Dr Greg Bahnsen - Seminary Apologetics: Religious Language (Part 28)

This message is a continuation of the previous tapes. Talk about persons, things or events which transcend the physical world must be forbidden. Such talk must not even be countenanced as meaningful. On the other hand, the Christian, as I've indicated, also has convictions about the nature of reality. God is the Spirit who created the world. And in terms of that view of reality, men are obliged to live and speak in a certain way. They're to offer praise to to their Maker for all things, not talking as though there is anything more certain or more authoritative than him. So the positivist has one view of reality and an ethic that goes with it that controls his speaking. The Christian has another view of reality and an ethic that goes with it that controls his speaking. The logical positivist and the Christian both have worldviews. To put it briefly, just a hint for those of you who are lost. I'm at level two in the checklist. I'm just trying to show people, look, we've both got worldviews here. Notice that you got a certain view that controls your speech. I have a certain view that controls my speech. Now, is it possible that the verification principle could disqualify the meaningfulness of the Christian's worldview as a worldview and not do equal damage to the positivist worldview as a worldview as well? Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Now we're doing internal critique at the coherence level. If you really do hold to this principle, then haven't you refuted yourself as strictly empirical, as the logical positivist may wish to be, that is wanting to stick close to observational particulars? Even he cannot escape using philosophical notions or abstract principles in his reasoning and theorizing. The key component in the verificationist challenge to religious language was, naturally enough, the verification principle itself. Notice that the verification principle is a rule. It's a standard crucial to the worldview of the logical positivist. Accordingly, the Christian apologist has to ask whether the verification rule, the verification principle itself, is either one, a trivial truth of logic and semantics, or is it a sentence that can be empirical, empirically confirmed? Because on their approach, if it's not one of those, it's meaningless. Clearly, the answer is no to both of the options, in which case the verificationless challenge to Christianity undermines itself. If it undermines anything, it destroys itself. It's always an embarrassing position to be in. As a philosopher, if my approach is functional and successful at all at destroying my approach. Yes, sir. To save this village, we had to destroy it. What this replied to the verification principle as a weapon against religious language and intelligibility shows in particular is that verificationism was nothing but a rationalization of religious prejudice. And this prejudice against God talk was so openly faithful foolish that it self destructed. It ruled out its own meaningfulness along the way of trying to say Christians can't be speaking meaningfully. None of what I've said can you find quote unquote in the Bible. But isn't this what Paul was saying? Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools. Well, let's talk about the dedicated faith of the positivist here. Now let's go a little bit further. For all of his intellectual hostility to religion and Christianity, the verificationist was clearly just as religious in his devotion to his underlying presuppositions as was any devotee of Christianity. For logical positivism, the practice of natural science, with its impressive results was perfectly acceptable just the way it is. Its authority and supremacy were taken for granted in the same way that the Christian takes the Bible's ultimate authority for granted. Natural science did not call for critical appraisal and possible correction or reform any more than the Christian thinks the Bible has its errors to be rectified. What I'm getting at here is logical positivists, they just assume there's no problems in our system, it's the ultimate authority, so it can't have any problems. Well, as a Christian, that's the way I proceed too. I say, well my system is ultimate authority, so I'm not worried about correcting its errors. I don't think it has any. Instead, according to logical positivism, the only thing natural science required was to have its empirical basis elucidated. And that's what the verification principle was, an attempt to do likewise. The Christian simply feels the Bible needs to be elucidated and explained where its value and truth should be obvious to any honest hearer. I don't think there's any defects in the Bible. I need to go and show it up. I simply need to explain the Bible. Logical positivism. There's no defects in science. All we need to do is explain the logic of science. Logical positivism was ironically then very much like a religious faith, a faith in natural science, we might call it scientism. This became very apparent when the positivist attempt to elucidate the strictly empirical foundation of natural science came to grief over the self refuting character of the verification principle. Now we all want to be open minded, reasonable Men, Right. What should the Positivist have done when his esteemed verification principle was utterly obliterated by self reputation? Should have given up his positivism, right? Hey, guess what? He didn't. When the elucidation failed, the logical positivist did not relinquish his original faith in natural science at all. He acted like a true believer. He held onto that commitment to science regardless of his philosophical problems. I want you to feel the irony of that because over and over again that's what is said about us. We're true believers. Even though we have these problems with our faith, we hold