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Keywords

Vienna Circle:

A group of philosophers who met in Vienna and gave rise to the Logical Positivist movement.

Logical Positivism:

The philosophical strand of thought which focuses upon the relationship between philosophy and language.

Verificationism:

A statement must be verifiable for it to be meaningful.

Basis of thought

Verificationism suggests that religious language is meaningless. The only meaningful statements that can be made are:

Analytic, a priori statements like tautologies or mathematics.

Empirically verifiable, synthetic a posteriori statements which can be directly assessed.

This idea was inspired by Wittgenstein's Tractatus, which suggested that meaningful language had to be defined by the real world. They also followed the tradition of John Locke and David Hume in arguing that truth is found empirically. Theological thought is just the 'God of the gaps'.

Difficulties

Too rigid:

One cannot make statements about history as all evidence is secondhand by nature.

Scientific laws made meaningless:

Any scientific absolute is difficult to prove in the way they require.

Swinburne:

No absolute is meaningful at all, making it difficult to talk about the world.

John Hick:

God can be eschatologically verified.

Art:

Statements about art or the subjective become meaningless.