'The challenges to Logical Positivism provide convincing arguments to non-religious believers&#3

Logical Positivism derived from the work of the Vienna Circle, who said that only logical and empirically verifiable statements could be meaningful. These included tautological, analytic, synthetic and mathematical statements. Everything that lat outside of these was not meaningful. They came up with the verification principle which was 'the meaning of a statements is its method of verification'. This appears to be logical and convincing.

However, this in itself is not logically and empirically verifiable and so falls flat. This is convincing to a non- religious believer because it does not rely on religious to undermine the challenge.

Ayer also said that verification did not account for historical statements and said that if you knew how to verify it, then it is meaningful. This would appeal to non-religious believers because it allow for history to be meaningful. However, this could still pose a threat to religious believer if the religious language is not rooted in historical empirically and logically verifiable fact.

Falsification was also proposed by Karl Popper and said that anything that could be proved wrong or falsified was meaningful . If it were outside, then it was not.

Anthony Flew used Wisdom's Parable of the Gardener and concluded that due to the mystery of God, then falsification was impossible if a believer did not know what they were trying to disprove. He concluded that believers would 'die the death of a thousand qualifications'.

Mitchell and Hare however similarly said that it was not about if religious language could be falsified but rather the impact of the belief had on a religious person.

Mitchell said further that believers did take into account problems but it was a matter of faiths as to how meaningful religious language still was to them. To a non-believer, this defence would be less convincing as they would view Mitchell's argument as vague.

Swinburne also attempted to challenge falsification by stating that somethings are just true regardless of what is there to back or prove it wrong.He used the analogy of the toys in the cupboard to further illustrate this.

This may be a convincing challenge to falsification for a believer because Swinburne does not rely on faith to back up his argument. However, it seems to only fit the anti-realist theory of true because it coheres to what we think is true. A relist non-believer would demand to see how this challenge corresponds to what they know is true, then it is no longer convincing. They would want, cognitive, empirical truth.

How also do know that those things are true? It's all very well to say basic things like the grass is green, but once it goes beyond the realm of the physical and into the metaphysical, then it is harder to define what is true if there is no universal agreement.

Lastly, things may be accepted as true with no evidence for or against this, but this may not be the case in the future.

In conclusion, the challenges to Logical Positivism in the sense of verification appear to be mroe convigin to non-religious believers than falsification.

This is because they are logical and have no basis in religions. They also allow verification to be re-evaluated through the work of Ayer such that history can be considered as meaningful .

However, challenges to falsification would appear too vague and also rest in religion, which would not convince the non-religious believer.

Swinburne's challenge would not convince a realist non- believer who would demand cognitive objective truths gathered empirically.

Basically the way that I answered this was like the previous essay. You have to talk about verification and falsification, the solutions to them and then analyse the solutions.

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