on to it tenaciously. Yeah. And so do you, Mr. Positivist. Of course, this dedicated faith, ecological positivist in natural science had not been acquired through the rigorous application of anything like the scientific method. Commitment to the foremost authority of natural science was not itself scientifically founded. It was a personal leap of faith. I know that professors in the university are not going to come before their classes and openly admit this. Why do people who are religiously dedicated to natural science. Religiously dedicated? It's because they rigorously prove that dedication from science? No, it usually arises either from impressive results that they've seen in science, and so they say, boy, that's the sort of thing I want to give my life to. Or it comes from a kind of hostility to things which are not scientific, like religion. And so I'm going to give my life to science. But where it doesn't come from is the rigorous application of scientific method. We have a self authorizing ultimate commitment. Which is what? Not self authorizing when all is said and done. Because science doesn't authorize science in the way that we see it practiced by the positivist. The other embarrassing thing about using the verification principle to challenge the meaningfulness of any language about theology or metaphysics or ethics is that the principle was simultaneously too narrow and yet too broad. Too narrow and yet too broad. First it was too narrow and restrictive because it ruled out sentences which any reasonable man, even the Positivist, would be willing to assert as meaningful. Let me give you a sentence like that. There is a past. Every person has a mother. Most sentences are virtually unassailable. And the only problem is they aren't verifiable. The verification principle would have resulted in judging the intended result of natural science. The darling of the logical positives remembered itself to be meaningless. Because you see, it's characteristic of natural science to aim to make universally quantified states. The aim of the scientist is to say all Whales are mammals, or to generalize laws which are likewise universal in character, such as in all cases water expands upon freezing because of their universal character. However, no such statement can be fully verified by any finite person or finite group of researchers. In that case, scientific generalizations would fall into the limbo of meaninglessness. This is getting really embarrassing. There's philosophers delight in doing this for our scientific buddies. You know, wait a minute. If you say that to be meaningful it must be verifiable, then what do we do with the results of science? Like all whales are mammals, you can verify that it also proved impossible for dedicated logical positivists to successfully reduce even the simplest observation sentences completely to reports of sense data. The attempt by the positivist to reduce observation sentences to sense data sentences would be like an apple is on the table became akin to a set of qualities A, B, C and following is that X, Y, Z, that is three dimension specifications at T, that is a temporal specification. So let me give it to you in English, not just in the logical notation. A set of qualities is at a three dimension specification at a temporal specification. But even Rudolph Carnap's famous efforts to perform this kind of reductionistic translation were left encumbered with the language of logic and the language of math, that is that had to use set language. And it was encumbered with the language of location is act. The language of sets and the language of location are not defined by sense data. They had to be left undefined in alien expressions which didn't express sense data. See how bad this is getting? It's reductionistic to say an apple is on the table means the qualities of red brown spherical are at three dimension specification and a temporal specification. It's embarrassing to say that's what that sentence means. It doesn't get reduced to that. But you can't even reduce it to that, because is at is not a sense data remark and sets are not sense data remarks. And thus the verification principle did not in the end prove friendly to those advocating it, since it ruled out expressions and generalizations they would have wanted to retain as meaningful. Logical positivists have a dedicated faith in natural science. And yet their own verification principle would have rendered the program, procedures and results of natural science itself meaningless. In a conspicuous way, the verification principle became unreasonably restrictive for the positives. And yet, on the other hand, there was a sense in which the verification principle proved embarrassingly open ended and allowed too many expressions the privileged status of qualifying as meaningful. This rendered it unreasonably inclusive and it's not so much that I'm proud of what I'm telling you here, but I do wish you all had some background in philosophy so you had some appreciation. This position is getting the stuffing kicked out of it. Because first you dance it this way and say, see, this is too narrow. And then you say, oh, by the way, it's also too broad. I mean, it just doesn't have anything going for it. A.J. eyre, a Y E R, was perhaps the best known logical positivist in the English world. In the first edition of his famous book Language, Truth and Logic, Eyre maintained that a sentence is meaningful when in conjunction with other premises, an observation statement can be deduced which could not have been derived from the other premises alone. That was entirely unhelpful. With a little imagination, as logicians pointed out, a logician could use that criterion and show that any statement whatsoever can pass the test. In which case, Ayres criterion of verifiability allows all statements to count as meaningful. Time is short and