The verification principle offers no real challenge to religious belief. Discuss.
Religious believers suffer with a problem of needing to explain the meaning of religious language, and what such language means when talking about a transcendent reality called God. The verification principle claims that language is only meaningful if it can be verified by sense observation, empirical evidence or it is a tautology as these are non-cognitive. This was devised by logical positivists who said the evidence that we obtain from our senses is the highest form of evidence and with logic, it is the only real knowledge. They believed that philosophers had no business to say anything about the world and any questions should be answered by science.
The movement of verificationism was influenced largely by science, and stressed the importance of confirming any statement with evidence, especially that from the senses. One of logical positivisms presuppositions is that ‘language mirrors the world’, if a statement could not be observed to be true with empirical sense evidence then it is factually meaningless. Verificationists and logical positivists do not have a particularly high opinion of religious claims of God, worldly knowledge or anything beyond our experience. For a verificationist or those such as Moritz and Schlick, language tells us something about the way the world is, and the way a statement becomes meaningful is shown in the method of its verification, therefore language that talks about God is utterly meaningless, it has no meaning in a factual sense since it cannot be backed up by sense evidence and it is not a tautology. All “knowledge” that cannot be verified using the verification principle such as metaphysical speculation should according to logical positivists should be abandoned. They also believed that religion was a system of belief which depended for its credibility on its capacity to offer causal explanations for things about the world.
Ayer supported verificationism, however he did not say that people couldn’t make types of statements that are of importance to them, just that these statements have no factual significance. He then suggested the need of a procedure for deciding if a statement is verifiable or not. The statement that is being tested whether it is verifiable or not is called a ‘putative proposition’. He distinguished ‘practical verifiability’ which referred to statements which could be tested in reality, from ‘verifiability in principle’ which are statements that are meaningful and verifiable in principle, but in practice we cannot verify these statements as we lack the technology or knowledge. Next Ayer distinguished ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ verification. Strong verification applied to anything that can be verified conclusively by observation and experience, whereas weak verification refers to statements that can be shown to be probable by observation and experience. He gives the example ‘all human beings are mortal’. It is impossible to demonstrate this statement in a ‘strong’ sense without killing every human being who lives or will live since it is impossible to do, but few people would doubt that all human beings are mortal, as all human observations to date suggest the truth of the statement ‘human beings are mortal’. If we support Ayer’s view then religious statements are nonsense if referring to God defined as infinite, impersonal and transcendent, because statements about God do not tell people anything about the world that is verifiable. He argues that believers saying they have seen God are simply recounting a set of emotions that are religious. However it could be said that there are signs of design in the world but this becomes a problem as we question what satisfies the weak verification criteria.
Ayer goes on to refine his weak and strong verification. He rejected the use of ‘putative statements’ and changed his definition of the principle of verification to ‘a statement is held to be literally meaningful if and only if it is either analytic or empirically verifiable’. This was changed because his distinction wasn’t a real distinction as the strong form of verification could not apply to any statement. He then said that single experiences are what happens and when you have the experience it is a reality, it actually happens. You may not be able to describe it particularly well, but its occurrence is what makes it verifiable. He also rejected his previous definition of weak verification as ‘far too liberal, since it allows meaning to any statement whatsoever’, Ayer then suggested two new criteria - directly and indirectly verifiable. If something is directly verifiable it is either an observation statement, or is such that in conjunction with one or more observation-statements it entails at least one observation-statement which is not deducible from these premises alone. What this means is that a directly verifiable statement is that which is verifiable by an observation. By indirectly verifiable he meant a statement that is not directly verifiable or analytic, one way to understand this is a statement could be verified if other directly verifiable evidence could support it.
However, even still it could be argued that weak verification principle and indirect verification allow for some religious claims to be true or at least meaningful, researchers have suggested that there is clear evidence that such experiences as those of a religious nature happen and that a God causing experience cannot be ruled out. Symbols of religion could also be weak forms of verification. Hick argued that talk of God isn’t meaningless because its claims can be verified in principle, he said that the truth of God’s existence is verifiable in principle if true, but not falsifiable if false, at the end of things (eschatologically). ‘Hick imagined two travellers on the journey through life to the Celestial City. The journey is unavoidable. One traveller believes that there is a celestial City at the end of the journey and views difficulties along the way as learning activities and good events as gifts from the ruler of the Celestial City. The other traveller does not believe there is a Celestial City. This traveller views good events as welcome and bad events to be endured. Whichever one is right at the end of the journey, their views could be verified.’ This is because Celestial city is a possibility, since there is a journey to the city which is unavoidable and has to lead somewhere. Also many philosophers have pointed out that claiming ‘statements are only meaningful if verifiable by sense observation’ is itself unverifiable. You cannot demonstrate this principle by sense observation. Finally it is also quite possible for a statement to be meaningful without being verifiable, such as that of Schrodeingers cat.

To conclude, the verification principle does not offer any challenge to religious belief, since firstly religious belief is not based on fact, it is based on a faith and trust in God which has nothing to do with scientific evidence. Secondly, the statement itself is unverifiable, it cannot be demonstrated by sense observation and so is nonsensical to apply this principle to other statements. Finally the different versions of Ayers verification allow for religious experience to be verifiable, especially the first version of his weak verification principle.