Edexcel special
Implications Philosophy of religion
This ‘Edexcel special’ looks at one way of tackling a passage from A. J. Ayer’s ‘God Talk is Evidently Nonsense’ in the ‘Philosophy of religion’ Implications paper
A. J. Ayer’s article ‘God Talk is Evidently Nonsense’ offers candidates an opportunity to discuss a range of issues in religious language and religious experience. Here we suggest one possible way in which you could address the generic Implications question in response to a passage from this text.
Exam advice is provided to help you apply the answers to your own work.
Question (a)
Examine the argument and/or interpretation in the passage. (30 marks)
Student’s answer
This extract is from A. J. Ayer’s article ‘God Talk is Evidently Nonsense’, which is based on the philosophy of the logical positivists. The principle of verification as put forward by the logical positivists demanded that, to be meaningful, a statement had to be empirically verifiable or analytically true. Logical positivism set out to be the ‘handmaiden of science’ and saw the role of philosophy to be one of analysis. The verification principle was the scalpel which would cut away at the ‘diseased intellectual tissue’ of metaphysics. Since all assertions about a transcendent God are metaphysical, they contain no literal significance and therefore cannot be verified. Ayer therefore rejects all assertions as being even probable because they contain no empirical verification.
A useful and well-judged opening paragraph which sets the article in context using some key phrases but without degenerating into a long recital of the verification principle complete with examples.
Ayer opens his argument by claiming that philosophers, at least, have concluded that the existence of the God of classical theism can’t be ‘demonstratively proved’. Ayer specifically identifies ‘philosophers’ presumably to distinguish them from those who adopt popular religious reasoning.
Philosophers, using skills of reasoning and analysis, are able to recognise that attempts to prove the existence of God are futile because they cannot be based on empirical observations or analytic truths. Since the God of classical theism is not ‘animistic’ — cannot be identified with objects or behaviour in the world — there is nothing to observe. The ‘super-empirical’ attributes of God are beyond demonstrative proof, since, for example, how could we prove God’s omnibenevolence or omnipotence? Such attributes are a priori assumed of God.
Ayer, however, believes that he has gone further than this by arguing that the existence of God is not even a matter of probability. Probability entails a degree of likelihood and to establish this demands that we weigh up evidence on either side. So the proposition that God exists would have to be an empirical hypothesis which could be tested by experience and natural evidence. As Ayer has already observed, this is not possible since God is understood as a transcendent being.
Interestingly, this leads Ayer to argue that the position of the logical positivists is not to be confused with atheism or agnosticism, which are both concerned with establishing the probability of God’s existence or nonexistence. Atheism and agnosticism make claims about God’s existence which are understood to be significant propositions that could be true or false. However, Ayer claims that without access to relevant empirical evidence such propositions are meaningless and not based on genuine questions.
A good, technically sound summary of Ayer’s opening position with a clear understanding of how the logical positivist position is distinct from atheism —a point which may be overlooked.
Ayer argues that observations made about the natural world have played an important role in the philosophy of religion. The Design Argument in all its forms draws on regularity in nature, its beauty, fittingness for life and beneficial orderliness as evidence which points towards the existence of God.This a posteriori and inductive argument is used to show that the probability of God’s existence is increased by the orderliness of the world, and extends to incorporate natural moral law imprinted on God’s creation so that humans are without excuse. Such appeal to natural evidence would, ironically, be more satisfying to Ayer than the claims of ‘sophisticated religions’ which have moved God outside the world into the realm of the transcendent.
However, Ayer recognises that observations about regularity in nature are not intended by the religious person to constitute an empirical proposition about God. To some extent he agrees with the religious believer that certain types of phenomena such as regularity in nature could be explained in terms of God if the believer were satisfied that it was ‘necessary and sufficient’ evidence to convey everything they want to say about God, and if ‘there is a requisite regularity in nature’ were exactly the same as saying ‘there is an existent God’.
Similarly, if the believer responded to the occasion of thunder with the assertion ‘Jehovah is angry’ and intended it to be fully interchangeable with the assertion ‘it is thundering’, it is conceivable that their assertions about God could be empirical propositions. However, ultimately the believer will not be satisfied for his claims about God’s existence or attributes to be reduced to claims about nature, and therefore no statement about God can be an empirical proposition.
