Antony Flew, before his conversion to theism, wrote an article in which he argued that religious assertions such as “God loves his creatures” are in fact meaningless, because there is nothing that could happen that would cause the believer to deny the assertion. But if there is no state of affairs that would warrant a denial of the assertion, this must be because there is no state of affairs that is excluded by the statement. But every assertion excludes its contradiction; hence, the original statement must not actually be asserting anything, and is therefore meaningless.
This is, of course, plainly absurd. It is absurd even if we grant, for the sake of argument, that there is nothing that could happen that would cause the believer to deny the statement. This is evident simply from the fact that the argument proves too much: innumerable examples can be given of this kind that are plainly quite meaningful:
“It is possible that the sun will not rise tomorrow.” Now, some people might deny that this is possible, based for instance on prior experience. But there are also many people (e.g. Hume) who would maintain that we can never definitely rule out possibilities such as the sun’s not rising tomorrow. Clearly this does not make the statement any less meaningful as proposed by people of the latter sort compared to the former.
“Some human being stepped on this patch of ground exactly 10,000 years ago.” We could conceive of evidence that might rule this out in certain specific cases, but in most cases it is simply not possible to know. Thus, nothing that happens could rule out the statement. Again, this does not prevent it from having a perfectly clear meaning.
And so on and so forth. Some people who believe in conspiracy theories such as that the moon landing was faked, or 9/11 was an inside job, also fit Flew’s description quite well. Does this mean that it is meaningless for them to say that the moon landing was faked?
An interesting thing about Flew’s position is that, if true, it would devastate many assertions made by his (at the time) fellow unbelievers. Bart Ehrman, for instance, basically argues that there is no event that could happen such that it would be rational to ascribe it to supernatural causes rather than natural ones. According to Flew’s argument, Ehrman’s assertion that miracles don’t happen is therefore meaningless.
At the most fundamental level, the argument is obviously false inasmuch as it is based principally on the fact that any assertion excludes its contradiction. On this level, there is evidently one and only one thing that would warrant the denial that God loves his creatures; namely, God’s not loving his creatures. But Flew would obviously not have accepted this, which makes me believe that, if pressed, his argument would ultimately have reduced to the rather tired verificationist claim that an assertion is meaningful only if it could be theoretically disproven by empirical evidence. And this goes back to the problem discussed in the prior posts, namely the completely baseless assumption that the physically observable is all there is.
I agree that that dude is wrong, but your arguments don’t address his point. The point is that if there is no possible state of affairs which could falsify the statement, then the that statement is meaningless. So any event which may or may not have happened may or may not be able to be verified by us; but this is a de facto statement, which does not preclude a possible state of affairs in which it could be verified. Put an other way: sure, in fact, we have no idea if someone stepped here or not 10,000 years ago, but there is a state of affairs which is possible (although not actual) in which we could know. Same with conspiracies. Same with any particular contingent event.
But with statements about God, he is saying, things are different. There is no possible state of affairs in which statements about God could be verified. I don’t think this really proves that statements are meaningless if they cannot possibly be verified, because I don’t think meaning has anything to do with verifiability, but which intentionality, verifiable or not.
The interesting question, I think, is if there is a state of affairs which could cause one to deny that God is good. Supposing, per impossiblie that God did not love his creatures. Would we be able to know that? What evidence would we have that this was the case?
There is no possible state of affairs that would disprove that “every statement excludes its contradictory.” Therefore the statement is…meaningless?
This brings out Bunthorne’s point, that Flew takes “true” as synonymous with “empirically true,” when in fact many things are known a priori or by other non-empirical means.
And this is the root of Mike’s point that the true does not mean the verifiable (which would require that all truth be empirical) but the correlation between mind and reality.
Oops. Forgot I for a moment that I’m an ignoramus. Started talking like a prof.
Scoozie!