2.91 Those who argue to the contrary are employing an implicit cri-terion of verifiability to refute it.
2.911 Implicit operations are always more dangerous than explicit operations, for at least the latter occur in the open epistemolog-ically and can far more readily be evaluated.
2.92 But is it not better to speak (à la Popper) of “falsifiability” and not of “verifiability"?
2.921 Falsification is indeed vital, for it clears the field of chimerical players in the game of truth.
2.922 However, since there are in theory an infinite number of possi-ble worldviews, to eliminate even a significant number of them will never, by process of elimination, yield the true worldview (if such there be).
2.923 Moreover, as in Popper’s own case, exclusive concentration on falsification leads to a perpetually tentative view of the world contradicted by the day-to-day necessity of decision-making.
2.9231 “Popper’s own philosophy of science had this element of para-noia in it. Because what he used to teach us is that the nearest thing to a true theory is one that hasn’t betrayed you yet” (Toul-min).
2.924 Even more importantly, the same criteria will inevitably apply to verification as to falsification, so one gains little by insisting on the latter in preference to the former.
2.93 By verification we mean: the evaluation of the potential truth-value of a proposition by asking, “Can the one claiming it to be
veracious offer some means of confirming its truth, i.e., can she indicate what observations should lead us to accept the propo-sition as true or reject it as false?”
2.931 Here, the classification employed by the Analytical Philoso-phers has considerable utility: truth claims are either formal (“analytical”) assertions, factual (“synthetic”) assertions, or as-sertions that are neither formal nor factual (“meaningless” or
“nonsensical” statements).
2.932 Analytical claims, the truth of which depends on their defini-tion (e.g., asserdefini-tions of formal logic, pure mathematics, and tautologies) are verified by seeing whether or not they logically follow from their premises.
2.9321 Examples: 2 + 2 = 4; Euclidean proofs; the assertion that “All husbands are married.”
2.9322 It is a category mistake to think that any observation of the world can verify or falsify such assertions: no sociological sur-vey will establish whether indeed all husbands are married.
2.933 Synthetic claims, on the other hand, do make assertions about the world, and only by factually vetting those assertions can one determine their truth or their falsity.
2.9331 Example: “There are five husbands in this room”; “Napoleon lost the Battle of Waterloo”; Abraham Lincoln was fatally shot in Ford’s Theatre, Washington, D.C., rather than expiring after a slip and fall accident in Peoria, Illinois”; “Jesus claimed to be God, predicted that he would rise from the dead, and was in fact resurrected.”
2.94 It will be observed that verifying a factual claim does not re-quire laboratory experiments or repeatability, as desirable as these are where possible and appropriate.
2.941 A. J. Ayer eventually saw that historical claims could hardly be regarded as little more than pseudo-synthetic—and therefore meaningless—because it is very difficult to repeat the Battle of Waterloo under laboratory conditions.
2.942 Even in the “hard” sciences, experiment and repeatability are not always possible: think of palaeobotany (where the plants are no longer available for laboratory work) or astronomy
(where, owing to the speed of light, one often observes galaxies no longer in existence and therefore immune to experiment).
2.95 Verification does not arbitrarily force data into the Procrustean bed of a single investigative method; it does, however, insist that where there is no way, even in principle, to confirm or dis-confirm a truth claim, such a claim be classed as nonsensical or meaningless.
2.951 Not, to be sure, meaningless in absolute terms: such claims can be very meaningful psychologically (they can tell us much about the claimant) or sociologically (they can likewise pro-vide exceedingly valuable insights into the groups maintaining such claims).
2.9511 “Imagine that there is a town in which the policemen are re-quired to obtain information from each inhabitant. e.g. his age, where he came from, and what work he does. A record is kept of this information and some use is made of it. Occasionally when a policeman questions an inhabitant he discovers that the latter does not do any work. The policeman enters this fact on the record, because this too is a useful piece of information about the man” (Wittgenstein).
2.96 In the realm of traditional philosophy, as the analytical philos-ophers maintained, verification can eliminate much dead wood.
2.961 “Philosophy is the disease of which analysis should be the cure!” (Feigl).
2.962 Examples:
2.9621 F. H. Bradley’s neo-Hegelian assertion that “the Absolute en-ters into, but is itself incapable of, evolution and progress.”
2.9622 Heidegger’s existentialist assertion that “the Nothing itself nothings.”
2.963 In such instances, one is reminded of the comment written on a colleague’s paper by physicist Wolfgang Pauli: “This isn’t right; it isn’t even wrong."
