The fourth part of my review of the late Dr. Greg Bahnsen’s book Always Ready discusses the chapter of his book entitled “The Problem of Religious Language.”

This part isn’t going to be very long. The arguments Bahnsen discusses aren’t all that interesting to me. Possibly because of that, I don’t see many faults in his arguments against them.

Bahnsen starts off thusly:

In philosophical circles during much of the twentieth century, two issues which have dominated discussions in philosophy of religion - and thus two of the most popular polemics against the intellectual credibility of Christian commitment - have centered on the meaningfulness of religious discourse.

…

The challenge made by many modern philosophers has been that talk of this kind is not really meaningful (in any cognitive sense), even if it has the deceptive appearance of being so. For years and years and years it may have seemed that when Christians used language about God and salvation, it was possible to make pretty good sense out of what they were saying. Not everybody believed that what Christians would utter was true, of course, but the God-talk of believers was at least thought to make (or entail) assertions which carried rationally intelligible, if not also spiritually intoxicating, meaning. But not so, according to many philosophers of recent vintage.

He discusses two avenues for this argument: verificationism and falsificationism. I’m hardly an expert in philosophy, but I don’t find logical positivism (the verificationism section is based on claims from that school of thought) that interesting or useful. I’m only going to comment on one thing:

A. J. Ayer was perhaps the best known logical positivist in the English world. In the first edition of his famous book, Language, Truth and Logic, Ayer maintained that a sentence is meaningful when, in conjunction with other premises, an observation statement can be deduced which could not have been derived from the other premises alone.[1] This was entirely unhelpful. With a little imagination, a logician could use this criterion and show that any statement whatsoever can pass the test[2] - in which case Ayer’s criterion of verifiability allows all statements to count as meaningful!

Keeping the Faith

It will not surprise the reader that Ayer attempted to remedy this situation by revising the verifiability criterion in the second edition of his famous book. This maneuvering reveals that Ayer was not a disinterested scholar, seeking in some neutral fashion to follow the evidence wherever it happened to lead. He had a particular conclusion in mind from the outset, thus desiring to shape and revise his espoused principles until they would (hopefully) prove what he originally wanted. Unbelievers are not very subtle about letting their own religious prejudices or presuppositions show. They too “keep the faith”!

This is sort of ridiculous. Revision is a sign of faith? We have to get the arguments for something exactly correct the first time, otherwise we’re being dogmatic about it? Bizarre.

The falsificationism section deals with Antony Flew’s famous Theology and Falsification essay. Bahnsen summarizes it like so:

Flew was suspicious of religious discourse because he noticed that believers tend to hold on securely to their convictions, even when they are aware of apparent counter-evidence to those beliefs. They qualify and defend, then qualify and defend some more. It begins to look as though they would guard their theological claims against any and all objections or rebuttals. But if so, that would make religious convictions impervious to falsification - would render the religious language compatible with every conceivable state of affairs in the world. Since God-talk would not amount to denying anything, there would be nothing intellectually at stake in theological utterances. And thus, being unfalsifiable, they would not amount to genuine or meaningful assertions in the first place, suggested Flew. This is the problem with religious language.

Then Bahnsen states his challenge:

Many subsequent writers who have reflected upon Flew’s criticism of the meaningfulness of religious discourse have observed in one way or another that he failed to distinguish adequately between a proposition logically resisting falsification and the person who believes that proposition psychologically resisting its falsification.

A proposition or linguistic claim which is logically compatible with any and all states of affairs could, indeed, be said to resist falsification; as Flew properly observed, in theory nothing could then conceivably contradict the proposition. It should be judged to be vacuous. But a person can resist being persuaded that his belief has been falsified by counter-evidence, even when the proposition he believes logically contradicts (rules out) certain states of affairs. He should be simply judged to be tenacious.

Flew confused a characteristic of human behavior (diligently defending one’s beliefs) with a conceptual characteristic of some linguistic utterances (logically never needing a defense). And in so doing, he apparently did not notice that his polemic against “religious” discourse was in fact a polemic against all “committed” discourse - the utterances and linguistic responses of people who maintain certain beliefs dogmatically.

Immediately we see a problem. Flew is not really criticizing the argument he sets up in his parable. Qualification and defense is fine, except when it gets to the point where the statement is so qualified that it no longer really says anything. As Flew concludes in his essay:

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?”

Bahnsen doesn’t address this in any form. It’s not clear that it’s a valid objection to the existence of God, but Bahnsen doesn’t even attempt to argue that it isn’t. He continues on with his confusion:

Now then, scientists often display intellectual stubbornness with respect to their theories about the natural world. They can be quite committed to the conclusions they have reached and published. When evidence or reasoning is urged contrary to their views, they defend or qualify those views, and many times “dig in their heels” against refutation.[1] This is not usually taken as a mark that their scientific theories must be vacuous of any significant claim about the world - thus, being cognitively meaningless. It is usually just taken as a mark of a deep-seated belief about which they are strongly persuaded (or at least personally motivated). The logical status of the belief in question is not affected by the personal demeanor of the individual propounding or defending it (that is, the degree of his readiness to abandon the belief).

