OCR training programme
2009-2010
GCE Religious Studies
Get Started A2 – Effective Delivery of
Philosophy of Religion
Falsification
Exploring the confusion
found in a number of
older textbooks and
many student essays.
Falsification
• A number of philosophers had problems with
Logical Positivists. This leads many people to
think that the Falsification Principle is
somehow the opposite side of the coin from
the Verification Principle.
Falsification
• Famous among the critics were Dorothy Emmet
(1904 –2000) and Anthony Flew (1923 - ).
• However to get to the roots of the Falsification
Principle we need to begin by exploring the
work of Karl Raimund Popper (1902 – 1994).
Falsification
• While studying in Vienna, he became
acquainted with – and indeed, friendly with –
many of the leading figures in the Vienna
Circle. But because of his disagreement with
the conclusions of Logical Positivism, he was
never invited to their meetings.
Falsification
• Otto Neurath described Popper as ‘The Official
Opposition.’
• His approach to science, and his opposition to
the principle of verification, were set out in
Logik der Forschung of 1934 (translated as
The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1959).
Falsification
Popper’s opposition to verification theory was
based on the assumption of the Vienna Circle
that what mattered was to be able to prove
scientific propositions true.
Falsification
• Popper pointed out that if we belief that
science is about proving our views to be true,
we would make no progress at all. We would
also have the wrong mindset when conducting
experiments.
Falsification
• When conducting experiments, we should not
look to verify theories, but to falsify them. Only
in that way does science progress – we
recognise, through continual criticism,
weaknesses in our existing theories, discard
them, and try to produce better ones.
Falsification
• If we conducted all our experiments on the
assumption that they would prove our theories
true, we would want to explain away anomalies
and exceptions. But it is the anomalies and
exceptions which tell us that there is
something wrong with our original theory.
Falsification
• What Popper is leading us to is a discussion
about the way we think and the type of
questions we might ask rather than to a
discussion of meaning.
Falsification
•Anthony Flew in An Introduction to
Western Philosophy explains the
point that Popper is making very
clearly:
Falsification
• Popper’s contention was … that, whereas no
theory and no proposition may be accounted
scientific even when it is known to be false, no
theory and no proposition can be properly
presented as even a possible contribution to
science unless its proponents are prepared to
specify what would have to happen, or to have
happened, for it to be falsified; that is, shown to be
false.
Falsification
• Notice we are talking about how scientific
statements can be falsified, not at any point
about whether or not these statements have
meaning.
Falsification
• As Flew puts it:
• Popper proposed his Falsification Principle.
Unlike the Verification Principle of the Logical
Positivists, this was put forward as a criterion
not of meaning but of scientific status.
Falsification
• So why is it an issue for Religious Language?
• To get to the bottom of that we need to look at
the ‘University Debate’:
• ‘Theology and Falsification’
University Debate
• This involved:
•Anthony Flew,
•Basil Mitchell
•and R.M. Hare.
University Debate Anthony Flew
•When teaching this section it is worth
keeping in mind that what Flew was
trying to get at was the idea that
religious believers will go to
extraordinary lengths to stop anything
counting against their faith statements.
University Debate Anthony Flew
• Flew begins by referring to John Wisdom’s
parable of the gardener, from his article ‘Gods’.
• The story is simple. Two explorers come upon
a clearing in the jungle. Some parts look
tended, others do not. In Wisdom’s original
parable, he is making the point that the world
is rather like that.
University Debate Anthony Flew
• In the original, one man takes the view
there is a gardener who comes to tend the
ground, while the other thinks there is not.
Neither can find the gardener, neither
experience anything the other does not, yet
their belief about the clearing is very
different.
University Debate Anthony Flew
• Flew comes to a slightly different conclusion
from Wisdom. He asks what is the difference
between the apparently invisible, intangible,
scentless, soundless gardener and no
gardener at all?
University Debate Anthony Flew
• It looks as if what seemed a genuinely
scientific hypothesis, that a gardener comes to
the clearing, is actually not a genuinely
scientific hypothesis because the believer in
the gardener does not accept falsification – he
claims ever deeper invisibility, but still believes
in the gardener.
University Debate Anthony Flew
• “And in this, it seems to me, lies the peculiar
danger, the endemic evil, of theological
utterance. Take such utterances as ‘God has a
plan’, ‘God created the world’, ‘God loves us
as a father loves his children’. They look at first
sight very much like assertions, vast
cosmological assertions.
University Debate Anthony Flew
•Of course, this is no sure sign that they
either are, or are intended to be,
assertions. But let us confine ourselves
to the cases where those who utter
such sentences intend them to express
assertions.”
University Debate Anthony Flew
• Flew is arguing that the question is about the
status of the sentences, as genuine assertions.
He goes on to say that for an assertion to be
genuine, it must be falsifiable: ‘if there is
nothing which a putative assertion denies then
there is nothing which it asserts either: and so
it is not really an assertion.’
So Flew challenges his fellow speakers
• Just what would have to happen not merely
(morally and wrongly) to tempt but also (logically
and rightly) to entitle us to say ‘God does not love
us’ or even ‘God does not exist’? I therefore put to
the succeeding symposiasts the simple central
questions, ‘What would have to occur or to have occurred to
constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or of the existence of
God?’
