Thu, 29 Jan 2009
Verificationism
I was reading an argument between a Skeptic and a Buddhist today and the Skeptic's went something like this. Science is based on verifiable facts, religion, including Buddhism, is not. So science is valid, and religion is nothing more than thought spinning. This seems to be the skeptical party line, and I find it tiresome, because it's so clearly wrong. I've said why before, but since no one seems to be listening, I'll say it again. If we divide statements into two piles, one pile being statements verified by observation and the other pile statements not verfied, we will need a procedure to determine which statement goes in which pile. The question then is, has this procedure been verified or not? Clearly the procedure cannot validate itself, so either it is unverified, or there is some second procedure to verify the first. This obviously leads to an endless regress. So each verifiable statement is an infinite conjunction of the form, "This has been verified AND the procedure which validated it has been verified AND the procedure which validated the first procedure has been verified AND ..." on into infinity. According to the rules of logic, a conjunction is only true if all its terms are true. If we accept the premise of verificationism, we can never know anything. So either verificationism is untrue, and the skeptic has no grounds for criticizing religion, or it is true, and the skeptic is in the same quandry as the person of faith, as neither can know anything.
