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Eschatological Falsification

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Gregory S. Kavka
Gregory S. Kavka
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Los Angeles
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Extract

In a well-known article,1 John Hick argues that the proposition ‘God (as conceived by Christians) exists' is, in principle, verifiable but is not falsifiable. Essentially, his argument is that while no experience in this life could conclusively disprove the existence of the Christian God, certain experiences one might have in the after-life would conclusively verify the existence of the Christian God. In particular, he argues that post mortem experiences of Christ ruling in the Kingdom of God would constitute a verification of the existence of the Christian God. In this paper, I shall argue that on Hick's own assumptions, the existence of the Christian God turns out to be falsifiable, in principle, as well as verifiable.

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Articles
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Religious Studies , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , June 1976 , pp. 201 - 205
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1976

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References

page 201 note 1 ‘Theology and Verification’, Theology Today (April 1960)Google Scholar; reprinted in John, Hick, ed., The Existence of God (New York: Macmillan, 1964).Google Scholar All page references to this article refer to the pagination of the reprinting.

page 201 note 2 Hick, , in his introduction to The Existence of God, op. cit. pp. 2–3Google Scholar, describes the Judaic-Christian conception of God as follows: ‘God is the unique infinite personal Spirit who has created out of nothing everything other than himself; he is eternal and uncreated; omnipotent and omniscient; and his attitude towards his human creatures, whom he has made for eventual fellowship with himself, is one of grace and love.’

page 203 note 1 Interestingly, in the first edition of his book Faith and Knowledge (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1957)Google Scholar, Hick himself seems to acknowledge the possibility of an eschatological falsification of God's existence when he writes on p. 156, ‘The only experience that could conclusively refute belief in a loving God would be the obverse of a Beatific Vision, namely a satanic vision, a direct confrontation with an all-powerful and wholly evil being whose existence precluded the possibility that a God should exist as described by Christianity.’ This passage does not appear in the second edition of Faith and Knowledge (1966) in which the discussion of eschatological verification closely follows the text of ‘Theology and Verification’.

page 203 note 2 ‘Theology and Verification’, op. cit. p. 269.

page 203 note 3 ‘Theology and Verification’, op. cit. pp. 258–9.

page 203 note 4 ‘Theology and Verification’, op. cit. p. 272.

page 205 note 1 ‘Theology and Falsification’ in Antony, Flew and Alasdair, MacIntyre, editors, New Essays in Philosophical Theology (New York: Macmillan, 1955), p. 99.Google Scholar

page 205 note 2 I am grateful to Robert M. Adams and Marilyn M. Adams for helping me improve this paper in several respects.