A History of Western Philosophy and Theology by John M. Frame

A History of Western Philosophy and Theology by John M. Frame

Author:John M. Frame [Frame, John M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: MichaelA
ISBN: 9781629950860
Publisher: P&R Publishing
Published: 2017-02-21T05:00:00+00:00


Fig. 12.2. Transcendence and Immanence in Logical Positivism

Some years after the heyday of positivism, Antony Flew925 developed a similar argument against Christianity that many tried to refute.926 He presented a parable as follows:

Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. In the clearing were growing many flowers and many weeds. One explorer says, “Some gardener must tend this plot.” So they pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. “But perhaps he is an invisible gardener.” So they set up a barbed-wire fence. They electrify it. They patrol with bloodhounds. (For they remember how H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man could be both smelt and touched though he could not be seen.) But no shrieks ever suggest that some intruder has received a shock. No movements of the wire ever betray an invisible climber. The bloodhounds never give cry. Yet still the Believer is not convinced. “But there is a gardener, invisible, intangible, insensible to electric shocks, a gardener who has no scent and makes no sound, a gardener who comes secretly to look after the garden which he loves.” At last the Sceptic despairs, “But what remains of your original assertion? Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?”927

Flew’s parable raises the positivist challenge in a new form: How does a God whose existence cannot be verified or falsified empirically differ from no God at all? Doesn’t this parable raise again the question whether the existence of God is a “meaningful” proposition? But this question presupposes an epistemology, a form of empiricism, and that epistemology is open to the same objections as those of Hume, Russell, and Carnap that we have considered. Consider, then:

1. Given Christian presuppositions, Christianity is indeed verifiable. All facts speak of God. Christianity is also falsifiable: if Christ is not risen, then our hope is vain. If God’s promises fail, God is not true.

2. But Christianity resists arguments that purport to falsify Christianity from a non-Christian presupposition.

3. Christianity resists falsification from non-Christian assumptions because, like every other worldview, including positivism, it is itself a presupposition; it claims the right to judge evidence.928

4. Flew’s verification principle is also a presupposition, and should be evaluated like other presuppositions.

5. But Flew’s verification principle, like those discussed earlier, is incoherent as an attempt to define the limits of meaningful discourse.

As I mentioned, hardly anyone defended the program of logical positivism after 1970. Jon Wheatley was not too far off the mark when he said, “Logical positivism is one of the very few philosophical positions which can easily be shown to be dead wrong, and that is its principal claim to fame.” 929

OTHER PHILOSOPHIES OF SCIENCE

This chapter is mainly devoted to twentieth-century philosophies of language analysis. But it should be evident from our discussions so far that many twentieth-century philosophers focused more closely on science than on language per se. As we have seen, many philosophers in the Enlightenment were deeply interested in science, and that has continued since.



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