POSITIVISM AND CHRISTIANITY A STUDY OF THEISM AND VERIFIABILITY POSITIVISM AND CHRISTIANITY A STUDY OF THEISM AND VERIFIABILITY by KENNETH H. KLEIN MARTINUS NIJHOFF• / THE HAGUE / 1974 To myfather © 1974 by Martinus NijhoJ!, The Hague, Netherlands Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1974 All rights reserved, including the right to translate or to reproduce this book or parts thereof in any form ISBN-13: 978-90-247-1581-7 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-010-2014-5 001: 10.1007/978-94-010-2014-5 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION VII Chapter I. STATEMENT OF THE ISSUES A. Overview of the Positivist stand upon theism 1 B. Exposition of the Positivist stand on the issues 5 1. "The statement that God exists is, at least putatively, a statement of fact" 5 2. "A necessary condition of a genuine statement of fact is that it must be Verifiable" 13 3. "The statement that God exists is not Verifiable" . 21 Retrospect 37 C. Appendix: Unintelligible words and unintelligible sentences 38 Chapter II. THEISM WITHOUT BELIEF IN GoD . 49 A. Religious belief construed as a moral commitment 51 B. Religious belief construed as "slanting" . 57 C. Religious belief construed as the contemplating of a "sym- bol picture" . 61 Discussion 68 Transition to Chapters III and IV 73 Chapter III. TESTABILITY AND FACTUAL SIG1"1FICANCE . 75 A. The search for a criterion of factual significance. 76 B. Formulations and difficulties . 81 1. The paradigm case: The criterion of verifiability 82 2. The criterion of verifiability in principle . 84 3. The extended criterion of verifiability in principle 86 4. The criterion of falsifiability in principle . 91 VI CONTENTS 5. The criterion of partial verifiability 92 6. The criterion of Verifiability 93 C. Further problems 97 1. Statements about other minds . 97 2. Statements about "unobservables" in science 104 Retrospect 111 Chapter N. ARE THEOLOGICAL SENTENCES TESTABLE? . 113 A. Terrestrial falsifiability . 115 B. Eschatological verifiability 121 C. Terrestrial verifiability 133 Retrospect 149 Chapter V. DILEMMAS 151 A. Summary of the argument . 152 B. Objections and dilemmas . 154 1. Conclusive Verifiability. 154 2. Verifiability in principle 157 3. Ad hoc exceptions 159 4. The translatability criterion 161 5. Falsifiability and theological statements 166 6. The transcendence of God . 169 SELECTED BmLlOGRAPHY 175 INDEX 180 INTRODUCTION This essay is conceived as a critical exposition of the central issues that figure in the ongoing conversation between Logical Positivists and neo­ Positivists on the one hand and Christian apologists on the other. My expository aim is to isolate and to describe the main issues that have emer­ ged in the extended discussion between men of Positivistic turn of mind and men sympathetic to the claims of Christianity. My critical aim is to select typical, influential stands that have been taken on each of these issues, to assess their viability, and to isolate certain dilemmas which discussion of these issues has generated. I am convinced that the now commonly rejected verifiability theory of meaning is very commonly misunderstood and has been rejected by and large for the wrong reasons. Before it is cast off-if it is to be cast off-what is needed is a reconsideration of that theory and of the objections that its several formulations have elicited. Furthermore, at least partially because of a misconstruing of the verifiability doctrine, there have been some interesting-though in my opinion unsuccessful-claims advanced about the testability-status of sentences expressive of Christian belief. Moreover, in their haste to vindicate Christianity, some apologists have been fairly cavalier, in my opinion, about what "Christianity" involves. This volume offers what I hope will be a clear statement and analysis of the principle points at issue between Positivism and Christianity, together with my own assessment of where the argument stands now. My attempt through­ out has been to provide for teachers, students, and interested laymen an orderly, concise discussion of several of the most crucial, interrelated issues that figure prominently in this manifestly vivid, still-unclosed chapter of contemporary analytic philosophy of religion. My claim will be that the problems posed by Positivism for Christianity, and for any theism of this type, have not yet been resolved either by the alleged discrediting of Positiv­ ism or by the apologetic efforts formulated thus far. The issues examined here are historically associated with the formulation, vm INTRODUCTION dissemination, and eventual widespread influence of the doctrines of Logical Positivism, a philosophical movement which enjoyed prominence in Austria, England, and America during the second and third decades of this century. Although