RLE

Question 1

What is thread 1?

Answer 1

Ayer’s verification principle
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Hick’s Eschatological verification
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If I have a body in heaven, that body wouldn’t be me

Question 2

What is thread 2?

Answer 2

Flew’s falsification principle
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Hare’s lunatic student
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This is not what most religious believers are doing

Question 3

What is thread 3?

Answer 3

Maybe Mitchell has a better response to Flew
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Some fundamentalists refuse to take on counter arguments

Question 4

What is Ayer’s verification principle as applied to Religious language?

Answer 4

• A statement is meaningful iff it is true by virtue of meaning or empirically verifiable
• Religious claims like ‘God loves me’ aren’t true or false by definition as it is true in virtue of how the world is
• They aren’t empirically verifiable as there is no test that could be done to verify the truth of or falsity of statements like ‘God loves me’

Question 5

What is hick’s eschatological verification

Answer 5

• Hick agrees with the VP
• But he thinks religious statements are verifiable
• it is possible to die and go to heaven, and there is a possible experience that we can have that would verify the statement

Question 6

What is a duplicate of me wouldn’t be me, and so can’t verify claims I made?

Answer 6

• If I have a physical body in heaven, I would have to be a duplicate ( as I still have a corpse on earth)
• If God were to have made a mistake and accidentally left me alive on earth and made a duplicate in heaven, most people would say that that duplicate and me on earth are not the same.
• So this means when God doesn’t make this mistake, that duplicate of me is not me, so would not be able to verify the statement I had on earth when I was alive.