How can religious claims be meaningful if they are not empirically verifiable?

This was the strongest question in philosophy of religion for about thirty years, and then it collapsed — not because religious people stopped asking it, but because the standard it used turned out to destroy itself.

1. The principle fails its own test. "Only empirically verifiable statements are meaningful" is not empirically verifiable. You cannot put it in a test tube or derive it from an experiment. By its own criterion it is meaningless. That is not a cheap trick; it is the argument that actually ended logical positivism.

2. The movement admitted it. A.J. Ayer popularized the verification principle in Language, Truth and Logic (1936), and later conceded that it was not a workable criterion. Carnap softened it to "confirmability," which let in far more than the original principle allowed, including much of metaphysics. The school dissolved from the inside, and it is now a historical episode rather than a live position.

3. Meaning is not the same as verification. We understand statements we cannot verify: that Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, that other people have minds, that two plus two equals four, that torturing a child for fun is wrong. None of these can be checked by experiment, and no one thinks they are gibberish. If verification were the test of meaning, most of what humans say would fail it.

4. Science would not survive the test. Universal laws — "every electron has a charge" — cannot be verified, only confirmed by instances. Theoretical entities like quarks and fields are not observed directly. Popper's falsifiability is a better demarcation of science, but it is a line between science and pseudo-science, not a theory of meaning, and Popper knew it.

5. Moral claims would be casualties. "Torturing an infant for amusement is wrong" is not empirically verifiable, and it is not meaningless. The prophets ground justice in God's own character — "what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God" (Micah 6:8). A criterion that makes that sentence nonsense has shown something about the criterion.

6. Religious language has a grammar. Aquinas argued that terms like "good" and "wise" apply to God neither univocally, as if God were a bigger version of us, nor equivocally, as if the words meant nothing in common. They apply analogically: genuinely informative, while acknowledging that the creature's goodness is derived and God's is original. That is a worked-out account of how religious language means, and it predates the objection by seven centuries.

7. Wittgenstein on use. On the later Wittgenstein's account, meaning is tied to use within a practice — a "form of life." Religious language has its own grammar, its own conditions of appropriate use, and it is not trying to be physics. That doesn't make it true, but it does make it meaningful, which is all this objection is about.

8. Many religious claims are empirically testable. If a good God made the world, we should expect order, beauty, and intelligibility, which is what we find, and if Christ rose there should be an empty tomb and transformed witnesses, which is what the earliest documents report. "The heavens declare the glory of God" (Psalm 19:1) is a claim about what the world is like, and it can be argued for or against. Christianity's own claim is that God has spoken: "Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son" (Hebrews 1:1-2), and that "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). Those are claims with content, and content can be examined.

9. The turn: the objection is a universal non-empirical claim. Anyone who says "religious claims are meaningless" is making a sweeping claim about the limits of meaning, and that claim cannot be verified. So the objection is either meaningless by its own standard or an exception to it. Either way, it cannot be used as a neutral test that religious language fails. It is a philosophical position, and it has to be argued like one.

Meaning does not require a laboratory. It requires truth-conditions, coherence, and fit with reality — and religious claims can have all three. The verification principle was a serious proposal that turned out to be unworkable, and the question it was meant to answer is now settled in the other direction.

Sources: A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations; Norman Geisler; William Lane Craig.

Related challenges:
• How can human language be used to correctly characterize an infinite God?
• How can religious claims be meaningful if they are not empirically falsifiable?
• Doesn’t the very concept of faith preclude the offering of evidence and argument? Isn’t that the whole point of “becoming like a child”?