A Level Religious Studies: WTF is the Verification Principle? Revision Notes

WTF is the Verification Principle?

The Verification Principle was intended as a tool to allow us to distinguish between the meaningful statements of science and the meaningless claims of pseudo-science and mysticism, and in that sense it has at times been valuable: as Ayer argued, sometimes people assume that because a word exists, there must be a corresponding real thing to which it refers. But the principle was quickly discredited as an adequate criterion of meaning, and much recent philosophy has examined less narrow ways in which language is used. But it is difficult to abandon completely the notion that for a statement to be meaningful, it must in some sense be shown to correspond to reality.

Flew argues that for a statement to be meaningful it must at least be open to falsification– there must be some way of showing it to be false. A statement that fits any imaginable state of affairs doesn’t appear to say anything at all, and is therefore meaningless. Religious statements tend to suffer from ‘death by a thousand qualifications’: the claims they embody are so immune to falsification that they are, in fact, empty.

The Falsification Principle accepts a statement is verifiable if it is know what empirical evidence could count against it or prove it wrong. For example, "Aliens live on Saturn" is a meaningful statement because we know how to verify it. Religious statements however have no exact way of being verified.