OCR training programme 2009-2010 GCE Religious Studies Get Started A2 – Effective Delivery of Philosophy of Religion

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.


• 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.


• 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.


• 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?


• 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.


• “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.


•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.”


• 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.


•Hare notes that while the lunatic’s view can neither be proven nor disproven, it profoundly alters the lunatic’s life. He argues:


• ‘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.’


•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.


• 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.


•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:


•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.


• 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.


•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.


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.’


• 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’


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.


• 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.’


‘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.

Documents

OCR training programme 2009-2010 GCE Religious Studies Get Started A2 – Effective Delivery of Philosophy of Religion