Logical Positivism, considered as a philosophical movement, is passe, its influence upon recent philosophy of religion is massive, its philo­ sophical afterbirth-linguistic analysis-has been sanguine, and some of its own tenets are still defended, albeit in usually sharply modified form. The doctrines of Logical Positivism have a complicated genealogical history, stemming not only from the writings of Kant and the tradition of British empiricism, but also from writers of more recent vintage-physicists, logi­ cians, sociologists, and philosophers of science. The immediate progenitors of Positivism were a small group of philosophers, scientists, and mathema­ ticians more or less loosely gathered together by Moritz Schlick in the early 1920's at the University of Vienna who gave themselves the name of "the Vienna Circle." The officially recognized precursors of Positivist ideas are remembered in a sort of Positivist manifesto-Wissenschaftliche Weltauf­ !assung, Der Wiener Kreis-written in 1929 by Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath, and Hans Hahn. No attempt will be made in this volume at historical completeness, com­ pleteness either with respect to the full evolution and variety of Positivist doctrines or with respect to the burgeoning variety of responses offered in service to Christian apologetics. Readers interested in the broader concep­ tual picture would do well to look at A. J. Ayer's Logical Positivism and at Frederick Ferre's Language, Logic, and God and to follow up some of the generous bibliographical leads provided there. My focus in this essay is with-so to speak-hard-core Positivism as it bears on Christianity and with more or less direct, first-generation responses to Positivism in defense of Christian orthodoxy. Developments in Christian apologetics within the last decade or so have been very interesting indeed. These developments, how­ ever, open an entirely new chapter and I have thought it best, in the interest of preserving singleness of theme, to neglect them in this study. My book takes a dual look at one of the central doctrines of Logical Positivism-dual, in that I will be looking both at the doctrine itself (the verifiability-doctrine) and also at the impact which this doctrine has made in one field of inquiry (Christian apologetics). That portion of the book which will be devoted to examining the doctrine itself will try to ascertain whether or not the doctrine is tenable and, if so, in what form. If the doctrine is tenable, it constitutes, or appears to constitute, a challenge to-indeed an attack upon-the intelligibility of that type of religious belief exemplified by Christianity. Of course the Positivists' attack upon Christianity was but INTRODUCTION IX one instance of their hostility to "metaphysics" in general. By focusing upon this one instance of their attack, I do not mean to suggest that Christianity was singled out for special disfavor. But since the Positivistic bite was force­ fully felt by philosophers of religion and particularly by Christian apologists, it is appropriate to field the argument at the point of one of its foci of conflict, even though there were others as well. Whether or not the doctrine which the Positivists employed to undermine Christianity is tenable, there are many writers of contemporary philosophy of religion who certainly think that it is. Certain writers are sufficiently worried about the potential destructive fecundity of the doctrine in question that they have tried to answer the Positivists in some way or another. What these answers characteristically have in common is the attempt to vindicate Christianity, or some more general religious orientation of which Christi­ anity is a special case, from Positivist objections. Given this common con­ cern, however, two quite different types of response occur. Some hold that Christianity is not really susceptible to the Positivist's attack in the first place, since Christians are not really disposed to hold what the Positivists think they hold, although they sometimes appear to do so. Others hold that although Christianity is susceptible, in principle, to the Positivists' objection, sentences expressive of a Christian's basic beliefs are not unintelligible in the way the Positivists alleged since these sentences, in their typical use, meet the requirements of intelligibility. These replies to the Positivists' argument, whether the argument is initially sound or not, are interesting in their own right since they highlight topics of concern both to Christian theologians and to philosophers of religion, notably the distinction between the first and the second persons of the Trinity and, more generally, the topic of the transcendence of God. There is another sort of reply to the Positivists which is relevant to their attack upon Christianity.