we continue now with our study of apologetics there's an aspect of uh uh of basic uh necessary conditions for knowledge that we've yet to cover I mentioned that there are four the law of non-contradiction the law of causality the basic reliability of sense perception and we've covered those three already and the fourth one you will call is the principle of the analogical use of language now this is probably the one that seems the most esoteric perhaps to uh the lay person who's engaged with issues relating to apologetics in our day and so what I'm going to do today is try to explain what this issue is all about you remember that these elements or principles came out of our inductive study of atheism when we looked at those who rejected classical theism and listened carefully to the arguments that were waged against judeo-christianity and I said that there were certain elements of thinking that were present in the critics of classical theism such as the denial of the law of non-contradiction or the denial of causality and so on and now we come to this question of language in the 20th century in contemporary philosophy of the period we saw a shift in philosophy to concern with human language and in the midst of this shift in philosophical Focus came a controversy that's known as the God talk the God talk controversy now you may not be familiar with that but one of the things that came out of the God talk controversy was a movement in theology called Theo thanatology now there's a word for you Theo thanatology not even maybe haven't even heard of that term how many of you here have never heard of the term Theo anology okay nobody's heard of it well that's the fcy word for the death of God now how many of you heard of the death of God movement ah now we're beginning to uh become familiar a little bit with it we heard philosophers and theologians announcing the death of God in the 60s while what was behind that movement of the death of God was a crisis in the philosophy of language that had its roots first of all with a philosophical school that emerged in the 20th century coming out of Great Britain called logical positivism and in logical positivism one of the central thesis was a principle that was called the law of verification or the principle of verification and we know what it means to verify things to verify coming from the word veritos meaning truth is to authenticate or show that something is true if I make a claim and I don't back it up my claim is as yet not verified if I can prove the truth of my claim then I have verified it now the verification principle that grew out of logical positivism was this principle that only those statements are deemed to be true that can be verified empirically or it may state in another way only statements that can be verified empirically are true statements now to verify a statement empirically would be to show it to be true through sense perception that is by seeing hearing or so on if I say to you there is gold in Alaska the only way I can prove that that statement is true is if I can go to Alaska and find some gold there I scientifically prove I empirically demonstrate that there is go gold there by finding it and showing it to you so that you can see it with your eyes feel it with your fingers and so on that's what we mean by empirical verification something demonstrated to be true by the senses the five senses now this principle of verification made a tremendous impact in the philosophical Community for a while until somebody observed what should have been obvious at the beginning that if the only statements that are true are statements that can be verified empirically then that would mean that the that the law of verification itself was not true because the law of verification can't be verified empirically it is simply uh a gratuitous premise and so then that uh school of thought sort of retreated with a little bit of egg on their face but despite that stumbling block and that uh obvious uh error there with the principle of verification still The Guns of criticism were leveled against historic theism with respect to language about God and the critics were saying that statements about God cannot be proven in any way scientifically because no one can see God you can't subject God to a test tube or to a laboratory analysis and so the idea of God remains unprovable unverifiable and not only unverifiable but also un falsifiable now that's a critical thing a lot of Christians take comfort in the idea that things that they say they believe cannot be proven false and just because something cannot be proven false does not mean that it is true for example if if I say to you that I believe in ghosts and somebody says well have you ever seen one I say no but I believe they're there well do we have any scientific evidence of ghosts and I say well no but there's a reason for that ghosts don't like scientists and anytime scientists come around with any kind of measuring devices that could possibly detect the presence of ghosts the ghost leave because it's part of their ghostly nature to flee from scientists and so therefore scientists have never been able to uh verify them or it's like saying that there are little men made out of green cheese who live on the opposite side of the moon who have the same kind of allergy to telescopes and anytime a telescope is pointed in their Direction they're make sure that they're out of the way and that's why we never see them now do you see somebody deposits a belief like that cannot either he can neither prove the truth of his premise but neither can anybody prove him wrong because the impossibility of falsifying the statement is built into the premise do you see that now that's what we call cheating in the the theoretical realm of thought and so it we understand in full philosophy that in many time many cases uh falsifying a statement is much more difficult than verifying it for example let's go back to our analogy of gold in Alaska if I say to you there is gold in Alaska and I can verify that all I need to do to verify it is to go to Alaska and find some gold there then I've proven the truth of my uh assertion but suppose somebody says there's no gold in Alaska or oppositely who somebody's going to prove that there's no gold in Alaska or in other words to falsify my statement that there's no gold in Alaska and so they go to Alaska and they go in the first time they look around they can't find any gold does that prove that there's no gold in Alaska now how much of Alaska would they have to examine to prove that there's no gold there all of Alaska every square inch of Alaska how far deep down in the ground does Alaska go how far do you have to dig before you can say we've excavated all of Alaska and then you suppose you do that and after all is said and done the the scientist said well we excavated every square inch of Alaska couldn't find an ounce of gold therefore we falsified the statement that there's gold in Alaska and I say to them wait a minute how how do you know that when you were shaking that CV up there near Anchorage and that dirt that you were checking out somebody didn't miss a speck of gold that fall fell through the C you better go back and test it again and you can do this forever in other words it's much harder to falsify empirically than it is to verify however with logic that's another matter if something violates a law of contradiction that statement is then or those uh the argument is falsified and that's not too difficult but because of the problem we have with God that nobody's ever seen God and we don't hear his voice we don't have any scientific evidence as it were for his existence our belief in God or faith in God is based on some kind of rational argument apart from from physical evidence or upon inferences drawn from that which we can see like the created Universe we look at the universe and we