A.J. Ayer "Language Truth Logic and God," 1946
Language Truth Logic and God
The following excerpt was published in
Language Truth and Logic (1946).
by A. J. Ayer
  he criterion which we
use to test the genuineness of apparent statements of fact is the criterion of
verifiability. We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person,
if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to
express—that is, if he knows what observations would lead him, under certain
conditions, to accept the proposition as being true, or reject it as being false.
If, on the other hand, the putative proposition is of such a character that the
assumption of its truth, or falsehood, is consistent with any assumption whatsoever
concerning the nature of his future experience, then, as far as he is concerned, it
is, if not a tautology, a mere pseudo-proposition.
The sentence expressing it may be emotionally significant to him;
but it is not literally significant. And with regard to questions the procedure is
the same. We inquire in every case what observations would lead us to answer the
question, one way or the other; and, if none can be discovered, we must conclude that
the sentence under consideration does not, as far as we are concerned, express a
genuine question, however strongly its grammatical appearance may suggest that it
does. As the adoption of this procedure is an essential factor in the argument of
this book, it needs to be examined in detail. In the first place, it is necessary to
draw a distinction between practical verifiability, and verifiability in principle.
Plainly we all understand, in many cases believe, propositions which we have not in
fact taken steps to verify. Many of these are propositions which we could verify if
we took enough trouble. But there remain a number of significant propositions,
concerning matters of fact, which we could not verify even if we chose; simply
because we lack the practical means of placing ourselves in the situation where the
relevant observations could be made.
A simple and familiar example of such a proposition is the
proposition that there are mountains on the farther side of the moon. No rocket has
yet been invented which would enable me to go and look at the farther side of the
moon, so that I am unable to decide the matter by actual observation. But I do know
what observations would decide it for me, if, as is theoretically conceivable, I
were once in a position to make them. And therefore I say that the proposition is
verifiable in principle, if not in practice, and is accordingly significant. On
the other hand, such a metaphysical pseudo-proposition as "the Absolute enters into,
but is itself incapable of, evolution and progress," [F.H. Bradley, Appearance
and Reality] is not even in principle verifiable. For one cannot conceive of an
observation which would enable one to determine whether the Absolute did, or did not,
enter into evolution and progress. Of course it is possible that the author of such
a remark is using English words in a way in which they are not commonly used by
English-speaking people, and that he does, in fact, intend to assert something which
could be empirically verified. But until he makes us understand how the proposition
that he wishes to express would be verified, he fails to communicate anything to us.
And if he admits, as I think the author of the remark in question would have admitted,
that his words were not intended to express either a tautology or a proposition which
was capable, at least in principle, of being verified, then it follows that he has
made an utterance which has no literal significance even for himself. […]
It should now be clear that the only information which we can
legitimately derive from the study of our aesthetic and moral experiences is
information about our own mental and physical make-up. We take note of these
experiences as providing data for our psychological and sociological
generalisations. And this is the only way in which they serve to increase our
knowledge. It follows that any attempt to make our use of ethical and aesthetic
concepts the basis of a metaphysical theory concerning the existence of a world
of values, as distinct from the world of facts, involves a false analysis of
these concepts. Our own analysis has shown that the phenomena of moral experience
cannot fairly be used to support any rationalist or metaphysical doctrine whatsoever.
In particular, they cannot, as Kant hoped, be used to establish the existence of a
transcendent god.
This mention of God brings us to the question of the possibility
of religious knowledge. We shall see that this possibility has already been ruled
out by our treatment of metaphysics. But, as this is a point of considerable
interest, we may be permitted to discuss it at some length. It is now generally
admitted, at any rate by philosophers, that the existence of a being having the
attributes which define the god of any non-animistic religion cannot be
demonstratively proved. To see that this is so, we have only to ask ourselves what
are the premises from which the existence of such a god could be deduced. If the
conclusion that a god exists is to be demonstratively certain, then these premises
must be certain; for, as the conclusion of a deductive argument is already contained
in the premises, any uncertainty there may be about the truth of the premises is
necessarily shared by it. But we know that no empirical proposition can ever be
anything more than probable. It is only a priori propositions that are
logically certain. But we cannot deduce the existence of a god from an a
priori proposition. For we know that the reason why a priori propositions
are certain is that they are tautologies. And from a set of tautologies nothing but
a further tautology can be validly deduced. It follows that there is no possibility
of demonstrating the existence of a god.
What is not so generally recognised is that there can be no way
of proving that the existence of a god, such as the God of Chrisianity, is even
probable. Yet this also is easily shown. For if the existence of such a god were
probable, then the proposition that he existed would be an empirical hypothesis. And
in that case it would be possible to deduce from it, and other empirical hypotheses,
certain experiential propositions which were not deducible from those other
hypotheses alone. But in fact this is not possible. It is sometimes claimed, indeed,
that the existence of a certain sort of regularity in nature constitutes sufficient
evidence for the existence of a god. But if the sentence "God exists" entails to
more than that certain types of phenomena occur in certain sequences, then to assert
the existence of a god will be simply equivalent to asserting that there is the
requisite regularity in nature; and no religious man would admit that this was all
he intended to assert in asserting the existence of a god. He would say that in
talking about God, he was talking about a transcendent being who might be known
through certain empirical manifestations, but certainly could not be defined in
terms of those manifestations. But in that case the term "god" is a metaphysical
term. And if "god" is a metaphysical term, then it cannot be even probable that a
god exists. For to say that "God exists" is to make a metaphysical utterance which
cannot be either true or false. And by the same criterion, no sentence which
purports to describe the nature of a transcendent god can possess any literal
significance.
