeted him with a smile he wondered what the pictures of the third morning would show. He shivered as he imagined that they might show the guards outside Jesus’ tomb with the large stone firmly in place all day. Imagine if they showed the disciples coming to steal the dead body of their leader. Such pictures would have a huge impact on the world. Was this why the destruction of the film had been ordered?

22. A short story What the teacher saw however was unexpected. When the film showed them the tomb once again they saw that the stone had already moved. The teacher gasped as the scientist smiled. Who had moved it? It had been moved whilst it was still dark so the telescope could not pick it up. The teacher knew the Gospel accounts of the resurrection and wondered if Jesus rose whilst it was still dark as John had suggested even though the synoptic writers seem to agree that he rose at dawn. (Verse One of chapter 20 of John’s Gospel suggests that Mary Magdelene arrived at the tomb, which Jesus’ body had been laid in, whilst it was still dark and saw that the stone had already been moved. The synoptic Gospels are the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. These are called synoptic as they have many similarities and the word synoptic means “a similar view”.)

23. A short story Early in the day some men arrived at the tomb and looked delighted to find that it was empty. The scientist smiled as the teacher started to talk as many people must have talked on that first Easter morning.

24. A short story The teacher arranged to meet the scientist the following December. They met every December after that. During the day they would walk amongst the tors and in the evenings they would sip a glass of beer and watch the film. When the teacher arrived 10 years after the first meeting the owner of the inn presented him with a letter and an urn. The letter said “I could not be parted from my film so I asked that it was placed in my coffin. Don’t be angry. I am leaving you in charge of my ashes. Scatter them please on the moors”.

25. The Falsification Principle • In order to say something which may possibly be true, we must say something which may possibly be false. • Faith and Knowledge. 1978. • Falsification: The philosophical theory that an assertion is meaningless if there is no way in which it could be falsified. • John Hick (1922-2012) • The falsification principle is not concerned with what may make something true, but with what may, in principle, make it false. • The scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, refutability, or testability • Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1963) • Karl Popper (1902-1994)

26. An example of Popper’s was astronomy against astrology... • Albert Einstein's theory of gravity was a scientific theory as it was potentially falsifiable, meaning the truth or falseness of it could be tested against empirical observations of the universe. • However, the claims of the mystic astrologers make their prophecies so vague that they are able to explain away anything that might refute their predictions had they been more precise ‘In order to escape falsification they destroyed the testability of their theory.’ (Popper) • If this principle is applied to religious belief than falsification draws in to question the nature of claims such as ‘Jesus was the incarnation of God’ or ‘God loves me’. If these claims are scientific they must be able to be scrutinised against sense observations and thus potentially be falsified. • Task: in groups of two continue this conversation... Person A; ‘God loves all people’. Person B; ‘Then why does he allow them to suffer?’...

27. Theology & Falsification: A Symposium • In 1955 the falsification theory was discussed by Antony Flew, R.M. Hare and Basil Mitchell in an article titled ‘Theology and Falsification: Symposium’ in the Journal ‘New Essays in Philosophical Theology.’ • Flew’s position: Theological utterances are not assertions; they have no cognitive meaning • Hare’s position: • Flew is right to say theological utterances are not assertions, however, they are ‘bliks’ and so are meaningful • Mitchell’s position: Theological utterances are meant as assertions and they are very meaningful to those who hold onto them.

28. Antony Flew (1923-2010) • Flew stated that it often seems to the non-religious there is no event or series of events that would ever convince the ‘sophisticated religious person’ that ‘There wasn’t a God after all’. (Flew, Theology & Falsification: A Symposium, 1955) • Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. In the clearing were growing many flowers and many weeds. One explorer says, ‘Some gardener must tend this plot’. The other disagrees, ‘There is no gardener’. So they pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. ‘But perhaps he is an invisible gardener.’ So they set up a barbed-wire fence. They electrify it. They patrol with bloodhounds (For they remember how H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man could be both smelt and touched though he could not be seen). But no shrieks ever suggest that some intruder has received a shock. No movements of the wire ever betray an invisible climber. The bloodhounds never give cry. Yet still the Believer is not convinced. ‘But there is a gardener, invisible, intangible, insensible to electric shocks, a gardener who has no scent and makes no sound, a gardener who comes secretly to look after the garden which he loves.’ At last the Sceptic despairs, ‘But what remains of our original assertion? Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even • from no gardener at all?’