deduce from the universe a Creator who stands above and beyond the universe and who made the universe and the question is whether that kind of reasoning is valid reasoning and we're going to get to that a little bit later on in this course but in the meantime what the critics and the Skeptics in the middle of the 20th century we saying is since there is no physical proof of the existence of God and following basic principles of verification statements about God are at best emotive that is language anguage about God is merely emotive when I say I believe in God I'm not really saying anything meaningful about what exists outside of me all I'm doing is telling you something about me that I happen to be a believer and that I have some kind of of emotion or passion bound up with the idea that God exists but I've told the story of a discussion I had with a college student several years ago who uh asked me if I believed in God and I saides and they said well if you believe in God uh do you pray to God and I said yes do you sing about him yes and do you go to church yes I do all these things do you read the Bible yes does that mean anything to you oh yes it's very meaningful to me and that and the college student said well then for you God exists but the student said but I don't believe in God I don't sing hymns I don't say prayers I don't read the Bible and I don't find the idea of God personally meaningful or significant to me at all so for me God does not exist of course this is relativism with avengeance and I saidwell we're not talking about the same thing and she said 'what do you mean and I said well when I say and I assert the existence of God I am asserting the existence of a being who exists apart from me outside of me who's not a part of my subjectivity or of my emotional makeup I'm saying that that God whom I'm proclaiming if in fact he does not exist apart from me all my praying to him singing to him reading about him and finding meaning in believing in him does not have the power to create him I'm simply deluded and wrong on the other hand the God I'm talking about here if he does exist all of your unbelief all of your disinterest in him and that you find him meaningless does not have the power to annihilate him so that's what we're talking about let's keep that in view that when we're discussing the existence of God we're talking about the objective existence of God not my subjective feeling about it but well you see this movement in Theology and philosophy was saying that God talk may be reduced simply to human emotions and that statements about God say nothing meaningful about objective reality outside of the people who are making the claims now that's an extremely skeptical approach to the idea of God and then I have to ask what's behind that well one of the main things that's behind it was the struggle in philosophy and in theology in the 19th century and in the 20th century in the 19th century following the enlightenment we saw a massive attempt among philosophers and theologians to redefine religion to redefine historic Christianity particularly in naturalistic terms remember that the single most important affirmation of the Enlightenment of the 18th century the principle of Enlightenment was this that the god hypothesis the the idea of God is no longer necessary to explain the presence in the origin of the universe or the origin of human life you see before the enlightenment uh even secular people were very much impressed by the classical Arguments for the existence of God as a necessary postulate to explain the universe and to explain human life and it was only in the enlightenment that a believable alternative to Creation made an impact on Western thinking particularly in Germany in England and in France with the French encyclopedias now not everybody in the enlightenment period uh agreed with all of these principles and the most militant were the French encyclopedias and particularly Deo who defined himself as quote the personal enemy of God and uh what they were saying was that we no longer need to affirm the existence of God because now through the Advent of modern science we know that the Universe and human life and all of these things come about through the principle of spontaneous generation that became the scientifically acceptable alternative to Creation in the enlightenment the idea of spontaneous generation namely that things just pop into existence on their own now later on in this course we'll take a close look at that concept but for now I'm trying to explain where this crisis in language came from so the 19th century following on the hill heels of this critique of of theism in the enlightenment which was a critique of supernaturalism 19th century philosophy and theology sought to accommodate that kind of skepticism by reconstructing Christianity in naturalistic terms so 19th century liberalism rejected anything Supernatural in historic Christianity Old Testament prophecy that was ADV Dan before events actually took place that was revised and thought well that's just later uh editors reading back into the text uh their contemporary situations and so there's no real Supernatural things such as predictive prophecy the Virgin birth of Christ was rejected because that would be Supernatural the uh atonement as a cosmic event was rejected because that would be Supernatural all of the Miracles of the Bible both Old and New Testament were rejected as mythological accretions into the historic documents and so on no resurrection of Christ but the meaning of Christianity now becomes love for your neighbor and having a sociological agenda of humanitarianism on the natural plane without any belief in the Supernatural now this concept of a naturalized religion also was married with philosophy in the 19th century that was Heavenly heavily evolutionary or what we call imminent that is the theology that prevailed was pantheism see so God is not something above and beyond the universe but if God exists he exists as part of the universe and we understand that pantheism in its simplest form means everything is God all is God and God is all but now think about that linguistically if everything is God and God is all then the word god itself does not refer to anything particular if it refers to everything in general it refers to nothing in particular so the term God has no particular meaning or significance and so with this imminence concept there was a crisis of language of whether you could speak meaningly about God at all now this provoked a crisis in philosophy and Theology and at the turn of the 20th century there was a reaction in Europe against liberalism and an attempt to re reconstruct the Transcendence of God the sense in which God is above and beyond the universe and the stream of history and this renewed emphasis to try to redeem Christianity from liberalism and restore the supernatural did what often happens in attempts to correct one error the pendulum swings in the other direction to an overcorrection so that philosophers and theologians who were now studying God in his Transcendence came off with language like this that God is Holy other God is so different from the universe we must flee so rapidly and strenuously from identifying god with the universe as pantheism does that we have to say that God not only is God not to be identified with nature not only does he exist above nature but he exists Totally Above and Beyond nature not only is he different from us but he is as one German philosopher said gone Andra completely different and then the other phrase of the following Generations refer to him in English as God's being holy other now this attempt to salvage Transcendence as well-meaning as it was paav the way for an even worse crisis about speaking meaningfully about God than the previous movement did and we'll see how that uh rolled itself out in our next session