Karen Armstrong Quote

During the 1950s, Logical Positivists such as A. J. Ayer (1910–91) asked whether it made sense to believe in God. The natural sciences provided the only reliable source of knowledge because it could be tested empirically. Ayer was not asking whether or not God existed but whether the idea of God had any meaning. He argued that a statement is meaningless if we cannot see how it can be verified or shown to be false. To say There is intelligent life on Mars is not meaningless since we can see how we could verify this once we had the necessary technology. Similarly a simple believer in the traditional Old Man in the Sky is not making a meaningless statement when he says: I believe in God, since after death we should be able to find out whether or not this is true. It is the more sophisticated believer who has problems, when he says: God does not exist in any sense that we can understand or God is not good in the human sense of the word. These statements are too vague; it is impossible to see how they can be tested; therefore, they are meaningless. As Ayer said: Theism is so confused and the sentences in which ‘God’ appears so incoherent and so incapable of verifiability or falsifiability that to speak of belief or unbelief, faith or unfaith, is logically impossible.2