anthony flew

下午沒課，時間充裕，往又一城午膳和順道到城大書店打書釘。

在書店買下英國哲學家 anthony flew 詳述其由無神論立場改變為相信有神的心路和理據的書 There Is a God。

書中一段提到 logical positivism，於此錄下， 以誌多年前曾為中大團契刊物《大學站》撰寫同題文章。

Logical positivism, as some might remember, was the philosophy introduced by a European group called the Vienna Circle in the early 1920s and popularized by A. J. Ayer in the English-speaking world with his 1936 work Language, Truth and Logic.

Acording to the logical positivists, the only meaningful statements were those capable of being verified through sense experience or true simply by virtue of their form and the meaning of the words used. Thus a statement was meaningful if its truth or falsehood could be verified by empirical observation (e.g., scientific study). The statements of logic and pure mathematics were tautologies; that is, they were true by definition and were simply ways of using symbols that did not express any truth about the world. There was nothing else that could be known or coherently discussed.

At the heart of logical positivism was the verification principle, the claim that the meaning of a proposition consists in its verification. The result was that the only meaningful statements were those used in science, logic, or mathematics. Statements in metaphysics, religion, aesthetics, and ethics were literally meaningless, because they could not be verified by empirical methods. They were neither valid nor invalid. Ayer said that it was just as absurd to be an atheist as to be a theist, since the statement "God exists" simply has no meaning.