Falsification principle

"Explain the challenges that the falsification principle presents to the meaningfulness of religious language"

What is the falsification principle?

The falsification principle, although originating from a scientifica background, came to challenge the meaningfulness of religious lanaguage under Anthony Flew. It suggests that for language to be meaningful it must be falsifiable (i.e. we must know what to do to prove it is false). Yet, since in religious language there is no possible state of affairs that could ever lead to a religious statement being proved false we must conclude that under the falsification principle, religious language is meaningless.

Cognitive language

Before we examine the challenges posed by the falsification principle, we must first acknowledge that the principle rests on religious language being 'cognitive'. Cognitive or 'realist' language means that the language makes factual assertions that can be proved true or false. For example, "God exists" is trying to make a factual statement about the realism of God, his genuine existence in our world. Anthony Flew argued in 'Theology and Falsification' describes cognitive language as consiting of "...crypto-commands, expressions of wishes, disguised ejaculations, concealed ethics or anythung else but assertions". When religious believers use language of this kind, they use it with the assumption that claims about God can be made and understood in the same way, or at least to some extent in the same way, as other factual claims — for example "the grass is green" is a fact in the same way "God listens to my prayers" is. Thus, as we examine the origins and the challenges of falsification, we must look at it through this perspective.

Karl Popper

The general means of assessing the meaningfulness and reliability of statements, particularly scientific ones, mostly followed the means layed out by the verification principle (i.e. Language must be synthetic or analytic to be meaningful. However Karl Popper found great fault with this as it was too flimsy and weak. He said "science is more concerned with falsification of hypothesis than with the verification". And so, he devised a more rigorous means of assessing meaningfulness of a statement; falsification. In this he proposed that when a scientist proposes a hypothesis, the hypothesis must have a means of being proved false if it is to be meaningful. If we have one piece of evidence against a statement, that that statement is able to be falsified and thus it is meaningful. In Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959) he used the example of a swan. If I were to say "all swans are white" there is no…