A Level Religious Studies - Falsification Principle presents a challenge to religious language essay

“Antony Flew’s falsification principle presents a significant challenge to religious language.”

Antony Flew’s falsification principle stems from Karl Popper’s ideas which questions the meaningfulness of religious statements by checking if they can be falsified. Flew applied this to religious language, concluding it is nothing more than silly, meaningless words. Whilst it could be argued Antony Flew’s falsification principle presents a significant challenge to religious language, this essay will argue that it does not.

It can be argued that Flew does present a significant challenge to religious language because a religious belief is changed to fit any circumstance. Flew says that this means the statement is not meaningful and has no empirical implications. Flew uses his own version of the Parable of the Gardener to explain this: two explorers find a clearing in the jungle, one says a gardener must tend to it but the other denies it. They wait but no gardener appears – but they try to detect them. One says the gardener is invisible and undetectable. This shows how religious believers do not allow for the falsification of their belief and turn to saying that God is incomprehensible. Flew said that God ‘died a death of a thousand qualification’, explaining that religious beliefs are continuously modified to meet the challenges. Eventually, the beliefs fall far from the original claims of God. Flew therefore does challenge religious language as he notes it lacks meaning and has no empirical evidence.

However, Richard Swinburne says that the falsification principle does not work for all statements, but they still have meaning. He uses the analogy of the cupboard of toys to explain this. It says that you cannot prove or falsify that the toys cannot leave the cupboard when it is unsupervised, but the concept of their movement still has enough meaning as it is something we can understand. This argument identifies a fatal flaw in the principle Flew puts forward as it suggests that some statements are meaningless just because they cannot be falsified. This therefore suggests that Flew’s falsification principle does not provide a significant challenge to religious language as it cannot be applied universally and has to be done systematically to make his principle seem strong.

Flew’s falsification principle can be argued to significantly challenge religious language because Ayer agrees. A.J. Ayer even takes it a step further, denying the possibility of God’s existence altogether on the grounds that there is no way of empirically verifying his existence. He believed that ethical statements fell short of the verification principle because they cannot be verified empirically. This provides a significant challenge to the idea of religious language because it concludes that it lacks any meaning or worth due to its lack of evidence. This is a significant challenge because it is impossible to provide any solid, empirical evidence in favour of God’s existence, meaning it is easy to take Ayer’s conclusion at face value and say that religious language is meaningless.

R.M. Hare combats this, arguing that religious language is meaningful because it is non-cognitive, and so cannot have the falsification principle applied to it. Religious statements do not make factual claims and so cannot be considered cognitive, thus making the application of the falsification principle wrong. Hare says that religious language is meaningful because they have great influence in believers’ lives, illustrating some sense of meaning to that person. He also proposed that a believer’s statements were ‘bliks’ – ways of regarding the world that may not based on reason or fact and are neither falsifiable nor verifiable. This eliminates any sense of challenge put forward by the falsification principle as it further reinforces the idea that religious statements are unfalsifiable.

It can be argued that the falsification principle does provide a significant challenge to religious language. Karl Popper writes that “science is more concerned with falsification of hypothesis than verification”, and so created the falsification principle as the verification principle was deemed too flawed to be valid. He figured that a scientific statement is one that is falsifiable, meaning that it would accept evidence, if it existed to prove the statement false. This presents a significant challenge to religious language as it highlights the need for evidence which believers cannot offer; Popper and other philosopher consider non-factual statements to be meaningless. As religious statements are not based on fact and rather a belief, it makes sense for them to be called meaningless.

Despite this, Basil Mitchell puts forward the argument that religious statements are meaningful even if they are neither straightforwardly verifiable, nor falsifiable. Mitchell said that Flew was wrong in his supposition that believers never allow anything to count against their beliefs. He used the Parable of the Partisan and the Strange to explore it. A Partisan meets a stranger who claims to be a resistance leader. The stranger urges the Partisan to have faith in him, even if he is seen to be acting against Partisan interests. The Partisan is committed to a belief in the stranger’s integrity, but his friends think he is a fool to do so. The original encounter with the stranger gives the Partisan sufficient confidence to hold onto his faith in him even when there is evidence to the contrary. This is important as it illustrates the concept of non-propositional faith, which is a trust in God which may be held even when things suggest otherwise. Flew missed this point, and Mitchell argues that believers do not allow anything to conclusively falsify their belief in God, but this does not mean it is meaningless. This knocks the falsification principle as it gives an explanation as to why religious statements can be seem as meaningful despite being attempted to be proven differently; the peculiar and problematic parts of religious belief will be revealed at the end of time according to religious belief.

In conclusion, the falsification principle does manage to put forward some points about the meaningfulness of religious language, but the arguments against Flew’s proposition set it back. The falsification principle’s strengths rely on a number of factors which are difficult to apply to religious language, and in some cases, have been proven impossible to apply as the components are not present. It is important to recognise that Flew’s confidence in empirical evidence as a final test of meaning is also unfalsifiable. If he couldn’t think of circumstances where he would say empirical evidence wasn’t necessary, him saying we need this evidence is also empty. The falsification principle therefore falls apart, making it very hard to say that it presents a significant challenge to religious language.