probably your backsides are limited to have me go through all the logic of that. But my point very simply is AIR tried to say this is the verification principle. And he stated it in such a way that any sentence, with a little manipulation, can pass the test of being verifiable. Any sentence. In the second edition of his book, he tried to come back from that devastating observation. And then a logician, one of the best in the 20th century, Alonzo Church, wrote a very brief, as I recall, maybe three quarters of a page review in which he totally obliterated the second version of it. This is really discouraging, doesn't it, Bob? At the Positivist, they weren't good logicians and good philosophers. They at least could keep the faith. Maybe it won't surprise you that Eyre attempted to remedy the situation when he published his book by just revising the criterion in the second edition of his famous book. Does that surprise you? One might have thought, well, being the objective, neutral scholar that he was, since his criterion was refuted, he would have said, oh, I was wrong. Well, what he already has mind made up as to what, what are the good apples and what are the bad apples. Now I go all the way back to the first day and remind you he already had an idea of what he wanted his apple sorting machine to work like, and so he was going to fix the machine. His method. He was going to fix the machine to make sure the apples he wanted rejected were going to be rejected. He didn't just give up the machine. No One is neutral about their methodology. And so as you see, the positivists, they too keep the faith. And here I have a short discussion of his revision and how it's refuted. And all I want to point out is that verificationism simply couldn't state its own principle cogently. The verification principle of cognitive needfulness was self defeating. It could never pass its own test. It was never self authorizing, it was always self refuting. Okay, well that's got to be the end of any attack on the meaningfulness of religious language, right? Wrong. Now we have to turn to the second version of the attack on the meaningfulness of religious language, which is called falsificationism. Not verificationism, but falsificationism. The second way in which unbelieving philosophers have attempted to criticize the meaningfulness of religious language in the 20th century is called falsificationism. The falsificationists were dedicated to the authority of natural science, just like the law logical positivist. Their brothers, however, the falsificationists, were painfully aware of the failure of the logical positivist to formulate cogently or save themselves from the fatal application of the verification principle of meaning. And yet they wanted to guard the honorific position of natural science and they wanted to distinguish it clearly from disreputable ways of thinking like superstition, magic and religion. The language of religion, according to the falsificationist, does not belong to the domain of genuine science. Science is tied to an empirical basis or procedural commitment which does not characterize religion. Upon analysis, the falsificationist said, the religious talk of believers is ultimately meaningless. Sounds familiar, eh? So let's see if we can go another round of this dance for the falsification. What makes genuine science scientific is that the theories which it will affirm are in principle falsifiable by means of empirical methods. This is a necessary condition for a truly scientific approach to what rational men will believe. Accordingly, if some theory or claim is not empirically falsifiable, notice, not falsified, but open to falsification by empirical means, that defect alone is sufficient to dismiss it as being cognitively meaningless. A meaningful claim in science must be, according to the falsification of science, subject to, pardon me, subject to reputation in theory. It doesn't mean the scientific claims must be refuted to be scientific. That would make all scientific claims false by definition. Right? But it must be that they are refutable in some conceivable circumstance. Now, the great advantage of taking this approach, which was popularized by Karl Popper e O p P E R the great advantage of taking this approach, if you advocate the supremacy of natural science and its procedures, is that the generalizations after which the scientist aspires all planets rotate around an axis are not ruled out as meaningless by virtue of their not being fully verifiable. We can't fully verify them, but we could falsify them if we found an exception. The generalizations of natural science, even those which are true, are always open to refutation or falsification, just in case we find a planet that doesn't rotate on its axis. No longer is the incompleteness of induction a strike against the meaningfulness or scientific character of an empirical generalization concerning the natural world. This then brings us to the famous, perhaps most famous, challenge to Christianity in the 20th century from Anthony Flew Flew the best known critique of religious language in the second half of our century came from the witty pen of the English philosopher Anthony Flew and attacked the meaningfulness of religious disputes from the perspective of falsificationism. Flew made his point by rehearsing a parable that was once told by John Wisdom, and then he commented upon the defect of theological utterances which the parable illustrates. And here's the story I'm reading from Fluid out. 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. The other disagrees. There's no gardener. So they pitch their tents and they set a watch. But 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. But no shrieks ever suggest that some intruder has received the shock. No movements of the wire ever betray an invisible climber. The bloodhounds never give cry. Still the believer is not convinced. But there is a gardener, invisible, intangible, insensible to electric shock. 