Jonas E. Alexis: God and the Intellectuals!

For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak, as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries. Agnostic Astronomer Robert Jastrow. During the early part of the twentieth century, one popular movement among philosophers was logical positivism, which limited truth to what could be empirically verified by the five senses or experience. At its core, the movement sought to deconstruct revelation, chiefly theological assertions, or anything else that appeared to be beyond the five senses. If something cannot be verified by the five senses, logical positivists dismissed them as meaningless. Over the course of more than a decade, logical positivists launched their ideas with great energy and passion, willing to crush anyone who stood in their way. Yet the movement could not gain much intellectual ground because its founding principle was self-defeating. After all, can the proposition "any statement that cannot be empirically verified is meaningless" itself be empirically verified? No. It is an axiomatic proposition, nothing less, nothing more. In the end, logical positivism ceased to carry any intellectual weight and quietly slipped out of academia, although it continued to impact many people. Over the course of more than a decade, logical positivists launched their ideas with great energy and passion, willing to crush anyone who stood in their way. Yet the movement could not gain much intellectual ground because its founding principle was self-defeating. After all, can the proposition any statement that cannot be empirically verified is meaningless, itself be empirically verified? No. It is an axiomatic proposition, nothing less, nothing more. In the end, logical positivism ceased to carry any intellectual weight and quietly slipped out of academia, although it continued to impact many people. Of course, the verification principle was later modified by people like Sir A J Ayer in Language, Truth, and Logic, but that modification itself was fraught with logical inconsistency. Ayer, who was largely responsible for spreading the gospel of logical positivism in England, asserted in 1936 that a proposition is said to be verifiable, in the strong sense of the term, if, and only if, its truth could be conclusively established by experience. Yet this bold proposition fails to pass its own test. Ayer seems to have foreseen the implication of the statement, and moves on to declare that if we adopt conclusive verifiability as our criterion of significance, as some positivists have proposed, our argument will prove too much.