Philosophy of religion has existed at least since the time of Socrates, who among other things used skeptical arguments to analyze statements made about the Gods. (You saw this in Chapter 2 with Socrates's conversation with Euthyphro about the topic “What is holiness?”) Since that time, philosophers have debated whether it is rational to believe in God's existence, whether there are sound proofs of the existence of God, whether God's foreknowledge and human freedom can coexist, the meaning of religious language, and so on.

The philosophy of religion is concerned with the meaning and justification of religious statements. Statements about how the world is are more typical of the major Western religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The Eastern religions, such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Confucianism, tend to concentrate more on a way of life than on ways to theoretically justify that way of life.

You have already seen how the school of logical positivism flourished in the analytic period. Positivism has deep roots in empiricism. The movement shot up in the twentieth century when a group of philosophers began meeting in the 1920s and into the 1930s at the University of Vienna. They were called “the Vienna Circle.” These positivists claimed that much of traditional metaphysics, including the claim that there is a God, is incapable of support using evidence, and is therefore meaningless.

According to A. J. Ayer and other positivists, for a statement to be meaningful it must be either about the formal relations between ideas such as those found in mathematics and analytic definitions — such as squares have four sides and bachelors are unmarried men — or sensible evidence of whether a given claim is true or false. “Roses are sweet” is meaningful if and only if there is some actual or conceivable sense experience that can confirm it. Thus, religious statements like “The absolute is outside of time and space” or “Krishna is an avatar of Vishnu” cannot be verified.

Antony Flew brilliantly illustrated the same point about the baffling nature of religious belief in his article “Theology and Falsification.” Flew uses a parable about a gardener in order to show that people hold religious statements as true, regardless of confirming evidence. Two men look at a plot of land containing weeds and flowers. One contends that a gardener tends to the plot, but the other insists there is no gardener. No gardener is ever seen, guard dogs never give out a cry. The believer keeps insisting: there is a gardener who tends this plot. Finally, the nonbeliever cries out in exasperation: How does your gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or no gardener at all? Flew's nonbeliever makes the same point that the positivists made: meaningful statements must be established by evidence.