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 skeptic 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 no gardener? Having told that story, Flew continued with his commentary in very sharp criticism of religious language. Flew says, someone may dissipate his assertion completely without noticing that he has done so. A fine brash hypothesis may thus be killed by inches, the death by a thousand qualifications. And in this, it seems to me, lies the peculiar danger, the endemic evil of theological utterance for if the utterance is indeed an assertion, it will necessarily be equivalent to a denial of the negation of that assertion. And anything which would count against the assertion or which would induce the speaker to withdraw it, and to admit that it been mistaken must be part of or the whole of the meaning of the negation of that assertion. And 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. You see, Flew was suspicious of religious discourse because he noticed that believers tend to hold on significant securely to their convictions even when they're aware of apparent counter evidence to those beliefs they qualify and defend, then qualify and defend some more. It begins to look as though they guard their theological claims against any and all objections or rebuttals. But if so, that would make religious convictions impervious to falsification. It would render the religious language compatible with with every conceivable state of affairs in the world. Well, since God talk would not amount to denying anything, there would be nothing intellectually at stake in theological utterances. And thus being unfalsifiable, they would not amount to genuine or meaningful assertions in the first place. Suggested flu. And that is the problem of religious language. How can we reply to this? Well, I have an opening question. Are strong convictions as such non cognitive? Are strong convictions as such non cognitive? Many subsequent writers who have reflected on Flew's criticism of the meaningfulness of of religious discourse have observed in one way or another that he failed to distinguish adequately between a proposition logically resisting falsification and a person who believes that proposition psychologically resisting its falsification. Say that again. We need to distinguish between a proposition which is logical, immune to falsification, and a person who resists having that proposition falsified. A proposition or linguistic claim which is logically compatible with any and all states of affairs could indeed be said to resist falsification. As Flew properly observed, in theory, nothing could then conceivably contradict the proposition. It should then be judged to be valid, innocuous. But a person can resist being persuaded that his belief has been falsified by counter evidence, even when the proposition he believes logically contradicts or rules out certain states of affairs in that case, where the proposition is incompatible with certain states of affairs, but the person is not going to let evidence refute it. We simply say he's a tenacious believer. Flew confused a characteristic of human behavior diligently defending a belief with a conceptual characteristic of some linguistic utterances, logically never needing A defense. And in so doing, he apparently did not notice that his polemic against religious discourse was in fact a polemic against all. All committed discourse. All committed discourse. The utterances and linguistic responses of people who maintain certain beliefs dogmatically. And if you think about it for a moment, it's obvious that people can and do hold strong convictions about a number of things, not simply religious topics. Sometimes beliefs about historical events are fervently propounded and defended. For instance, that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone in assassinating President Kennedy. Sometimes beliefs about scientific matters are zealously championed. For instance, that silicone breast implants do not cause cancer. Just about any kind of belief can be held tenaciously and defended at great lengths, from auto mechanics to family honor. Part of what it means to say that people hold their convictions strongly is precisely that they resist having those convictions refuted. Does that imply that their convictions must then have been non cognitive? Now then, scientists often display intellectual stubbornness with respect to their theories about the natural world, don't they? They can be quite committed to the conclusions they have reached in public, and when evidence or reasoning is urged contrary to their views, they defend or qualify those views. And many times they dig in their heels against reputation. A good book to read on this particular point is Thomas Kuhn's the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. This is not usually taken as a mark, though, that their scientific theories must be vacuous of any significant claim about the world and therefore cognitively meaningless. It is usually just taken as a mark of a deep seated belief about which they are strongly persuaded. The logical status of the belief in question is not affected by the personal demeanor of the individual propounding or defending it. Since natural scientists and anybody who has strong convictions about anything at all behave the very same way that religious believers do, then Flew's criticism of the cognitive meaningfulness of religious language would in all fairness need to be applied to the language of natural science as well. Oops. