Verification Principle

Verification Principle

If you argue that RL is cognitive, and that it allows something about God to be known, you can argue that RL is meaningless as religious statements are not concerned with objective facts that can be proved true or false. There is the problem of how we are to describe God in this way when we know nothing about God e.g. is it right to refer to God as "He"/"Him" or talk about what God "said" (use of language in this way anthropomorphises God - this appears to limit God's majesty/power). This has led to some non-religious groups seeking to demonstrate why RL is meaningless. One such group of philosophers were the Logical Positivists who developed from the Vienna Circle, a group who were heavily influenced by science and believed that the purpose of language is to tell us about the world around us.

Verification Principle states that we know the meaning of a statement if we know the conditions under which…