Ayer

Question 1

AYER - Verification principle

Answer 1

Religious statements cannot be verified in practice or principle and have no factual content. Because they say nothing about the world they are neither true or false so for the same reasons athiests and agnostics also fail to say anything meaningful about the world

Question 2

VP STRENGTH 1

Answer 2

Makes a straightforward demand for verification through sense experience

Question 3

VP STRENGTH 2

Answer 3

It is in line with empirical science

Question 4

VP STRENGTH 3

Answer 4

makes a demand for realism in what we say about the world, what you say has to actually make sense

Question 5

VP WEAKNESS 1

Answer 5

Dismisses the whole range of history, morality, poetry and art as meaningless. Whereas these give direction and meaning to human existence

Question 6

VP WEAKNESS 2

Answer 6

science deals with unobservable entities, so VP actually dismisses science as meaningless, which it isn’t

Question 7

VP WEAKNESS 3

Answer 7

does not recognise that religion itself offers a reasonable hypothesis about the origin of the world through the act of a creative mind (God)

Question 8

VP WEAKNESSES 4

Answer 8

appears to be a metaphysical assumption about the way things really are, but Ayer dismisses religious statements as metaphysical assumptions, so his VP is an example of the very thing it was intended to guard against