It is important not to confuse this view of religious assertions
with the view that is adopted by atheists, or agnostics. For it is characteristic of
an agnostic to hold that the existence of a god is a possibility in which there is
no good reason either to believe or disbelieve; and it is characteristic of an
atheist to hold that it is at least probable that no god exists. And our view that
all utterances about the nature of God are nonsensical, so far from being identical
with, or even lending any support to, either of these familiar contentions, is
actually incompatible with them. For if the assertion that there is a god is
nonsensical, then the atheist's assertion is that there is no god is equally
nonsensical, since it is only a significant proposition that can be significantly
contradicted. As for the agnostic, although he refrains from saying either that
there is or that there is not a god, he does not deny that the question whether a
transcendent god exists is a genuine question. He does not deny that the two
sentences "There is a transcendent god" and "There is no transcendent god" express
propositions one of which is actually true and the other false. All he says is that
we have no means of telling which of them is true, and therefore ought not to
commit ourselves to either. But we have seen that the sentences in question do not
express propositions at all. And this means that agnosticism also is ruled out.
Thus we offer the theist the same comfort as we gave to the
moralist. His assertions cannot possibly be valid, but they cannot be invalid
either. As he says nothing at all about the world, he cannot justly be accused of
saying anything false, or anything for which he has insufficient grounds. It is only
when the theist claims that in asserting the existence of a transcendent god he
is expressing a genuine proposition that we are entitled to disagree with him.
It is to be remarked that in cases where deities are identified
with natural objects, assertions concerning them may be allowed to be significant.
If, for example, a man tells me that the occurrence of thunder is alone both
necessary and sufficient to establish the truth of the proposition that Jehovah is
angry, I may conclude that, in his usage of words, the sentence "Jehovah is angry"
is equivalent to "It is thundering." But in sophisticated religions, though they
may be to some extent based on men's awe of natural process which they cannot
sufficiently understand, the "person" who is supposed to control the empirical
world is not himself located in it; he is held to be superior to the empirical
world, and so outside it; and he is endowed with super-empirical attributes. But
the notion of a person whose essential attributes are non-empirical is not an
intelligible notion at all. We may have a word which is used, as if it named this
"person," but, unless the sentences in which it occurs express propositions which
are empirically verifiable, it cannot be said to symbolize anything. And this is
the case with regard to the word "god," in the usage in which it is intended to
refer to a transcendent object. The mere existence of the noun is enough to foster
the illusion that there is a real, or at any rate a possible entity corresponding
to it. It is only when we enquire what God's attributes are that we discover that
"God," in this usage, is not a genuine name.
It is common to find belief in a transcendent god conjoined with
belief in an after-life. But, in the form which it usually takes, the content of
this belief is not a genuine hypothesis. To say that men do not ever die, or that
the state of death is merely a state of prolonged insensibility, is indeed to
express a significant proposition, though all the available evidence goes to show
that it is false. But to say that there is something imperceptible inside a man,
which is his soul or his real self, and that it goes on living after he is dead,
is to make a metaphysical assertion which has no more factual content than the
assertion that there is a transcends god.
It is worth mentioning that, according to the account which we
have given of religious assertions, there is no logical ground for antagonism
between religion and natural science. As far as the question of truth or falsehood
is concerned, there is no opposition, between the natural scientist and the theist
who believes in a transcendent god. For since the religious utterances of the
theist are not genuine propositions at all, they cannot stand in any logical
relation to the propositions of science. Such antagonism as there is between
religion and science appears to consist in the fact that science takes away one of
the motives which make men religious. For it is acknowledged that one of the
ultimate sources of religious feeling lies in the inability of men to determine
their own destiny; and science tends to destroy the feeling of awe with which men
regard an alien world, by making them believe that they can understand and
anticipate the course of natural phenomena, and even to some extent control it.
The fact that it has recently become fashionable for physicists themselves to be
sympathetic towards religion is a point in favour of this hypothesis. For this
sympathy towards religion marks the physicists' own lack of confidence in the
validity of their hypotheses, which is a reaction on their part from the
anti-religious dogmatism of nineteenth-century scientists, and a natural outcome
of the crisis through which physics has just passed.
It is not within the scope of this enquiry to enter more deeply
into the causes of religious feeling, or to discuss the probability of the
continuance of religious belief. We are concerned only to answer those questions
which arise out of our discussion of the possibility of religious knowledge. The
point which we wish to establish is that there cannot be any transcendent truths of
religion. For the sentences which the theist uses to express such "truths" are not
literally significant.
( A.J. Ayer,
Language Truth and
Logic, New York: Dover Publications, 1946, pp. 35-37, 114-18. )
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