This is the hardest part of Ayer’s article and the candidate has shown a confident grasp of its complexities.
Ayer recognises that the believer’s claims about God are more complex than propositions reflecting simple empirical manifestations. Rather, the believer’s claims about God are essentially about a transcendent being and this is the nub of Ayer’s opposition to their claims. For Ayer, the terms ‘transcendent’ and ‘metaphysical’ lead to the same problems for language and its meaningfulness. A transcendent being is beyond empirical verification or definition — to do so would amount to making a category error. For the believer, the transcendent nature of God is the essence of his nature, although God may be known through empirical manifestations.
This is at the heart of classical theism, as Donovan observes. Knowing God through experience by intuition is ‘attractive to Christians and consistent with the teaching of the Bible about how God is known’. Moses’ encounter with God at the burning bush was an empirical encounter through which God was made known to him, but God could not be reduced to the burning bush or defined by it. Moses was not told that in future when he saw a burning bush it was to be worshipped as God. Rather, once the bush had drawn his attention the focus was on what he could learn about God quite independent of the bush. It was God’s revelation of himself as ‘I am who I am’ which was, for Moses, a ‘significant proposition’. Although for the believer this presents no problem at all — in fact, it completely reflects the transcendent nature of God — for Ayer this is at the heart of the problem. Without an empirical manifestation which could verify or falsify God’s existence and nature, there is no significant content to the believer’s claims.
Use of illustrative examples outside Ayer’s article shows that the candidate has fully understood the principles.
So, Ayer draws the conclusion that since ‘god’ is a metaphysical term it cannot even be probable that God exists. Metaphysics defies verification since by its very nature it is beyond it but Ayer does not allow it to belong to a different but otherwise significant category of language. Neither did David Hume:
When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? We take in our hand any volume of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)
Ayer’s argument is that matters of metaphysics cannot be demonstratively true or false but neither is their truth or falsity a matter of probability, and nothing can tip the balance in favour of God’s existence or against it.
Any religious language fails the test of the verification principle because there are no observations which can be made by which we can establish any degree of probability. This includes not only propositions such as ‘God loves us’, which experience cannot prove or disprove — since anything could in principle support it or deny it — but also those propositions which have the appearance of verifiability, such as:
■ ‘God’s nature is stamped on his creation.’
■ ‘Whilst the sun rises each morning we know that God loves his creation.’
■ ‘Those who defy God will suffer the due penalty for their sins.’
These statements suggest that there is some state of affairs or events which will ‘prove’ the proposition, but even while we observe the sun rising or the wrongdoer suffering, we do not observe God’s direct action in these events — it is merely implied, and thus the assertion contains no literal significance.
Further exemplification and an excellent quotation from David Hume again show the candidate has learned to think around the issues raised.
There are many implications of Ayer’s views, several of which he identifies himself in the rest of the article, and even though we should be aware that Ayer’s philosophy has long been discredited, it is important to be aware of the potential impact of his ideas.
A simple but effective link into Question (b).
Question (b)
Do you agree with the idea(s) expressed? Justify your point of view and discuss its implications for understanding religion and human experience. (20 marks)
Student’s answer
Ayer is clearly correct on a number of commonsense observations he makes. It is evidently true to say that claims about God’s nature and existence cannot be empirically verified or falsified. All inductive arguments for the existence of God can only suggest a degree of probability (which Ayer also rejects) and involve an inductive leap which leaves them wide open to dispute.
Ayer is aware, however, that believers are inclined to make claims about God as if they can be proved or disproved, and herein lies the problem of religious assertions. I also agree with Ayer regarding the value that he places on science as the means to bridge gaps in knowledge by way of empirical observations and verifiable propositions.
You need to express your own opinion at some point (whether it is genuine or not) and the simplest way to do this is to start with something to agree with.
Ayer exposes some of the implications of this by examining the particular issue of religious experience and how it presents problems of meaninglessness. He observes that the mystics recognise several implications of talking about God which the logical positivists also identified. The mystic argues that God is beyond human understanding and so cannot be described, since he is an object of faith not reason. Ayer suggests that the mystic explains this in terms of a ‘purely mystical intuition’ which means that God cannot be described in terms that are intelligible to the reason.
