“Prove God exists lowly theist, or prove yourself a fool!”

We've all heard stories about the lone American soldier, stranded on a South Pacific island, who was discovered decades later still believing that World War II was in full swing. The image provides a fine metaphor for people who remain inexplicably locked in the past in their understanding of reality.

It is with that background that I note my surprise at finding somebody right here in my blog who was locked in the past much like our beleaguered WWII soldier. In this context, we arrived on the beach only to have somebody emerge from the dense foliage shouting "Verification!" as a means to bully theists. This is especially amusing given that verification and falsification criteria of meaning and rationality were already being abandoned by atheists when you could still buy an Edsel off the showroom floor.

The verificationist emerged in the thread for "Atheists are smart and theists are stoopid, right?". I must admit that when I came across this instance of verificationism I was excited, much like stumbling upon a yellowed program from Seattle's 1962 World's Fair at a yard sale. The unwitting setup came with theist MGT2 discussing belief in God and other entities which transcend the natural sphere:

the claim may not be falsifiable precisely because some real non-physical things such as some spiritual things are not subject to naturalistic verification, but is, nevertheless, reasonable.

MGT2's claim, in short, is that the ability to verify or falsify an entity's existence is not in principle necessary for rational belief in that entity's existence.

Then came the indignant reply to MGT2's fairly mundane statement, courtesy of TheOtherSorcero. It is here that I received a real blast from the past:

In what sense is belief that the claim is true reasonable if there is no way to verify or falsify it? I could equally say that believing the claim is false is reasonable, citing exactly the same absence of evidence to back me up.

Here we have the verificationist/falsificationist claim which I thought was dead and long gone, namely the thesis that for any proposition p, a necessary if not sufficient condition for rational assent to p is the ability either to verify or falsify the truth of p. If a belief like "God exists" cannot be either verified or falsified then it cannot be rationally believed.

The most famous example of falsification is Antony Flew's famous essay "Theology and Falsification" of 1950, ironic given that MGT2 was just talking about Flew's 2004 conversion to theism.

Anyway, as I noted both verification and falsification were abandoned as criteria of meaning and rationality decades ago and for a number of reasons, not least because they are self-referentially defeating. (Put it this way, where p is "for any proposition p, a necessary if not sufficient condition for rational assent to p is the ability either to verify or falsify the truth of p" how does one verify or falsify that? One doesn't. Rather, they accept it or they don't. But if they accept it then they must reject it and hence the self-referential defeat.)

The unfortunate thing is that I don't take TheOtherSorcero's ignorance of the abandonment of verification/falsification to be particularly unusual. On the contrary, I suspect there are many atheistic, agnostic, and skeptical soldiers who use it as a tool to bully theists. In doing so they are still fighting a battle that, in contrast to that of our American soldier, they lost decades ago.