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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
The world in which we find ourselves is religiously ambiguous. It is possible for different people (as also for the same person at different times) to experience it both religiously and non-religiously; and to hold beliefs which arise from and feed into each of these ways of experiencing. A religious man may report that in moments of prayer he is conscious of existing in the unseen presence of God, and is aware - sometimes at least - that his whole life and the entire history of the world is taking place within the ambience of the divine purpose. But on the other hand the majority of people in our modern world do not participate in that form of experience and are instead conscious of their own and others' lives as purely natural phenomena, so that their own experience leads them at least implicitly to reject the idea of a transcendent divine presence and purpose. If they are philosophically minded, they may well think that the believer's talk is the expression of what Richard Hare has called a blik, a way of feeling and thinking about the world which expresses itself in pseudo-assertions, pseudo because they are neither verifiable nor falsifiable and are therefore factually empty.1 The religious man speaks of God as a living reality in whose presence we are, and of a divine purpose which gives ultimate meaning to our lives. But is not the world the same whether or not we suppose it to exist in God's presence; and is not the course of history the same whether or not we describe it as fulfilling God's purposes? Is not the religious description thus merely a gratuitous embellishment, a logical fifth wheel, an optional language-game which may assuage some psychological need of the speaker but which involves no claims of substance concerning the objective nature or structure of the universe? Must not the central religious use of language then be accounted a non-cognitive use, whose function is not to assert alleged facts but to express a speaker's, or a community of speakers', emotions within the framework of a factually contentless blik, ‘slant’, or ‘onlook’?
page 189 note 1 Hare, Richard M., ‘Theology and Falsification’ in Flew, Antony and MacIntyre, Alasdair, eds, New Essays in Philosophical Theology (London: SCM Press; New York: Macmillan, 1955).Google Scholar Reprinted in numerous places.
page 190 note 1 ‘Theology and Falsification’, op. cit.
page 190 note 2 Braithwaite, R. B., An Empiricist's View of the Nature of Religious Belief (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1955).Google Scholar Reprinted in numerous places.
page 190 note 3 ‘Theology and Falsification’, op. cit. Cf. Mitchell's, The Justification of Religious Belief (London: Macmillan; New York: Seabury Press, 1973), chap. 1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
page 190 note 4 ‘Theology and Falsification’, op. cit.
page 191 note 1 ‘Theology and Verification’, Theology Today, vol. 17 (1960).Google Scholar Reprinted in numerous places.
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page 192 note 1 In his recent article, ‘John Hick and the Concept of Eschatological Verification’ (Religious Studies, June 1976), Michael Tooley speaks of ‘the verifiability principle’ as though there were a single such criterion available to be applied to theology. He seems to be taking his stand somewhere back in the 1930s. From this position he argues that the existence of persons, both human and divine, as ‘experientially transcendent entities’, is in principle unverifiable and therefore that the theory of eschatological verification fails. He claims that ‘given the verifiability principle, there is a very plausible argument which demonstrates that no factual meaning can be assigned to talk about experientially transcendent entities’ (p. 198), whether human or divine. I would agree that a conception of verification which is so restrictive as to exclude statements about human persons will also exclude statements about God. However Tooley has himself elsewhere argued, surely rightly, that such a concept of verification is untenable (‘Theological Statements and the Question of an Empiricist Criterion of Cognitive Significance’ in Diamond and Litzenburg, eds, The Logic of God, op. cit.). It is because I also take this view that in both my 1960 article and in the present essay I have defined verifiability more broadly, in terms of removal of grounds for rational doubt.
page 193 note 1 God and Other Minds (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967), p. 168.Google Scholar
page 193 note 2 ‘God and Verification’, Canadian Journal of Theology, vol. 10, 1964.Google Scholar Reprinted in Diamond and Litzenburg, eds, The Logic of God, op. cit.
page 193 note 3 ‘Some Major Issues and Developments in the Philosophy of Science of Logical Empiricism’, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 1 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956), p. 15.Google Scholar
page 195 note 1 ‘Theology and Verification’, reprinted in Diamond and Litzenburg, eds, The Logic of God, op. cit. p. 205.
page 196 note 1 Faith and Knowledge, 2nd ed. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966, and London: Macmillan, 1967), chap. 9Google Scholar; Arguments for the Existence of God (London: Macmillan, 1970, and New York: Herder & Herder, 1971), chap. 7.Google Scholar
page 196 note 2 Michael Tooley says, ‘If Hick is claiming both that religious people now have experiences which provide them with knowledge, or at least warranted belief, about the existence of God, and that theological statements can be shown to be verifiable, and hence factually significant, only by appealing to the possibility of certain experiences after death, his overall position would seem to be inconsistent’ (op. cit. p. 182). But surely there is no inconsistency here. There is a present belief, based on present religious experience, in the reality of God; and there is the philosophical question whether, under a reasonable verifiability criterion, this is a genuinely factual belief; to which the answer is that it is part of a system or organism of beliefs which includes verifiable eschatological expectations. These expectations ensure that what seems to the believer to be an affirmation of existence is not, in reality, merely a factually contentless blik.
page 197 note 1 Rev. 21:3.
page 197 note 2 Rev. 21:4
page 197 note 3 Rev. 21: 22.
page 199 note 1 ‘Theology and Verification’, op. cit. p. 206.
page 200 note 1 Kai Nielsen based his main critique of the theory of eschatological verification on the premise that the verification of a religious belief must be in non-religious terms (‘Eschatological Verification’, op. cit.), and Michael Tooley in his recent article likewise assumes that ‘the description of the experiences that verify any statement should ultimately be couched in purely observational terms’ (op. cit. p. 189), by which in this case he means ‘purely nontheological terms’ (p. 190). This seems to me fundamentally mistaken. The verification of a factual statement must be in terms of experience; but human experience is not only not confined to the registering of bare sense data, but it is even doubtful whether it ever takes this form. Here Tooley is again taking us back to the 1930s.
page 200 note 2 Michael Tooley asks, ‘Could a person understand what experiences Hick has in mind here [referring to the eschatological situation] if he did not understand theological language? If not, reference to these purportedly verifying experiences will not explain the meaning of theological statements to one who does not already understand them’ (op. cit. p. 188). However I have not suggested that the eschatological situation will explain the meaning of theological statements to one who does not already understand them. I begin from the fact that there is already, in this present life, a putative awareness of God, expressed in religious statements which the religious believer understands. (This is not of course to say that he ever wholly understands God.) These statements are part of a unitary by of beliefs which include eschatological beliefs, and it is these latter that give factual-assertion status to the system as a whole.
page 200 note 3 ‘Religious Faith as Experiencing-as’a in Vesey, Godfrey, ed., Talk of God (London: Macmillan; New York: St Martin's Press, 1969).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Reprinted in Hick, John, God and the Universe of Faiths (London: Macmillan; New York: St Martin's Press, 1973)Google Scholar, and elsewhere.
page 202 note 1 Gregory Kavka, ‘Eschatological Falsification’, op. cit.
page 202 note 2 Hick, John, Death and Eternal Life (London: Collins, 1976; New York: Harper & Row, 1977)Google Scholar, chaps. 6, 14, 15 and 19.
page 202 note 3 Ibid. chap. 13.
page 202 note 4 Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologica, 1 Q. 7.Google Scholar The basic considerations supporting classical theism's attribution of infinity to God are summarized by Owen, H. P. in Concepts of Deity (London: Macmillan; New York: Herder & Herder, 1971), pp. 12–13, 49–59.Google Scholar
