Logical Positivism and Cosmological Argument in Proving God’s Existence
A classical definition of empiricism in its early stages can be summarized with the claim that the only source of knowledge is experience. According to this view of logical positivism we cannot know anything about the world except through direct experience with our senses. What we cannot know from experience and our senses we can speculate and theorize by observing the patterns from our past experiences, but they are not guaranteed to predict the future. David Hume’s inductive skepticism suggests that even the best kind of evidence we can find for scientific theory is not completely decisive and that error is always possible. Science can never reach absolute certainty based on the beliefs of logical positivists. Hume thought such things as analytical and synthetic distinctions of language are very important. Analytical truth is simply whether the sentence is true or false based on the meaning of the words, and synthetic in itself includes analytical and must be true in the way the world is; in order to know such truths we must go back to experience and our senses.
Logical positivists believe that our theories of unobservable entities such as atoms and electric fields are simply theories that scientists have concluded based on the gathering of patterns through past experience and data collected from scientific experiments. Logical positivism came to be an uncompromising form of empiricism, mainly focused on the theory of language. In Godfrey-Smith’s book Theory and Reality he states that “Scientists use terms like “electron” or “gene,” they act as if they are doing more than tracking complex patterns in the observable realm” (Godfrey-Smith 36) as a means to state the obvious about the misinterpretations of language today. Operationalism, developed by Percy Bridgman, states that “scientists should use language in such a way that all theoretical terms are tied closely to direct observational test” (Godfrey-Smith 30). This was expressed more as a proposal in order to tighten up the use of the scientific language. According to Hempel, logical positivism holds that the sole purpose of science is to draw conclusions based on patterns in experience. For logical positivism, when a scientist tries to describe unobservable entities in the world that results in what we see, the scientist must instead be seen as describing the observable world in a special, abstract way, or by useful fiction. I think this method of dealing with such theoretical entities is quite adequate for the current level of technology we have today. I agree with the views of logical positivists in that we can only know about the world through our interactions and senses; this is the world we know and the only world we can know through experience. It is only through the patterns that we collect of our past experience can we then try to predict the future, with little or no guarantees.
The cosmological argument states that there’s a cause to everything we experience, nothing can possibly give cause to itself, and that there is no infinity of causes. Given these, there must be a cause to start the entire process of causes; therefore in turn this proves that God exists. This view on the existence of God is derived from the Principle of Sufficient Reason: every true proposition, or at least every contingently true proposition, must have an explanation or cause. In our lives, we acknowledge this reasoning and even use this in our everyday language by asking the question of why to each proposition that we experience. The Principle of Sufficient Reason simply puts this in more specific terms to cover the world in a broader sense. This would be included as an example of synthetic truth in that it would be true based on the sentence’s own premises and the state of our world observed through experience. It would be incorrect to say that we can know the Principle of Sufficient Reason on the basis of reason alone without factual interactions with the physical world. There needs to be knowledge of the world before asking the question of why the world is the way it is, and furthermore conclude that the First Cause must be God, therefore He must exist. I agree with Immanuel Kant who developed the view that “all our thinking involves a subtle interaction between experience and preexisting mental structures that we use to make sense of experience” (Godfrey-Smith 36). He exemplified that space and time cannot be derived from experience but in contrary mathematics can give us real knowledge of the world but does not require experience for its justifications.
Logical positivists believe that mathematics is purely analytical due to the fact that it made mathematics into an empiricist framework. “Mathematical propositions do not describe the world; they merely record our conventional decision to use symbols in a particular way” (Godfrey-Smith 26). To have truth based solely on reason alone one need to disregard the way the world is. The definition of synthetic truth is truth that can only be true if it is both valid and sound according to the way the world is, therefore there cannot be synthetic a priori knowledge without experience.
Godfrey-Smith, Peter. Theory and Reality.
No comments:
Post a Comment