Logical positivism. Could there be a greater misnomer? Only nihilism negates more.
Thanks to its own limitations, the primary assertion of logical positivism — “an empirical proposition is meaningful only if it either actually has been verified or could at least in principle be verified” — does not necessarily discount my testimony. It’s the “in principle” clause that rescues the philosophy from absurdity.
In principle, you cannot see the stars on a cloudy night. In principle, you cannot test Galileo’s assertion about the feather and the hammer on a windy day in Chicago. And in principle, you cannot expect Mr. Jones to knock on your door when you have put up a No Trespassing sign.
(Incidentally, it isn’t whether an assertion has truth value, but whether an assertion is true. All logical assertions have truth value — they are either true or false.)
Exceedingly well put, RexDart. Lib’s experiential knowledge is true only for Lib. However, it is no less true for others than, say, RexDart’s experiential knowledge is to them. God cannot be found other than through direct experience. All else is supposition.
I recently examined my own beliefs from an atheistic perspective, and found a connection to someone from whom I believe I am given animus, and to whom I believe I’ll return. Now, like Sentient Meat, I am intellectually unpersuaded by this connection (could just be a trick of human psychology, or some chemical abberation in my own brain). But I am irretrievably persuaded on a basic level of the truth of that connection, and I have made choices about the meaning of that truth.
And, like Apos suspects in his/her own case, the knowledge of that connection, and the implications of that connection for others, has affected me on a deep moral level, but has not made me religious.
Is Mr. Jones a good man or an evil man?
What does he value above all else?
Does he love you?
Is he trustworthy?
Did your experience with him surprise you based on what you had heard about him?
If no one else believes you, does it mean he never came?
I would believe in God if the Christians on this board would send me a couple of million dollars. Promise you. Come on, there’s a lot of you out there, start up a fund - how about you do something a bit more effective than pray for my soul?
A lot of atheists can and will turn to religion when they in a bad situation and run out of “secular” hope. I’m going through some very bad things right now, and I wish I could have the hope that my religious relatives have. I see now more than ever how the “there’s no atheists in foxholes” thing is at least partially correct.
I am ready to believe in the Christian god when there is incontrovertible evidence. It will be really easy for him too, some simple thing like an image appears on my monitor and say, “Hey, I am God, watch this.” Followed by the mug on my desk floats up into the air.
And a lot of believers will turn atheist when faced with a non-responsive God. One of my good friends was a “good” Catholic until he watched his three year old neice die slowly and painfully of cancer.
One of the best things about belief and/or religion is the hope and comfort that it is capable of giving. Its one of the reasons that I haven’t completely discarded the notion of God - he is convienent to go to for hope, as well as convienent to go to when expressing gratitude.
If that’s true, it speaks rather poorly for the ultimate truth of religion, don’t you think? If one is willing to adopt a belief that fundamentally changes how they view the reality of the universe, merely because they are unsatisfied with their life at a particular moment, I would tend to question such a belief. I see no reason to think that there is not an objective reality, just because a particular person may have changed his views during a moment of duress.
So do I. In fact, reason cannot discover truth, but merely verify it. That’s the nature of implication. It is a chain from one known truth to another. Logic is used for proofs. Syllogism follow the hypothesis.
Discovery, on the other hand, often comes when we least expect it. Sometimes out of the clear blue. We can then use reason to test the truth (or sometimes science to test the falsity) of our revelations and inspirations.
If God made irrefutable of God’s existence and no one saw it, heard it, felt it, smelled it or tasted it… does God still exist?
What if the proof of God’s existence is all around us but we just dont understand or comprehend it, …does God still exist?
Finally, what if God showed up and proclaimed “I am” and gave proof to all but no one believed, …does God still exist?
Well, there’s the rub. The question is whether certain sorts of statements really are assertions, or merely something else. Take the following statements:
A.) My truck is black.
B.) Ouch!
C.) Don’t touch me.
D.) Murder is morally wrong.
E.) 12 angels could simulateously dance upon the head of a pin.
The first statement clearly has a truth value. Either my truck is black, or it is not black.
The second statement has no truth value. It does not actually assert a fact about the world. It therefore posits nothing which either does or does not correspond to the world as it exists independent of perspective, thus cannot be true or false under the commonly accepted Correspondence Theory of Truth.
The third statement has no truth value. It is a command, an imperative. You might obey the command or ignore it, you might touch me or you might not, but that lends no truth or falsity to the statement.
The fourth statement similiarly has no truth value. Embedded within such a statement is a moral exhortation. The words need to be expanded upon to acquire the meaning. What it means to be morally wrong is “don’t do that.” It’s just another command, taking the form of a recommendation as to what you ought or oughtn’t do. Statements about the morality of actions are thus neither true nor false, and they are imperative statements not declaratory ones.
The fifth statement has no truth value. The word “angels” has no referent, there is nothing existing in the real world to which it corresponds, so the sentence is in fact meaningless.
As for your remark on verification…well, if something could be verified “in principle”, then surely one must be able to describe some hypothetical mechanism by which such verification could take place. Due to the limitations on interstellar travel, and the speed of light limiting us, we could not possibly ever observe galaxies on the other “edge” of the universe, nor could any of our descendents. My statement “there is a supernova occuring at time t at location x, y, z” may not be verifiable by any human being ever due to the coordinates, but it is still the sort of thing that can be verified. Similiar things not facing the verification problem of the interstellar speed limit have been verified in the past, we’ve observed supernovas, we can verify that sort of thing.
An assertion that “I was visited by god” cannot be verified even in principle. Unless you claim it visited you in corporeal form, or that it projected and/or reflected and/or refracted light rays, or that it absorbed them in a predictable pattern, conducted heat or electricity, or that it affected the tangible physical world in some measurable way, then it is not verifiable in principle. Nothing like that has ever been verified, not even anything of a remotely similiar nature.
That method of acquiring knowledge strikes me as very limited. Using it, one could only propose a hypothesis, and then use logic to decide that if that hypothesis is true a set of other propositions are also true. That wouldn’t say anything at all about whether those propositions are actually true until you demonstrate that the hypothesis is actually true. That hypothesis would, under your method, have to be acquired by a previous chain of similiar reasoning, etc., etc., back and back forever. It would either form a circle, and thus only be justifying itself by virtue of itself, or end at some single point or set of points.
It’s my contention, as mentioned elsewhere recently, that the only proposition that we have knowledge of without having to learn it is “A v ~A”. This is basically because if you didn’t already know it, you could not learn it, because when you arrived at its truth you would not already possess the mechanism by which to exclude its contradiction. “A v ~A” is a useful proposition for learning and acquiring facts through reason and observation, but there sure ain’t much that flows from it in pure logic without any observations to supplement it.
If rational observation cannot discover truth, then one’s set of known truths is limited to what you start with a priori and what you can deduce from that. Unless your set of a priori truths is MUCH larger than mine, and you can accurately account for that, you’re never going to get very far with that epistemology.
Just kidding, gex gex.)