A.J. Ayer
A.J. Ayer (1910-1985) - "Freddie" to his friends - was a British philosopher famous for promoting Logical Positivism. Ayer traveled to Vienna and studied with the "Vienna Circle" of Logical Positivists. On returning to Britain, he wrote his best known work, Language, Truth & Logic (1936) when only in his mid-twenties. In later life, Ayer supported atheism and Tottenham Hotspurs, but is reported to have had a near-death experience in his later years.
A.J. Ayer is a key scholar for issues in Religious Language.
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He was undoubtedly one of the liveliest figures on the British philosophical scene in his time and, when he appeared on it, it was in need of enlivening - Anthony Quinton
Philosophical Language: The Design Argument
British philosopher A.J. Ayer used Logical Positivist ideas to develop the Verification Principle:
A statement is held to be meaningful if and only if it is analytically or empirically verifiable - A.J. Ayer
What Ayer means is that meaningful statements (Ayer sometimes says "literally significant" statements) are ones which can be translated into factual observations ("empirically verifiable") or logical observations ("analytically verifiable").
These statements are VERIFIABLE: you can check the first one by looking at the roses; you can check the second and third by consulting an abacus or a dictionary.
Statements that aren't verifiable in this way are, according to Ayer, "meaningless" or "nonsensical".
Ayer argues that religious language (he calls it "God-talk") is always meaningless, because God can't be factually observed or logically deduced. This means that religious language seems to be telling us something about the world, but it isn't really. It has no factual or logical content at all. It's "just a bunch of words".
If we are describing unusual patterns or regularities in nature, we are making factual statements. Ayer thinks it is perfectly meaningful to say that the human eye is staggeringly complex or the probability of life evolving on Earth is mindbogglingly unlikely. Because these are factual statements, they are meaningful statements: they communicate something.
But when we move to the conclusion that there is a Designer, who exists outside the physical universe and cannot be perceived by the 5 senses, Ayer thinks we are moving to a meaningless statement that doesn't communicate anything at all.
- A factual observation might be, "These roses are red"
- A logical observation might be, "2 + 2 = 4" or "A bachelor is an unmarried man"
These statements are VERIFIABLE: you can check the first one by looking at the roses; you can check the second and third by consulting an abacus or a dictionary.
Statements that aren't verifiable in this way are, according to Ayer, "meaningless" or "nonsensical".
Ayer argues that religious language (he calls it "God-talk") is always meaningless, because God can't be factually observed or logically deduced. This means that religious language seems to be telling us something about the world, but it isn't really. It has no factual or logical content at all. It's "just a bunch of words".
If we are describing unusual patterns or regularities in nature, we are making factual statements. Ayer thinks it is perfectly meaningful to say that the human eye is staggeringly complex or the probability of life evolving on Earth is mindbogglingly unlikely. Because these are factual statements, they are meaningful statements: they communicate something.
But when we move to the conclusion that there is a Designer, who exists outside the physical universe and cannot be perceived by the 5 senses, Ayer thinks we are moving to a meaningless statement that doesn't communicate anything at all.
if the sentence "God exists" entails no more than that certain types of phenomena occur in certain sequences, then to assert the existence of a god will be simply equivalent to asserting that there is the requisite regularity in nature; and no religious man would admit that this was all he intended to assert - A.J. Ayer
Ayer is asking what the statement "God exists" means. If it means that there is order in nature, then Ayer agrees with it. For Ayer, "God exists" means "Nature is orderly". This is verifiable.
But religious believers mean something more than that. For them, "God exists" means that something beyond nature (literally, something metaphysical) is responsible for this order. Ayer thinks this is a meaningless thing to say. Statements about metaphysical beings cannot be verified.
If Ayer is right, then the Design Argument is a waste of time. It's trying to draw a metaphysical conclusion from physical premises and you can't do that. This is a powerful attack on the validity of the Design Argument.
But religious believers mean something more than that. For them, "God exists" means that something beyond nature (literally, something metaphysical) is responsible for this order. Ayer thinks this is a meaningless thing to say. Statements about metaphysical beings cannot be verified.
If Ayer is right, then the Design Argument is a waste of time. It's trying to draw a metaphysical conclusion from physical premises and you can't do that. This is a powerful attack on the validity of the Design Argument.