#759 Theological Non-Cognitivism

Dr. craig’s response

The reason you’ve probably never heard of this view before, Carlo, is because it has been dead for over 50 years! When I was a student in the 1970s, it was already dying out but still much discussed in philosophy of religion classes.

Mid-twentieth century philosophers of religion, faced with the challenge of Logical Positivism, were forced to defend the very meaningfulness of their claims against the attacks of positivists and their philosophical ilk.  Positivists championed a Verification Principle of meaning, according to which an informative sentence, in order to be meaningful, must be capable in principle of being empirically verified.  Since religious statements like “God exists” or “God loves the world” were, in their opinion, incapable of being empirically verified, positivistic philosophers held them to have no cognitive content and, hence, to assert nothing.

In general, verificationist analyses of meaning ran into two insuperable problems:  (1) The verification principle of meaning was too restrictive.  It was quickly realized that on such a theory of meaning vast tracts of obviously meaningful discourse would have to be declared meaningless, including even scientific statements, which the principle had aimed to preserve.  (2)  The principle was self-refuting.  The statement “In order to be meaningful, an informative sentence must be capable in principle of being empirically verified” is itself incapable of being empirically verified.  Therefore, it is by its own lights a meaningless statement—or, at best, an arbitrary definition which we are free to reject.  The inadequacies of the positivistic theory of meaning led to the complete collapse of Logical Positivism during the second half of the twentieth century, helping to spark not only a revival of interest in metaphysics but in philosophy of religion as well.  Today the non-cognitivist challenge, which loomed so large in mid-century discussions, is scarcely a blip on the philosophical radar screen.

The chief value of the non-cognitivist viewpoint today, and the reason for which I took your question this week, is that it underlines the point that you make, namely, that there are multiple versions of non-theism. For example, there is atheism, which is the view that God does not exist. There is also agnosticism, which is the view that it cannot be, or is not, known whether God exists. And then there is non-cognitivism, the view that the question of God’s existence is meaningless. All three are forms of non-theism. This belies the fashionable claim among the uninformed that atheism is simply the absence of God belief and therefore makes no claim and requires no justification. That naïve view fails to distinguish between the different forms that the absence of belief in God may take: one might be an atheist, an agnostic, or a non-cognitivist. So we need to ask our non-believing interlocutor exactly which form of non-theism he espouses. Then we can inquire what reasons he has for his particular view.