29. Flew’s argument is that religious believers act in the same way as the believing explorer. Flew gives the example of saying God loves people, even if disaster happens. His argument is that people still go on believing in the loving God. No experience seems to falsify a religious believer’s faith. Flew therefore argues that God-talk is meaningless as it is unfalsifiable, in the same way as the eternally elusive gardener in his analogy. • Flew suggested that God died a ‘death by a thousand qualifications’. By this phrase, Flew meant that when a religious believer is challenged about the existence of God, or God’s nature, their response is to modify the way they talk about God to respond to the challenge, that is, they try to qualify (explain/justify) what it is they have said by changing, altering or explaining what they have said by using an equally vague and unfalsifiable statement). • Flew argues that believers end up modifying their statements about God so much when challenged, that the statements no longer resemble the original claim about God – in other words, their belief in God dies a ‘death by a thousand qualifications’.

30. Task: Look at the first statement then consider how the second challenges it. • God is all-loving • God is all-powerful • God answers the prayers of his faithful • God loves us • Gods Creation is good • Human beings have free will • God did not prevent hurricane Katrina • People pray for healing and it does not happen • Many evil people have good lives, whilst good people suffer • Nature is indifferent to humanity’s existence • Q. Can the religious believer challenge Flew without proving him right?

32. R. M. Hare (1919-2002) • R.M. Hare did not start by contradicting Flew’s argument, in fact he states in his section of the Symposium; ‘I must begin by confessing that, on the ground marked out by Flew, he seems to me to be completely victorious.’ • However, this does not mean Hare is in complete agreement with Flew (notice the ‘on the grounds marked out by Flew’). Hare uses a parable of his own to suggest that Flew is standing on the wrong ground to be able to understand religious assertions. • A certain lunatic is convinced that all dons want to murder him. His friends introduce him to all the mildest and most respectable dons that they can find, and after each of them has retired, they say, ‘You see, he doesn’t really want to murder you; he spoke to you in a most cordial manner; surely you are convinced now?’ But the lunatic replies ‘Yes, but that was only his diabolical cunning; he’s really plotting against me the whole time, like the rest of them; I know it I tell you’. However many kindly dons are produced, the reaction is still the same.

33. Hare’s example outlined how the lunatic saw the world and nothing could change his view of the world. Hare notes that according to Flew’s criteria the lunatic’s assertion would be meaningless as there is no behaviour being demonstrated by the dons that would support his theory. • He is referred to as a lunatic because his assumptions of the dons differs to that of everyone else. Hare coined the word ‘blik’ to describe the way in which people see and interpret the world (a ‘blik’ being a basic, unprovable assumption that gives explanation to the user). The important characteristic of the ‘blik’ is that it is not falsifiable and it does not make factual claims about the world that can be tested. No evidence of argument can demonstrate the falseness of a ‘blik’. • Whilst the lunatic may have an insane ‘blik’ and we may have a sane ‘blik’, we both have a ‘blik’. For the lunatic to have a wrong ‘blik’ there must be a right ‘blik’. Holding the right ‘blik’ is what matters.

