Flew on "God Talk"

Ayer's Verificationist Rejection of God Talk

Ayer argued that "God talk" is literally meaningless. Sentences that refer to God do not have any meaning.
This is a consequence of a theory of meaning—verificationism.

According to verificationism a sentence is meaningful provided there is a method of verifying it.
An important consequence of this theory is that

If there is no method for verifying a sentence, then the sentence is meaningless.

So, on Ayer's theory, "God exists" turns out to be meaningless because there is no method for verifying it.
Why is that? God by definition is supernatural—beyond the empirical world. His existence cannot be verified in the way that an apple, chair, or person can be verified.

Just as important, on Ayer's theory of meaning "God does not exist"—the atheist's belief—also turns out to be meaningless. "God exists or God does not exist"—the agnostic's belief—also turns out to be meaningless. Ayer is therefore skeptical of the whole enterprise of talking about God. If, as an atheist, you take yourself to be making a substantive claim when you deny the existence of God, as you might deny the existence of cantaloupe in your fridge, then according to Ayer, you are making a meaningless claim.

So according to Ayer it is unreasonable to believe that God exists.  But the unreasonability of the theist's belief rests wholly in the meaninglessness of the theistic proposition.  He's not pointing out the poverty of evidence for theism or an atheistic argument like the problem of evil.  He's pointing out that believing "God exists" doesn't make any more sense than believing that "green thoughts sleep furiously."  It's not reasonable to believe meaningless strings of words.

Swinburne's Objection to Verificationism

Ayer's theory of meaning, verificationism, has been soundly rejected by philosophers. Swinburne gives several of the standard objections. The important upshot of these objections is that

If verificationism is right, then too many sentences turn out to be meaningless.

Indeed, Swinburne's article is an attempt to weaken verificationism in various ways to get around this problem. But in the end verificationism has to be rejected, and along with it, Ayer's argument to the conclusion that God talk is meaningless.

Flew: God Talk Dies a Death of a Thousand Qualifications

As I described in class, I think we should see the failure of verification as the historical background for Flew's article. The verificationists attempted to show that "God Talk" was suspect, but there are good reasons to reject verificationism. But even if we reject the verificationist attack on God talk, there might still be a viable form of skepticism about God talk in the near neighborhood. This is the territory explored by Flew.

Flew's attack on God-talk doesn't rest on a generic theory of meaning like verificationism. He does not insist that claims like "God exists" are (initially at least) meaningless. These appear to be quite substantial, meaningful claims. But Flew isolates a quite intuitive point about how a claim can be stripped of meaning by a process of qualification. He gives the Gardener Example to illustrate. At the end of the qualification process Flew asks, "What remains of the original assertion that a Gardener exists? Just how does an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?"

In Flew's view, to qualify a claim is to amend it in such a way as to render it compatible with something which apparently showed the claim to be false. For example, the believer amends the claim about the gardener to a claim about an invisible gardener in order to make the claim that the gardener exists compatible with the fact that no gardener has been seen walking the grounds.

The process of qualification can be halted at a stage where something remains of the original assertion. That is, qualifying a claim doesn't always strip away its meaning. Qualification is a danger, however, since if taken too far, nothing remains that will show the claim to be false (that's just the point of qualification after all). And according to Flew, if there is nothing that will show the claim to be false, then nothing is said. (Think of the gardener again.)

Flew thinks that theistic propositions are in special danger of dying by qualification. He specifically considers the way in which "God cares for us" gets robbed of meaning when the theist qualifies it to deal with apparent counterexamples. That is, in response to the problem of evil the theist doesn't allow any apparent counterexample to her claim about God's love count as evidence against her view. Thus, there's nothing left at the end to the claim that "God loves us" because nothing has been allowed to show that the claim is false.

It is an open question, however, whether Flew is right that theistic propositons always are qualified to a point that they are rendered meaningless.