Doesn't it really matter whether religious beliefs are true or false? You'd think that it should matter, but if that's the case why are so many religious doctrines - indeed, perhaps the majority of them - famed in a way that it's impossible to determine whether they are true or false?

In God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong, S. T. Joshi writes:

What has saved religions from completely collapsing of their own absurdity is ... the difficulty — indeed, the impossibility — of definitively determining the truth or faulty of these doctrines. The impossibility allows the pious to maintain, as a slim and ever-decreasing hope, that the tenets of their religion might somehow still be true, or at least not clearly false. No amount of negative evidence can ever conclusively put any given religious dogmas out of court (aside from those that can be shown to be self-inconsistent), because there will always remain the remote possibility hat they are true.

The notion that truth or falsity is somehow not involved in the analysis of religious doctrine — a view fostered not only by many modern theologians but by some recent philosophers of language who maintain that religious principles are merely “language games” that do not commit their exponents to any truth-claims — has ... I trust, been shown to be a dodge and an evasion. The great majority of the faithful would certainly be astounded and offended if someone were to tell them that when they say “God created the universe,” they are merely expressing some kind of “attitude of piety” rather than making an assertion about the nature of entity.

The difference between truth and falsity should matter a great deal — on a daily basis, people's lives depend upon knowing the difference between what is true and what is false. For a large number of people, their religion plays a central, fundamental role in their lives. If anything were to depend upon truth and falsity, it should be such a religion — yet at the same time, there has been a broad-based development of an ideology of religious language not expressing truth or falsity.

This is the fault of Karl Popper and Antony Flew. These two philosophers argued that meaningful statements must be verifiable (Popper) or falsifiable (Flew). At first theologians rejected this because it clearly excluded their religious doctrines from being meaningful, but eventually they came to accept it. In response, they argued that instead of expressing truth or falsity (and thus being at least theoretically subjected to scientific tests), religious statements express very different sorts of things.

Many thought they rescued religion from philosophical critique, but instead they ended up relegating religion to an even more meaningless existence. It's no wonder that many traditional believers looked upon these theologians with more bewilderment and eventually disdain than they did the philosopher-critics whom the theologians were reacting to.

 

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