Flew is making the specific assertion that religious language is beyond falsification. He is not saying that the act of qualification and defense makes something meaningless. He’s saying that some things, through that process, can become meaningless statements. Bahnsen completely misses Flew’s point.

Bahnsen continues with a new line of argument:

Antony Flew’s commentary upon the parable of the invisible gardener gains its persuasiveness from the myth that the beliefs held by people are accepted or rejected against the empirical evidence in a one-by-one fashion. That is, it is thought (erroneously) that we observationally test and rationally evaluate only one individual belief at a time. Supposedly the scientifically directed scholar takes a single proposition as isolated from every other proposition he would assert to be true, and then compares it to the empirical evidence which is available (as though the relevance and strength of such evidence are independently and indisputably established in advance).

This is, however, not at all an accurate description of the way in which people actually come to beliefs or test them against the empirical evidence. Moreover, from a conceptual standpoint, the picture of one-by-one scrutinizing of beliefs for empirical falsification is entirely artificial and impossible.

Huh? This is an odd argument. Where is Bahnsen going with this?

The network of all these beliefs together encounters the tribunal of any empirical experience.[2] When a conflict is detected between this network of beliefs and empirical experience, all we know is that some kind of adjustment in one’s beliefs will need to be made to restore order or consistency. But there is no way to determine in advance what specific change a person will choose to make in order to eliminate the conflict within his thinking.

If Sam says that he saw a ladybug on the rose, but his friends all say that they saw no ladybug, which of his beliefs will he surrender? There are any number of possibilities. Maybe his friends do not know the difference between aphids and ladybugs. Maybe there was a spot on his glasses. Maybe the lighting was not right. Maybe he does not understand the use of the English word “rose.” Maybe his friends are on drugs. Maybe they were looking at a different rose. Maybe the ladybug quickly flew away. Maybe he is dreaming. Maybe our senses deceive us. Maybe only the “pure of heart” can see gentle ladybugs, and his friends are perverse…. There are so many possibilities for correcting previous assumptions, ranging from what will seem reasonable to what seems to be fanatic or extreme. The point is simply that it is ambiguous or unclear just what the counter-evidence to Sam’s remark will turn out to falsify.

Still not getting it. We’ll keep going:

Remember the story of the psychiatrist who was treating a man who believed that he was dead. Counseling the poor man about his neurosis seemed to get nowhere. Finally one day the psychiatrist decided to use an empirical test to convince the patient of his error. He asked the man whether dead men bleed, to which the man said no. At that point the psychiatrist pricked the man’s finger with a pin and told the man to look and see: he was bleeding, so he could not be dead. To this the patient responded that he must, then, have been wrong: dead men do bleed after all! The psychiatrist in this joke mistakenly thought that the bleeding finger would be counter-evidence that would falsify one particular belief of the patient (viz., that he was dead), when in fact it was equally possible that it falsified a related belief instead (viz., that dead men do not bleed).

Since empirical experience or evidence never decisively falsifies any particular belief within a person’s network of convictions, it turns out that it is possible (even if it seems unreasonable to others) that a person can choose to treat any of his beliefs - about anything whatsoever - as central convictions relative to which any other belief should first be surrendered when counter-evidence is offered. That is, given the fact that a whole network of beliefs, rather than isolated individual beliefs, meet the test of observational evidence, then any belief may be treated as unfalsifiable. This is a characteristic of all beliefs. Falsifiability is not inherently a feature of any specific belief or a belief on any specific subject. It is as true of “religious” beliefs (narrowly understood) as it is of beliefs about the natural world.

Bahnsen’s confusion argument is creeping into this argument, it seems. In the ladybug example he’s shown that it’s difficult to falsify a particular belief. So what? In the psychiatrist example he shows that some people will still hold to beliefs that are not falsifiable. No shit.

In the end, Bahnsen is just bringing his presuppositional argument back in. Bahnsen wants us to see those unfalsifiable beliefs in the final paragraph as presuppositions. In the previous part of my review I argued that we can have presuppositions without God (indeed, they underlie the concept of God) that are basically self evident. Anything that doesn’t follow from those presuppositions should be treated as something that has to be justified with reason or empirical evidence. Flew’s argument depends, like most other philosophical arguments, on some basic presuppositions about logic and evidence. Bahnsen wants to attack those presuppositions, but he does it in a roundabout manner. At the core, we’re just getting TAG all over again.