For Ayer this is a fatal weakness, since if experience of God cannot be defined in intelligible terms, it effectively means that there is nothing to be described — ‘For we know that if he had acquired any information he would be able to express it…’ The mystic is unable to do what Ayer demands and devise an empirical test for his experience, which leaves Ayer to argue that the state of mystical intuition is ‘not a genuinely cognitive state’.
The mystic’s vision does not give any information about the external world, only indirect information about the condition of his own mind. For Ayer, this leads inevitably to the conclusion that the argument for religious experience is ‘altogether fallacious’ and ‘interesting only from the psychological point of view’. Rather than demonstrating that there is any religious knowledge, the mystic is merely providing ‘material for the psychoanalyst’.
Knowledge of the whole article is shown here. The candidate is confident and able to link different parts of the article together.
However, Peter Donovan draws rather different conclusions in ‘Can we Know God by Experience?’ — his study of religious experience as leading to intuitive knowledge of God. He recognises that religious believers who have such an intuitive experience feel able to claim ‘If you really experience God you know he’s real and that’s all there is to it’. He calls this self-certifying knowledge, which is so persuasive to the experient that it justifies taking seriously. He observes that we find intuition attractive as a source of knowledge and although it is a ‘risky business’ to assert that we know something for sure without being able to give reasons for that claim, we do appeal to intuition in everyday matters: ‘I know I have two hands’, ‘I know it’s wrong to let that child starve’.
This psychological certainty is persuasive to us, and gives rise to religious intuitions also, which Donovan argues are ‘particularly attractive to Christians and consistent with the Bible’. Nevertheless, he is aware that because psychological certainty is so important to Christians they must be able to address the philosophical difficulties which arise from it. Psychological certainty (feeling certain) is not the same as rational certainty (being right), and even in human encounters the sense of encounter may be mistaken.
Furthermore, any ‘experience of’ presupposes ‘knowledge about’ — in other words, we must have an I–It relationship towards the object of our experience, before we can have a genuine I–You relationship. Finally, he argues that ‘experience of’ is not the same as ‘knowledge about’, otherwise experience of pregnancy would be sufficient to provide the knowledge of pregnancy that a trained doctor has learned.
Valuable and relevant use of Peter Donovan’s article to make comparisons with Ayer.
Nevertheless, unlike Ayer, Donovan concludes that ‘for all possible criticisms, it doesn’t follow that experiences of God must all be illusory or simple minded nonsense’. Rather, Donovan is aware that religious experiences have proved ‘vital for religious belief’ and ‘have made it plausible for millions of people today’ by generating a ‘sense of knowing God’.
In contrast to Ayer’s acerbic observations about the implications of claiming intuitive knowledge of God, Donovan suggests that the only philosophical problem arises when experience is taken to be the same as selfcertifying knowledge. Popular religious reasoning may well be guilty of this, but otherwise Donovan allows that nothing justifies the conclusion that the claims of intuitive experience should be discarded ‘as a pricked balloon’.
Furthermore, although logical positivism and the verification principle appeared to be an influential tool in the study of philosophy in the early to mid twentieth century, it was ultimately flawed and Ayer himself proposed a weakened version of the principle. Brian McGee, in Confessions of a Philosopher (1997), observed that despite its initial popularity, ‘People began to realise that this glittering new scalpel was, in one operation after another, killing the patient’, as it made it impossible to employ many common types of language without the charge of meaninglessness.
Wittgenstein’s theory of language games seems to solve the problem of how to understand religious language by examining the use of language within its form of life. Just as we couldn’t understand a lion’s language without being part of a lion’s world, neither can we expect to understand religious language without being part of its world. The claims of mystics and visionaries make sense within a world in which an awareness of knowing God is self-authenticating and significant, just as atheists understand the meaning behind both the theists’ and their fellow atheists’ words because, despite differences in belief, they know how language is being employed in the context.
So the implications for religious language need not be as dramatic as Ayer believed in 1936. Whether cognitive or non-cognitive, religious language continues to occupy an important place in both the philosophy of religion and in the dialogue between believers, atheists and agnostics.
The candidate has skilfully worked back to an evaluation of the logical positivist position as a whole and has been able to suggest the implications of its success or failure for religious language and its use today.