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Faith—and Faith in Hypotheses1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

John King-Farlow  and
William N. Christensen
John King-Farlow
Affiliation:
Professor of Philosophy, University of Guelph, Ontario
William N. Christensen
Affiliation:
Priest-in-Charge, Saint Mark's, Edmonton, Canada Council Fellow in Philosophy
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Extract

Debate continues to rage among philosophers of religion over Anthony Flew's famous little paper ‘Theology and Falsification’ and the responses it provoked, most notably R. M. Hare's response that religious claims are in no way like scientific hypotheses. For now, twenty years later, we still find many theists taking a similar tack to Hare's. A particularly interesting example is J. F. Miller in Religious Studies, 1969, who replies to Flew that propositions like ‘God loves mankind’ cannot be subject to falsifiability conditions because they are used as claims expressing ‘religious first-order principles of the Judaeo-Christian Weltanschauung and as such are not amenable to falsification’ (p. 50). Miller seems to put his faith in some kind of great gulf fixed between what he would consider decently falsifiable scientific hypotheses and what he takes to be unfalsifiable first-order principles both of theology and of contemporary science. In what follows we will try to sketch a more rational strategy for modern believers of a liberal empiricist type, for those whose interest in appealing and deferring to experience includes but is not restricted to so-called ‘sense experience’. This will involve accepting analogies between theological statements and so-called hypotheses, insofar as the latter are propositions held and put forward in a somewhat tentative spirit with a view to explaining what we experience.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , June 1971 , pp. 113 - 124
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1971

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References

page 113 note 2 See the articles on ‘Theology and Falsification’ in New Essays in Philosophical Theology, editors Flew, A. G. N. and MacIntyre, A. C. (London, 1955)—especially Flew and Hare on pp. 99–103.Google Scholar

page 113 note 3 See for example Allison, H. E. at Review of Metaphysics, 1969, p. 501Google Scholar; in Religious Studies, 1969, see Bell, R. M. at p. 11 and Kellenberger, J. at p. 75.Google Scholar

page 117 note 1 See Toulmin's comments on the nature of scientific progress in The Philosophy of Science (London 1953) and Foresight and Understanding (New York, 1963), passim.Google Scholar

page 117 note 2 Quine, W. V., From a Logical Point of View (Boston, 1953), pp. 42–6.Google Scholar

page 119 note 1 See King-Farlow, John, Reason and Religion (London, 1969)Google Scholar, Chs. I and II; ‘Justifications of Religious Belief’, Philosophical Quarterly, 1962Google Scholar; ‘Miracles’, International Philosophical Quarterly, 1962Google Scholar; ‘Cogency, Conviction and Coercion’, International Philosophical Quarterly, 1968Google Scholar; ‘Metaphysics and Probability’, Philosophical Studies (Ireland), 1968.Google Scholar

page 121 note 1 Cf. Malcolm's, contribution to John Hick's Faith and the Philosophers (New York, 1966), pp. 103 ffGoogle Scholar. Lewis, H. D. seems to have predicted and almost clairvoyantly undermined Malcolm's move at Our Experience of God, pp. 25–6 and 33.Google Scholar

page 121 note 2 See ‘Myths of the Given and the “COGITO” Proof’, Philosophical Studies (U.S.), 1961Google Scholar; ‘Dialogue Concerning Natural Metaphysics’, Southern Journal of Philosophy, 1968.Google Scholar