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Scientific discourse, which resist refutation as it often does, would have to be consigned to the status of cognitive meaninglessness by flu. But that's not what Flew intended to accomplish. Not at all. So what have we done? Answer the fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit. Okay, so Mr. Fool, explain to me your philosophy, and then take his philosophy to where it leads him. Expose the foolishness of his position. Indeed, in terms of any subject matter at all, the only meaningful discourse. If you were to Follow Flew's folly would be the discourse of those who are tentative, doubtful or unsure of themselves. And that's certainly an unreasonable assessment. I'd like to say a bit more about this when we come back from a two minute break. Okay, let's look further at this commentary on the parable offered by Anthony Flew of the Invisible Gardener. I think Anthony Flew's commentary on the terrible gain I'm suggesting when people read this, they say, wow, this is pretty strong stuff. But that's because one of the things they've assumed, and you've already seen from our epistemological lectures a few days ago that it's wrong. But one of the things people assume is that beliefs are accepted or rejected against the empirical evidence on a one by one fashion. It's thought erroneously that we observationally test and rationally evaluate only one individual belief at a time. Supposedly, the scientifically directed scholars takes a single proposition, has isolated from every other proposition he would assert to be true, and then compares it to the empirical evidence which is available, as though the relevance and strength of such evidence are independently and indisputably established in advance. This, however, is not at all an accurate description of the way people actually come to beliefs or test them against the empirical evidence. Moreover, from a conceptual standpoint, the picture of one by one scrutinizing the beliefs for empirical falsification is entirely artificial and impossible. The beliefs which people hold are always connected to other beliefs by relations pertaining to linguistic meaning, law, logical order, evidential dependence, causal explanation, indexical and self conception, etc. Let me give you an example. To assert I see a ladybug on the rose is to affirm and assume a number of things simultaneously. Some of the things it assumes are rather obvious about the uses of English words. One's personal identity, a perceptual event, categories of bugs and flowers, physical relations, other things that are assumed are more subtle about one's linguistic, entomological and botanical competence, the normalcy of one's eyes and brain stem, theories of light reform, fraction, shared grammar and shared semantics, the reality of the external world, the laws of logic, etc. The network of all these beliefs together encounters the tribunal of any empirical experience when a conflict is detected between this network of beliefs and an empirical experience. All we know all we know is that some adjustment in one's beliefs will need to be made to restore consistency. But there's no way in advance to determine what specific change a person will choose to make in order to eliminate the conflict within his thinking. If Sam says that he saw a ladybug on the road. But his friends all say that they saw no ladybug. Which of his beliefs will Sam surrender? You know, there's any number of possibilities. Maybe his friends don't know the difference between aphids and ladybugs. Maybe there was a spot on his glasses. Maybe the lighting was not right. Maybe he doesn't understand the use of the English word road. Maybe his friends are on drugs. Maybe they're all looking at a different rose. Maybe the ladybug quickly flew away. Maybe he's dreaming. Maybe our senses deceive us. Maybe only the pure in heart can see gentle ladybugs. All his friends must be therefore perverse. There are a lot of possibilities. Now, granted, all the ones that I've mentioned, and I've only mentioned some, some might appear more and some less reasonable to you. But the point is you can't tell which of those things he's going to hold on to and which he's going to give up. The point is simply that it's ambiguous or unclear just what the counter evidence to Sam's remarks will turn out to falsify. You remember the story of the psychiatrist who was treating a man who believed he was dead. Counseling the poor man about his neurosis seemed to get nowhere. Finally, one day the psychiatrist decided to use an empirical test to convince the patient of his error. So he asked the man whether dead men bleed, to which the man said no. At that point, the psychiatrist pricked the man's finger with a pen and told the man to look and see he was bleeding so he couldn't be dead. To this, the patient responded that he must then have been wrong. Dead men do bleed, after all. The psychiatrist, in this old joke mistakenly thought that the bleeding finger would be counter evidence that would falsify one particular belief of the patient and not others, namely, that he was dead, when in fact it was equally possible that it falsified a related belief, namely that dead men don't bleed. Since empirical experience or evidence never decisively falsifies any particular belief within a person's network of convictions, it turns out that it is possible, even if it seems unreasonable to others, that a person can choose to treat any of his beliefs about anything whatsoever as central convictions relative to which any other belief should first be surrendered. When counter evidence is offered, that is, given the fact that a whole network of beliefs rather than an isolated individual belief meets the test of observational evidence, any belief may be treated as unfalsifiable. This is a characteristic of all beliefs. They can be treated as unfalsifiable. Falsifiability is not therefore inherently a specific feature or feature of any specific belief or kind of belief on any specific subject. It's just as true of beliefs about the natural world as beliefs about religious