Anthony Flew presented his argument that religious claims are meaningless because they are unfalsifiable in his article “Theology and Falsification” (1944).  Building on Karl Popper’s argument that meaning depends not on the means of verification but on whether a claim is capable of being falsified, Flew used John Wisdom’s parable of the gardener to suggest that religious beliefs are meaningless because they are incapable of being falsified.  The believer, like the believing explorer in Wisdom’s parable, is convinced that there is something and won’t accept evidence to the contrary, making excuses and adapting their beliefs rather than admitting that the evidence has shown the beliefs to be false.  For example, believers cling on to their belief that God is good and just despite the evidence of war and the holocaust.  For Flew this shows that these beliefs are meaningless. Overall, Flew’s claim is persuasive, but relevant to only one specific interpretation of meaning.

Firstly, Flew’s argument was criticised by RM Hare in his contribution to the 1955 Falsification Symposium.  Hare pointed out that whether a belief is meaningful or not does not depend on either the means of verification or capability of being falsified.  We all have our everyday lives shaped by non-rational beliefs, such as that my car is roadworthy… how many of us really stop to check under the bonnet before each journey  Hare used a parable about a lunatic to illustrate his point.  The lunatic is convinced that all dons are out to kill him, which shapes his life entirely.  Just because there is no evidence to support or verify this belief and no circumstances under which the lunatic will abandon his belief as being falsified does not change the extent to which the belief makes a difference to and is meaningful within the lunatic’s life.  Nevertheless, and even though Hare is right to say that a whole range of unverifiable and unfalsifiable beliefs – which he called BLIKS – shape our everyday congress with the world, he is arguing at cross purposes with Flew.  For Flew, meaningfulness is a technical concept and relates to ontological claims, statements that purport to describe reality.  If I say “this chair is blue” then I am making a claim about an existing object and how it can be perceived.  In this case, for the claim to be meaningful it is reasonable to say that it must either be capable of verification, such as by looking at the chair, or capable of being falsified… as Flew suggests, at the very least I should be able to admit that I would regard the claim as untrue if somebody looked and the chair turned out to be red.  Hare is using the word “meaningful” in a different sense, meaning impactful in the life of an individual.  Of course, lots of unverifiable and unfalsifiable beliefs make an impact on our lives.  The belief that “it will all be OK in the end”, our family loves us, that a politician or party is “better” than another, that we don’t like cabbage… all of these beliefs have impact in our lives, but are mostly not capable of verification or falsification.  This is because these beliefs are not based on ontological claims, but are more like affirmations of personal preference, identity, culture or the like. It is reasonable to point out that religious claims are meaningful even when non-rational because they make a big difference in the life of the believer, but it is also reasonable to point out that the claim “God is good” cannot be meaningful in an ontological sense when it is neither verifiable nor falsifiable. Both Flew and Hare have a point, but they are using the idea of meaningfulness in different senses, thus Hare’s criticism does not really affect Flew’s claim that religious claims are meaningless because they are unfalsifiable. 

Secondly, Flew’s argument was criticised by Basil Mitchell in his own contribution to the Falsification Symposium (1955).  He pointed out that not only was Hare mistaken in seeing religious beliefs as non-rational bliks but Flew was also mistaken in claiming that religious beliefs are meaningless because they are unfalsifiable.  Mitchell used the parable of the partisan to make his point.  In a time of war, a follower meets a stranger and, as a result of what the stranger says and does, decides to follow him and become part of the resistance.  Over time, there is some evidence that the stranger is on the side of the resistance, and other evidence that he is not, but the partisan keeps faith and carries on believing despite the falsifying evidence because that is what commitment and the decision to trust the stranger demands. As Mitchell pointed out, the decision to commit to the partisan – like the believer’s initial decision to have faith in God – is based on evidence, so it is not a non-rational blik as Hare claimed.  Further, the partisan’s unwillingness to accept falsifying evidence, whether relating to the partisan or God, is the result of the commitment they have made, not evidence that their belief is meaningless as Flew claimed.  Nevertheless, despite Mitchell’s argument being persuasive and a fair characterisation of the faith that many believers have, Flew still has a point because of the very slender evidence on which believers make their decision to commit and because of the extent of the falsifying evidence of evil in the world. Separately and later, Flew criticised the arguments for God’s existence, pointing out that “ten leaky buckets are no better than one” and he has a point.  While there have been many attempts to demonstrate God’s existence from observations and from reason, in the end there is no credible evidence for God’s existence, either in terms of sense perception or in terms of logic.  Even Swinburne accepts that the evidence is ambiguous and depends on our assessment of “prior probability,” suggesting that the case for God’s bare existence depends on what we feel about God before the evidence, on our wants and needs, rather than on an assessment of the facts.  In relation to Mitchell’s parable, if the partisan chose to commit to a stranger who gave so little reason to believe in him… and then refused to waver when the stranger was knowingly and unnecessarily allowed the deaths of six million Jewish people, then it is difficult to claim as Mitchell does that the decision to commit is rational.  Hare is surely right to say that belief is at best non-rational if not positively irrational, as JL Mackie later claimed.  Further, Mitchell is surely wrong to claim that continued belief, despite the overwhelming falsifying evidence, is meaningful.  As Flew and no doubt William Rowe, Gregory Paul and Ivan Karamazov would agree, there comes a point where despite commitment, continued faith must be falsified… or it becomes ridiculous.  It follows that Flew’s claim that religious claims are meaningless because they are unfalsifiable also survives Mitchell’s criticism.

