Free I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist by Norman L. Geisler, Frank Turek Page B

empiricist, Hume believed that all meaningful ideas were either true by definition or must be based on sense experience. Since, according to Hume, there are no sense experiences for concepts beyond the physical, any metaphysical claims (those about concepts beyond the physical, including God) should not be believed—because they are meaningless. In fact, Hume asserted that propositions can be meaningful only if they meet one of the following two conditions:
    the truth claim is abstract reasoning such as a mathematical equation or a definition (e.g., “2+2=4” or “all triangles have three sides”); or
    the truth claim can be verified empirically through one or more of the five senses.
    While he claimed to be a skeptic, Hume certainly wasn’t skeptical about these two conditions—he was absolutely convinced he had the truth. In fact, he concludes his Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding with this emphatic assertion: “If we take in our hand any volume—of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance—let us ask, ‘Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number?’ No. ‘Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence?’ No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.” 3
    Do you see the implications of Hume’s two conditions? If he’s correct, then any book talking about God is meaningless. You might as well use all religious writings for kindling!
    Nearly two hundred years later, Hume’s two conditions were converted into the “principle of empirical verifiability” by twentieth-century philosopher A. J. Ayer. The principle of empirical verifiability claims that a proposition can be meaningful only if it’s true by definition or if it’s empirically verifiable.
    By the mid-1960s this view had become the rage in university philosophy departments across the country, including the University of Detroit where I (Norm) was a student. In fact, I took an entire class on Logical Positivism, which was another name for the brand of philosophy espoused by Ayer. The professor of that class, a Logical Positivist, was a strange breed. Though he claimed to be a Catholic, he refused to believe it was meaningful to speak about the existence of reality beyond the physical (i.e., metaphysics, God). In other words, he was an admitted atheist who told us that he wanted to convert the entire class to his brand of semantical atheism. (I once asked him, “How can you be both a Catholic and an atheist?” Ignoring two millennia of official Catholic teaching, he replied, “You don’t have to believe in God to be a Catholic—you just have to keep the rules!”)
    On the first day of that class, this professor gave the class the task of giving presentations based on chapters in Ayer’s book Logic, Truth, and Language. I volunteered to do the chapter titled “The Principle of Empirical Verifiability.” Now keep in mind, this principle was the very foundation of Logical Positivism and thus of the entire course.
    At the beginning of the next class, the professor said, “Mr. Geisler, we’ll hear from you first. Keep it to no more than twenty minutes so we can have ample time for discussion.”
    Well, since I was using the lightning-fast Road Runner tactic, I had absolutely no trouble with the time constraints. I stood up and simply said, “The principle of empirical verifiability states that there are only two kinds of meaningful propositions: 1) those that are true by definition and 2) those that are empirically verifiable. Since the principle of empirical verifiability itself is neither true by definition nor empirically verifiable, it cannot be meaningful.”
    That was it, and I sat down.
    There was a stunned silence in the room. Most of the students could see the Coyote dangling in midair. They recognized that the principle of empirical verifiability could not be meaningful based on its own standard. It self-destructed in