Are Statements About God Meaningful?
For some reason that must be deep in the psyche of our contemporaries there seems to be a lot of interest in the debate about god—is he or isn’t he? Advocates on either side of the issue from the well-known outspoken advocates of atheism to the defenders of the reality or meaningfulness of god are on various media defending their views. The sudden recent interest in this issue puzzles me because it seems like a regression backward to an earlier generation of lively debate on the topic. I had thought the issue had been placed in the “no point of arguing” bucket because there was no way to resolve the issue by discussion. Some religion advocates seemed inclined, regardless of evidence, to take that “leap of faith” into the world of gods and spirits, apparently believing that it could do no harm to decide for god, whereas believing the contrary might put them uncomfortably in harm’s way if god were real and as vindictive to those who do not believe in him as the Evangelicals and Fundamentalists claim.
I fall on the side of the non-believer in that I do not think that the arguments for god have much persuasive ability or much that compels belief. I used to “believe” in god as a child and young man, but over time and education the belief in god seemed uninteresting, unimportant and irrelevant. There was never an “ah-ha” moment when the light bulb went off and I changed my mind on the subject. Many beliefs of childhood vanish over time. As I got older and acquired knowledge of history and science, and had more experiences with life, the inherent problems with religious belief just became insurmountable and the concept disappeared from my consciousness and my belief system.
I have never felt a need to become militantly atheistic. I think you have to take the concept of god seriously in order to debate it seriously, and I do not have much interest in the topic, any more than I would have interest in debating the concept of the Easter Bunny or Unicorns. However since I have been writing on the subject of Christian Humanism I have had numerous people try to show me the error of my thinking, asserting that if I just understood more, or listened to their arguments carefully, or gave god a chance, or did not close my mind to religious thinking and opened my heart to the Holy Spirit, or even if I prayed with them about my unbelief, that they could get me back on the path of right thinking on the subject of religion and restore my belief. One of the usual tactics is to tell me that it is my education that destroyed my belief and that education is the work of the devil, subtly taking away belief when I bit into that attractive apple of knowledge. I must admit to being annoyed by the arrogance of belief that dismisses unbelief as a churlish refusal to believe what to them is so obvious.
In graduate school I did a lot of reading in philosophy of religion. Back in the 1950s (when I was in graduate school) some of the most interesting contemporary philosophers were in England. One writer in particular made a significant impact on my early thinking in the philosophy of religion, Antony Flew, an Oxford professor who was a prolific writer and speaker who regularly took the negative side in frequent university debates about the meaningfulness of religious language in general and talk about god in particular. One passage struck me as stating in very simple language the essence of the argument, a short article in his book Logic and Language, entitled “Theology and Falsification,” (Blackwell, 1953). I still have that well-worn book in my library.
Here is the key statement of his argument. You can read the full article by clicking here.
"What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or the existence of, God?" The issue here is so obvious that it does not need any further exposition. It is known in philosophy as the “principle of falsification.” If there is no fact, experience or observation that would lead one to conclude that a statement was not true, then there is nothing that the statement asserts. In other words, if a statement cannot be falsified the statement is meaningless. That is the fundamental issue that must be faced by those who assert the meaningfulness of language about god."
For some reason that must be deep in the psyche of our contemporaries there seems to be a lot of interest in the debate about god—is he or isn’t he? Advocates on either side of the issue from the well-known outspoken advocates of atheism to the defenders of the reality or meaningfulness of god are on various media defending their views. The sudden recent interest in this issue puzzles me because it seems like a regression backward to an earlier generation of lively debate on the topic. I had thought the issue had been placed in the “no point of arguing” bucket because there was no way to resolve the issue by discussion. Some religion advocates seemed inclined, regardless of evidence, to take that “leap of faith” into the world of gods and spirits, apparently believing that it could do no harm to decide for god, whereas believing the contrary might put them uncomfortably in harm’s way if god were real and as vindictive to those who do not believe in him as the Evangelicals and Fundamentalists claim.
I fall on the side of the non-believer in that I do not think that the arguments for god have much persuasive ability or much that compels belief. I used to “believe” in god as a child and young man, but over time and education the belief in god seemed uninteresting, unimportant and irrelevant. There was never an “ah-ha” moment when the light bulb went off and I changed my mind on the subject. Many beliefs of childhood vanish over time. As I got older and acquired knowledge of history and science, and had more experiences with life, the inherent problems with religious belief just became insurmountable and the concept disappeared from my consciousness and my belief system.
I have never felt a need to become militantly atheistic. I think you have to take the concept of god seriously in order to debate it seriously, and I do not have much interest in the topic, any more than I would have interest in debating the concept of the Easter Bunny or Unicorns. However since I have been writing on the subject of Christian Humanism I have had numerous people try to show me the error of my thinking, asserting that if I just understood more, or listened to their arguments carefully, or gave god a chance, or did not close my mind to religious thinking and opened my heart to the Holy Spirit, or even if I prayed with them about my unbelief, that they could get me back on the path of right thinking on the subject of religion and restore my belief. One of the usual tactics is to tell me that it is my education that destroyed my belief and that education is the work of the devil, subtly taking away belief when I bit into that attractive apple of knowledge. I must admit to being annoyed by the arrogance of belief that dismisses unbelief as a churlish refusal to believe what to them is so obvious.
In graduate school I did a lot of reading in philosophy of religion. Back in the 1950s (when I was in graduate school) some of the most interesting contemporary philosophers were in England. One writer in particular made a significant impact on my early thinking in the philosophy of religion, Antony Flew, an Oxford professor who was a prolific writer and speaker who regularly took the negative side in frequent university debates about the meaningfulness of religious language in general and talk about god in particular. One passage struck me as stating in very simple language the essence of the argument, a short article in his book Logic and Language, entitled “Theology and Falsification,” (Blackwell, 1953). I still have that well-worn book in my library.
Here is the key statement of his argument. You can read the full article by clicking here.
"What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or the existence of, God?" The issue here is so obvious that it does not need any further exposition. It is known in philosophy as the “principle of falsification.” If there is no fact, experience or observation that would lead one to conclude that a statement was not true, then there is nothing that the statement asserts. In other words, if a statement cannot be falsified the statement is meaningless. That is the fundamental issue that must be faced by those who assert the meaningfulness of language about god."