On the other hand, Swinburne pointed out a difficulty with Flew’s argument using his “toys in the cupboard” analogy.  When a claim or belief relates to a state of affairs that is unverifiable and unfalsifiable by virtue of its object, that claim or belief must be evaluated in terms of the meaning it has in somebody’s life rather than as an ontological claim.  Further, as Swinburne pointed out, science makes many claims of a similar nature which it upholds despite not being verifiable or falsifiable. Quantum events cannot be observed without influencing what is observed meaning that any claim about a quantum event is unverifiable and unfalsifiable, but such claims are made all the time by quantum physicists.  This suggests that the falsification principle is no more “scientific” than the verification principle, which was discredited by Flew and previously Popper on the grounds that it is pseudo-scientific.  Nevertheless, Swinburne’s criticisms do not destroy Flew’s argument because he can’t deny that some religious believers claim to have direct experience of God, and because almost all religious believers claim that they will eventually encounter God after death, making their beliefs capable of verification in a way that beliefs about toys in the cupboard or claims about quantum events are not.  Further, Swinburne’s example of science not being able to verify that “all ravens are black” serves to show how Science reasonably relies on capability of falsification as a criterion of meaning routinely.  God is not incapable of verification, as Swinburne claims, like the toys in the cupboard or quantum events, but rather can’t be verified for lack of evidence like the ravens being black, meaning that Flew’s use of the falsification principle as a criterion of meaning is entirely appropriate.  Science regards a claim or belief as contingently meaningful and is always willing to proportion its beliefs to the available evidence, as Hume suggested a wise man should. Flew is right to suggest that religious believers should do the same in order to be regarded as similarly wise.  When believers hang on to belief beyond and even despite the evidence, they show how foolish and meaningless they and their beliefs are. Further, Hick suggested that his parable of the celestial city shows Flew’s argument to be wrong, because like the traveller’s belief in the city, the believer’s belief in God will be verified or falsified at the end of the journey or when we die. Nevertheless, this is not persuasive because while it is true that the belief may be eschatologically verifiable, it is not falsifiable.  If our belief was correct then we will know that it was correct, but if our belief was incorrect we will never know and never have to admit that we were wrong or change our belief.  It follows that belief in God, like belief in the city, is not properly meaningful in a scientific or ontological sense, at best half-meeting the criteria of meaning and more probably only having a tiny possibility of meeting half of these criteria, given the absence of credible evidence for an afterlife of any sort, let alone for one in which “I” could remember and know whether my beliefs had been verified or not.  Hick himself struggled to defend the belief that “I” could survive death, given the break in spatio-temporal continuity under an object that death must represent.  He abandoned his own “replica theory” in the end and tried to embrace re-incarnation, although with no real evidence or argument for this.  This shows that Hick’s point does not seriously challenge Flew’s claim that religious belief is meaningless because it is unfalsifiable.

In conclusion, Flew’s claim is persuasive, but relevant to only one specific interpretation of meaning.  The fact that Flew changed his position and proportioned it to the evidence, becoming a deist in 2010 shortly before he died as a response to new evidence about fine tuning, only serves to support this conclusion.  For Flew meaningfulness is a strictly scientific term and relates to whether a claim is contingent on the state of the evidence, whereas for Flew, Mitchell, Swinburne and Hick – although in different ways – meaningfulness is interpreted in different ways.  Because of this, Flew’s claim stands despite his opponents pointing out other senses of the word in which beliefs can be meaningful.