matters that they can be held tenaciously and can resist falsification. The falsificationist does not successful relegate religious language to the disgrace of meaninglessness, then, unless it's at the cost of consigning all discourse to the same disgrace. While there may be something wrong or fanatical about the particular way in which a believer guards his convictions from reputation, that fact still does not impugn the meaningfulness of his religious language. It simply the language of strong conviction. It's simply the language of firmly entrenched belief. Maybe you saw this coming. It's just the language of presupposition. Now, what else do we have to say before we're done? Well, guess what? Anthony Flew has his presuppositions also. I hope you can see in the steps that I'm taking in answering this how I'm just playing back for you. Your morning lecture here, the procedure answer the 420 of the unmask. His unargued philosophical assumptions show that he doesn't live by his own philosophy, or he's a fool if he does. Every thinker grants preferred status to some of his beliefs. That is to say, there are some linguists, linguistic assertions expressing those beliefs that are going to have a special place. They're central to his web of beliefs. He treats them as immune from revision until the network of convictions itself is altered. And these central beliefs have cognitive significance. They're not simply stipulated truths in virtue of definition and logic, and yet they resist imperial falsification to one degree or another, depending to his belief system. The reality of human nature and behavior has got to be recognized here. Our thoughts, reasoning and conduct are governed by presuppositional convictions, which are matters of deep personal concern to us. And yet they're far from vacuous, far from they're things to which we intellectually claim, things that we will defend as we say to the end. As irreligious as Anthony Flew is as a person, he too has his fundamental commitments to which he religiously adheres. Anthony Flew attempts to bring his thinking and living into line with these personal presuppositions, which means that when faced with what appears to be counter evidence, he's going to qualify and defend the language by which he expresses those presuppositions. He treats utterances about them as unfalsifiable. Get the point? Anthony Flew says, you Christians treat your presuppositions as unfalsifiable, so they're meaningless. The problem is Flew too has his presuppositions. Obviously, he's regulating his life in terms of some central convictions too. The expression of those central convictions, therefore, will be unfalse to him. John Frame once put it this way in replying to Flew, both Flew and the Christian are in the same boat. That's right. Each have their presupposition for which they believe there is extensive evidence. And each would make extensive changes within their respective systems of thought to guard those presuppositions, those heart commitments, those life governing convictions, to guard them from reputation. And so Frame illustrates this by means of a very clever parody which reverses the point of Flew's famous parable. So now let me tell you my story over again. This is from John Frame. Once upon a time, two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. A man was there pulling weeds, applying fertilizer, trimming branches. The man turned to the explorers and introduced himself as the royal gardener. One explorer shook his hand and exchanged pleasantries. The other ignored the gardener and turned away. There can be no gardener in this part of the jungle, he said. This must be some trick. So they pitched camp. Every day the gardener arrives, tends the plot. Soon the plot is bursting with perfectly arranged blooms. He's only doing it because we're here to fool us into thinking this is a royal garden. The gardener takes them to a royal palace, introduces the explorers to a score of officials who verify the gardener's status. Then the skeptic tries a last resort. Our senses are deceiving us. There is no gardener, no blooms, no palace, no officials. It's still a hoax. Finally, the believer despairs. But what remains of your original assertion? Just how does this mirage, as you call it, differ from a real gardener? Like the challenge of the logical positivist, SNU's falsification is challenged to the cognitive meaningfulness of religious language was just a failure in attempting to discredit the worldview of Christian faith. He ended up discrediting the meaningfulness of all language, including the language of science and discourse about his own most cherished convictions. Ah yes, Self reputation is the most painful refutation of all. It's when you do yourself in that it really hurts. And so I can conclude our practice of apologetic in the philosophical arena. I don't think anybody will accuse me of having taken the easy course here. This is the central problem in the philosophy of religion, at least it has been for at least 30 years in the late 20th century. The allegations of of problems with the meaningfulness of religious language, which have been advanced by both the verificationists and the falsificationists in this century, have disclosed, rather, by analysis, the religious prejudices and the incoherence and inconsistencies of Christianity's critics and those who are prejudiced and incoherent are in no position to attack our world. By analysis, the religious prejudices and the incoherence and inconsistencies of Christianity's critics and those who are prejudiced and incoherent are in no position to attack our worldview. This recording is distributed by Covenant Media Foundation, a non profit educational organization. Unauthorized reproduction of this tape is strictly prohibited. A free catalog of the Foundation's tapes and articles is available by calling 1-800-553-3938.