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Mode, Azim, Ramy, and Niya asked:
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We are students from Maldives (where philosophical resources are scarcely available and
philosophical enthusiasm hardly found and philosophical expressions highly restricted). we would like
to know whether a god as held by major religions of the world exists and and to know whether what
the logical positivists say about the meaninglessness of such questions as the existence of a god is
really true?
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============
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To tellyou that "a god as held by major religions of the world exists" or doesn't exist would be as
helpful as telling you that the mind is a substance distinct from the body— or telling you that it isn't.
There are brilliant thinkers on every side of every philosophical question, including the question of the
existence of God, even the question of how to think about God. These are matters of worldview, not
of fact, and one comes to judgment about them by thinking, not consulting experts. "Is there a God?"
is not like "Is there, in 2002, a King of France?"
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The movement called Logical Positivism was the expression of a methodological bias that quickly put
itself out of business about 70 years ago. It tried to banish metaphysics from philosophy by identifying
meaningful, i.e., intelligible, discourse with talk about what can be verified empirically. By
"empirically," however, it meant through sense perception.In so doing, Logical Positivists implicitly
affirmed that reality was ultimately a certain wayand therefore could notinclude certain facts (like the
theistic God, for example). Unfortunately for them, sense perception is no more able to verify the
implicit metaphysics of logical positivism than it can the explicit metaphysics of the most ambitious
idealist. A less empirical approach to philosophy could hardly be imagined.
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Tony Flood
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I most certainly can't answer whether god exists! If by 'the god of the major religions' you mean the
one god of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, then I think that the argument from evil is hard to argue
against (it says that the existence of evil is not compatible with an all-good, all-knowing and
all-powerful god). However, other major religions do not have this problem, and there are ways
around the argument from evil, if one denies any one of the three properties of being all-good,
all-knowing and all-powerful.
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The logical positivists' Principle of Verifiability says that the only statements that are meaningful are
those for which we can show how they would be verified. Basically, this means that only logically true,
and scientific, statements have meaning. The statement 'god exists' (they say) does not fit into either
category and hence is meaningless. The main problem with this view is that the Principle of
Verifiability itself is neither logically true, nor a scientific statement, and hence must be meaningless
by its own lights.
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Tim Sprod
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