Debate with a Christian

[discipulus]

You see my friend, all that you are saying "sounds" good. You sit behind your computer and say things like "We should use empirical this and we should use empirical that". It all sounds intelligent and smart, but no serious academic would actually suggest we utilize such a restrictive theory of knowledge. That is why verificationism died out in the late 60's.

BIB: why on earth shouldn't we, at least it is testable, demonstrable and real? At least its something, isnt it?

We should use it. I do not know if you saw what I wrote at the beginning of my post from which the above was taken.

We should use empirical means and methods in matters that are subject to observation and experimentation.

We should. I have said this over and over.

But to take verificationism and empiricism and to try and extrapolate it over into other domains and disciplines of research is simply unjustified. That is why the verificationist movement died out years ago. If it had been adopted, it would have compelled us to abandon wide swaths of what most of us take to be fields of human knowledge.

Those who espoused such a limiting and restrictive theory of knowledge did so for various reasons. Many saw it as a way to once and for all silence those who sought to speak about the supernatural or God, or other like topics. But unbeknownst to them at the time was that in their endeavor to eliminate all theological statements, they also rendered many scientific statements as worthless at the same time! They essentially were throwing the baby out with the bath water! For example, contemporary physics is filled with metaphysical statements that cannot be empirically verified. Eminent philosopher of science Bas van Fraassen remarks about these concepts when he states: “Do the concepts of the Trinity [and] the soul…baffle you? They pale beside the unimaginable otherness of closed space-times, event-horizons, EPR correlations, and bootstrap models.” -Bas van Frassen in Images of Science, ed. by P. Churchland and C. Hooker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 258.

Verificationism was abandoned by those in the academy primarily because, and ironically because it was too restrictive a theory of knowledge when it came to science itself!!!

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Fortunately, most of us don't live in hypotheticals. ;-)

Fortunately, we do not live in a world where empiricism is seen as the "be all and end all."