University Debate R.M.Hare
Hare’s response is that Flew is
right on his own ground,
arguing instead that religious
beliefs are what he calls ‘bliks’.
University Debate R.M.Hare
• This is his now famous case of an insane
university student who believes all the university
dons are out to kill him. No evidence will dissuade
him – if presented with a gentle and kindly don, he
will see this as evidence only of the diabolical
cunning of a profession trying to engender in him
a false sense of security.
University Debate R.M.Hare
•Hare notes that while the
lunatic’s view can neither be
proven nor disproven, it
profoundly alters the lunatic’s
life. He argues:
University Debate R.M.Hare
• ‘Let us call that in which we differ from this
lunatic, our respective bliks. He has an insane
blik about dons; we have a sane one. It is
important to realize that we have a sane one,
not no blik at all; for there must be two sides to
any argument – if he has a wrong blik, then
those who are right about dons must have a
right one.’
University Debate R.M.Hare
•Hare argues that we all have bliks and
they profoundly affect our lives. Hare
gives the example of driving a car – we
assume that the structure we drive will
remain solid while we do so: we do not
and cannot know this, and can neither
prove nor disprove it.
University Debate R.M.Hare
• Hare is argues that the concept of blik shows
what we are doing when we make a religious
statement. It is not merely a sort of explanation
of the world, but is completely life-changing,
even though unfalsifiable. It is a matter of the
very deepest concern.
University Debate R.M.Hare
•Hare’s position is superficially
convincing, but is vulnerable. Flew
argues that Hare’s view is at odds with
Christian belief and practice. He
argues that the intention of the believer
is to say something about the cosmos:
University Debate R.M.Hare
•Religious utterances may indeed
express false or even bogus
assertions: but I simply do not believe
that they are not both intended and
interpreted to be or at any rate to
presuppose assertions, at least in the
context of religious practice.
University Debate R.M.Hare
• The criticism of John Hick:
•We want to distinguish, in Hare’s
terminology, between right and wrong
bliks. …Hare assumes that one can
make this distinction; for he identifies
one blik as sane and the contrary blik
as insane.
University Debate R.M.Hare
• But there seems to be an inconsistency in his
position here, for a discrimination between sane
(=right) and insane (=wrong) bliks is ruled out by
his insistence that bliks are unverifiable and
unfalsifiable. . If experience can never yield either
confirmation or disconfirmation of religious bliks,
there is no basis for speaking of them as being
right or wrong, appropriate or inappropriate, sane
or insane.
University Debate Basil Mitchell
•Mitchell takes a different approach to
his response to Flew attempting to
maintain that religious statements are
genuinely factual though not
straightforwardly falsifiable.
University Debate Basil Mitchell
• Mitchell’s parable talks of the resistance fighter
who meets a stranger who impresses him deeply.
They spend a night in conversation, during which
the Stranger claims to be the head of the entire
Resistance. The fighter believes him, but is
warned by the Stranger that his faith will be sorely
tested – that at times he will find the man he
trusted apparently working with the enemy.
University Debate Basil Mitchell
• Despite this, and although they never again
share such a conversation, the partisan
persists in his belief that the Stranger is
who he claims to be. He maintains his belief
even when he sees the Stranger in the
uniform of the occupying force.
University Debate Basil Mitchell
Mitchell’s point is that the partisan does not
deny that there is strong evidence against his
belief that the Stranger is who he claims to be.
Mitchell argues that to remain sane, the
partisan must accept the reality of the
evidence against his belief. If he does not, he
is ‘guilty of a failure of faith as well as logic.’
University Debate Basil Mitchell
• If he does not accept that there is strong
evidence against the belief in a loving God,
then the believer is guilty of self delusion: if the
believer does not accept the strength of the
argument, his beliefs become ‘…vacuous
formulae (expressing, perhaps, a desire for
reassurance) to which experience makes no
difference and which make no difference to life’
University Debate Basil Mitchell
But Mitchell does not argue that the
believer just has faith – he has reason
for his faith, which is a belief in the
personal character of the Stranger.
University Debate Basil Mitchell
• Mitchell says:
‘It is here that my parable differs from Hare’s.
The partisan admits that many things may and
do count against his belief: whereas Hare’s
lunatic who has a blik about dons doesn’t
admit that anything counts against his blik.
Nothing can count against bliks.’
University Debate Basil Mitchell
‘Also the partisan has a reason for having in
the first instance committed himself, viz. the
character of the Stranger; whereas the
lunatic has no reason for his blik about dons
– because, of course, you can’t have
reasons for bliks.’
Modern Comparison
Those who have grown up reading the Harry
Potter stories may wish to think about
Professor Snape’s role in the books. Almost
everyone, and especially Harry himself, is
convinced that he is working for Voldemort and
his forces.
Modern Comparison
• However readers are continually told that
Dumbledore trusts him despite all the evidence
to the contrary and readers are given no
reason to distrust Dumbledore. In a
comparison with Mitchell’s partisan the truth
about Snape is kept until the end of the book.
In the end
• Your candidates need to be encouraged to
explore these ideas for themselves and decide
which they wish to believe are true. The
important thing for the examination is to make
sure they do not confuse falsification with
verification.