2.97 Verification has no less a valuable role to play in the religious sphere.
2.971 One might say “a more valuable role,” since there are far more people caught in the net of bad religion than in the net of bad
philosophy, and the former often creates more personal and so-cietal havoc than the latter (cf. 11 November 2001).
2.972 Examples (by no stretch of the imagination an exclusive list) of religious claims falling under the axe of non-verifiability:
2.9721 “You can’t say Tao exists / You can’t say Tao does not exist / But you can find it in the silence, / In wu-wei [deedlessness]”
(Taoist poet Ch’ang-tzu, translated by Robert Van Gulik).
2.9722 Brahma is All.
2.9723 Mohammed caused the moon to come down and pass through his tunic, and this occurred so quickly that no-one noticed that the moon was missing (“The Prophet’s Miraculous Night Jour-ney").
2.9724 God is the Wholly Other (Rudolf Otto).
2.9725 Jesus rose from the dead in Geschichte (supra-history, which cannot be investigated by the techniques of the historian), not in ordinary, verifiable Historie (Karl Barth).
2.9726 God is Being Itself (Paul Tillich).
2.9727 All illness and evil are an illusion (Christian Science).
2.9728 Smedley is the reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian sage (East-ern and New Age thinking).
2.98 The “Flew-Wisdom parable” serves as a classic reminder of the need to verify religious claims.
2.981 “Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. In the clearing were growing many flowers and many weeds. One explorer says, ‘Some gardener must tend this plot.’
The other disagrees: “There is no gardener.’ So they pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. ‘But perhaps he is an invisible gardener.’ So they set up a barbed-wire fence.
They electrify it. They patrol with bloodhounds. (For they re-member how H. G.Wells’ The Invisible Man could be both smelt and touched though he could not be seen.) But no shrieks ever suggest that some intruder has received a shock. No move-ments of the wire ever betray an invisible climber. The blood-hounds never give cry. Yet still the Believer is not convinced.
‘But there is a gardener, invisible, intangible, insensible to elec-tric shocks, a gardener who has no scent and makes no sound,
a gardener who comes secretly to look after the garden which he loves.’ At last the Sceptic despairs, ‘But what remains of your original assertion? Just how does what you call an invisi-ble, intangiinvisi-ble, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imag-inary gardener or even from no gardener at all?’”
2.99 Attention must be paid to a standard criticism of verifiability, to wit, that principles of verification are not themselves testable by the criteria set forth by those principles.
2.991 It is claimed that since verification principles are neither true by definition nor factually testable—and thus, neither analytic nor synthetic in nature—they themselves must be meaningless.
2.992 A verification principle (like methodological principles in gen-eral, including induction and scientific method, treated earlier) is a linguistic proposal (Hempel).
2.992l “This does not imply that the principle is regarded as an ana-lytic or necessarily true statement. A principle that expresses a linguistic recommendation is no doubt closely related to a cor-responding analytic statement, but the recommendation itself is not tautological and uninformative. A recommendation or a de-cision has a different logical status; it is not successful by being true or unsuccessful by being false” (R. W. Ashby).
2.993 As linguistic proposals, verification principles are perforce not themselves subject to verification.
2.9931 Were they verifiable by the terms of the principles themselves, the result would be perfect circularity; were they verifiable by some independent criterion of verifiability, one would arrive at infinite regress.
2.994 Sound methodological proposals are accepted on a necessitar-ian basis, in that whenever the critic herself is forced to make decisions of a crucial nature in ordinary life, she is found to be employing the very proposal she is criticising.
2.995 And so:
2.9951 The critic will not invest in shares when the company in ques-tion refuses to allow anyone to look at the company books.
2.9952 The critic supports Popper’s “Open Society” as against régimes where there can be no presentation and testing of diverse polit-ical positions.
2.9953 The critic refuses to believe in the existence of ghost who ap-pears in the Haunted House only when no psychical investiga-tors are present.
2.9954 The critic hesitates to marry a girl who refuses to give him any information on her background—or who says that if he wants to check up on her, this demonstrates a lack of real love toward her.
2.9955 The critic does not join a sect which declares that space crea-tures beyond the range of human telescopes wish the members to engage in collective suicide to enter a Fifth Dimension of blessedness.
2.996 It follows that to discard verification by criticising the original form of the verifiability principle (“Der Sinn eines Satzes ist die Methode seiner Verifikation”—Wittgenstein; “The mean-ing of a proposition is the method of its verification”—Schlick) is to miss a most important epistemological truth: that claiming something is not the equivalent of proving it.
3 Historical, jurisprudential, and scientific standards of evidence offer the touchstone for resolving the religious predicament by establishing the truth claims of Chris-tian proclamation.