thought of as personal in the way God is in “theistic” religions like Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam. But I cannot aspire here to so complete a coverage. Because the philosophical
problems and positions with which I will be dealing have their home in a theistic,
primarily Judeo-Christian, religious setting, I will limit myself to statements about God.
There is enough variety in the way God is construed in theistic religions to keep us
occupied.
2. Can There Be Statements about God with Truth Values?
From my preliminary statement of problems, I begin with the one an affirmative answer
to which is required for the other problems to arise, namely, whether what appear to be
statements about God that have an objective truth value really have that status or are
something quite different—expressions of emotion or attitude, commitment to a policy of
action or a lifestyle, ways of evoking “disclosures” by the use of symbols, or whatever. In
the 1950s and 1960s many philosophers embraced “verificationism,” the view that an
attempted factual assertion can have an objective truth value only if it is, in principle,
subject to empirical verification or falsification. In that period a number of philosophers
of religion applied this principle to alleged statements about God and took them to fail
the test. Verificationism was made prominent in the early twentieth century by a group
known as the Vienna Circle, prominent members of which included Rudolf Carnap,
Moritz Schlick, and Otto Neurath. The view was originally developed in the philosophy
of science, but severe difficulties led to its progressive abandonment in the field of its
birth. Though news of its demise took a while to reach metaphysics, philosophy of
religion, ethics, and other outlying territories, it is no longer a major concern in those
areas either. But because there is still a small but determined rear guard of the movement
in philosophy of religion, I will briefly review the main difficulties with verificationism.
Before doing that, I will point out that its
end p.222
application to talk about God is by no means as straightforward as is often supposed. It
depends on how we think of God and his relation to the world whether empirical
confirmation and disconfirmation of statements about God are possible. But limitations of
space prevent my going into that here.^1
The most serious defect in verificationism is this. Any statement that is not, like “The
liquid is cloudy,” formulated in observational terms, and hence that is not directly tested
by observation, can receive confirmation or disconfirmation from the results of
observation only if it is conjoined with “bridge principles” that are partly in observational
and partly in nonobservational terms, and hence make it possible for the results of
observation to have a logical bearing on “theoretical” principles. Thus, laws of
thermodynamics, when conjoined with principles that spell out how to measure the
temperature of a substance, can be tested by such measures. The reason this consideration
is fatal to verificationism as a criterion of genuine factuality is that no one has been able
to put restrictions on bridge principles that will let in nonobservational statements the