PHILOSOPHICAL LANGUAGE & THOUGHT
A statement is held to be meaningful if and only if it is analytically or empirically verifiable - A.J. Ayer
How does this affect the Ontological Argument?
Ever since David Hume and Immanuel Kant, philosophers have agreed that synthetic and analytic statements are completely different things and you can't get one out of the other. This is sometimes called "Hume's Fork". Kant expressed this as the analytic-synthetic distinction, which is what it is mostly known as today. |
Ha! You were expecting a fork for eating. No, it's a tuning fork, with two tines (prongs): the analytic and the synthetic.
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YES
The Verification Principle exposes "God-talk" for the waste of time that it is. Unverifiable statements can never be proven true or false, so why bother arguing? We can dispense with the Ontological Argument and move on to more important topics.
The Verification Principle assumes that analytic statements don't tell us facts about the world. They just tell us what words mean. If "God exists" is an analytic statement then it can never tell us facts about God. You can't define God into existence. You need empirical evidence to show things exist.
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NO
If belief in God is meaningless, then disbelief in God is meaningless too. The Verification Principle leaves the problem where it was before but by giving up on the Ontological Argument you are in fact siding with non-believers. This shows Ayer's atheist bias.
The Verification Principle is widely viewed as mistaken by most philosophers. William Quine showed that the distinction between synthetic and analytic isn't as clear-cut as Hume and Kant thought. There seem to be statements that are both synthetic (factual) and analytic (logical) and "God exists" might be one of them.
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