34. Hare made two major points about Bliks, his parable of the lunatic and Flew: • ‘Bliks’ are ways of seeing the world and the difference between different people’s ‘bliks’ cannot be solved by observations of what the world is like. • Flew makes a mistake by treating religious statements as though they are scientific explanations (see Wittgentsein). • Flew accepted Hare’s idea of ‘bilks’ (he even thanks him for introducing the concept to philosophy) but adds, Christianity does not rely on ‘bliks’ as part of their statement of faith stating ‘the man who reassures himself with theological arguments for immortality is being as silly as the man who tries to clear his overdraft by writing his bank a cheque on the same account.’ • Flew states Christianity makes ‘assertions’ about the universe and God which form the basis of theological apologetics. To base your theology on a ‘blik’ would be make your religious activity fraudulent, or merely silly. When Christians claim God really did this, then by implications this claim is testable or falsifiable and so not merely a ‘blik’.

36. Basil Mitchell (1917-2011) • Mitchell states that Flew makes errors in his analysis of the religious believer because the Christian attitude is not that of the detached observer, but of the believer. • In time of war in an occupied country, a member of the resistance meets one night a stranger who deeply impresses him. They spend that night together in conversation. The Stranger tells the partisan that he himself is on the side of the resistance--indeed that he is in command of it, and urges the partisan to have faith in him no matter what happens. The partisan is utterly convinced at that meeting of the Stranger’s sincerity and constancy and undertakes to trust him. They never meet in conditions of intimacy again. But sometimes the Stranger is seen helping members of the resistance, and the partisan is grateful and says to his friends, ‘He is on our side’. Sometimes he is seen in the uniform of the police handing over patriots to the occupying power. On these occasions his friends murmur against him: but the partisan still says, ‘He is on our side’. He still believes that, in spite of appearances, the Stranger did not deceive him. Sometimes he asks the Stranger for help and receives it. He is then thankful. Sometimes he asks and does not receive it. Then he says, ‘The Stranger knows best’. Sometimes his friends, in exasperation, say ‘Well, what would he have to do for you to admit that you were wrong and that he is not on our side?’ But the partisan refuses to answer. He will not consent to put the Stranger to the test. And sometimes his friends complain, ‘Well, if that’s what you mean by his being on our side, the sooner he goes over to the other side the better’.

37. Mitchell tackles Flew’s ‘dying a death of a thousand qualifications’ comment. He does this by using the same example as Flew that religious people assert God as loving whilst witnessing acts that seem contrary to this. • For Mitchell statements like ‘It is God’s will’ (which Mitchell parallels with the ‘he is on our side’ statement from the partisan) would be thoughtless and insane (vacuous formulae) if the believer ‘blandly dismisses [what he witnesses] as of no consequence, having no bearing upon his belief.’ However, Mitchell states the believer ‘...experiences in himself the full force of the conflict.’ In other words puts what he sees into a wider context of the whole of his doctrine and becomes a ‘significant article of faith’. • By this Mitchell agrees with Flew that religious utterances are not ‘bliks’ but indeed assertions. However, unlike Flew, Mitchell sees these assertions as explanations not an assertion ‘...so eroded by qualifications that it was no longer a qualification at all’ (Flew). • In conclusion Mitchell states that significant utterances of Christian belief and doctrine can be treated in one of three ways...

38. ‘God loves humanity’ is not conclusively falsifiable, but can by treated as follows: • As provisional hypotheses to be discarded if experience goes against them. • As significant articles of faith • As vacuous formulae (perhaps out of a desire for reassurance) to which experience makes no difference and which make no difference to life • The Christian is precluded by his faith from taking up the first attitude: He is in constant danger, as Flew has observed, of slipping into the third. But he need not, and, if he does, it is a failure in faith as well as in logic. • I still think that in the end, if relentlessly pursued’ [the theologian] will have to resort to the avoiding action of qualification. And there lies that death by a thousand qualifications which would be a ‘failure in faith and logic’.

40. How does the falsification principle differ from the verification principle? • Falsification stops short of saying we need proof but demands we know what kind of evidence we would need to reject it as false

41. Plenary “ Religious Statements die the death of a thousand qualifications” Anthony Flew What did he mean by this statement?