I always find it amusing that people claim the verification principle to be meaningless, because you can't verify it. I'am not a supporter of verification principe! But consider sentence "Today it will rain". This statement is clearly descriptive, but so is also this: "1+1=2". But if we consider the first and the second sentence, there is a clear difference, for the second statement is only a definition, while the first one is not. The first sentence makes a claim about the world. Does the verificationist principle make a claim about the world? Of course not. But a sentence "God loves the world" tries to do that. So why should we apply the same principle to both of them i.e. why should we apply verificationist principle on the principle itself. A better critism for verificationist principle would be for example that it refutes all statements about probability i.e. "The probability of P is n/m", because you can't verify this sentence!

Yes, sure. But in that case, one would be arguing for the utility of the principle, rather than for its necessity in all cases. More often than not a tool can be applied only for a specific set of circumstances, rather than all conceivable circumstances. I think what has been criticized, and rightly so, is the taken of the verification or falsification principle as a swiss army knife. If you do apply it to every proposition, rather only some propositions (as Popper did when he applied it to only empirical propositions), then you inevitably have to apply the principle to itself.

The problem is not that verification principle works or doesn't. The problem is that Truth/Knowledge does not NEED to come from Verificationism. The proposition was "Only Science/Empiricism/Verificationism can be used to come to knowledge or truth in the world." This is wrong because it is self refuting. Therefore, truth and knowledge can come about without these things. Logic exists even if the scientific method did not work. Logic exists even if observations had not been possible. Therefore, there are things, like philosophy, that can come to truth claims without these sorts of things.

Oh what? These subjects are easier? Logical inquires into metaphysics and ontology are simpler/easier? That might be so, but I think it's a bad point to argue that most people that do or subscribe to these subjects do so beacuse they are easier.

That’s a rich utilitarian rhetoric. So how do we come to KNOW these guiding principles, let alone if they are true, if we can’t even question their very integrity? Should we simply accept that they were given by God? Surely many would claim that to be ‘unscientific’🤔

@@Tobi_237 Hume pointed out that for many animals there is a large realm of their "knowledge" that is nothing more than brute instinct. Humans are animals too and the fact of the matter is there is a lot of our "knowledge" that is ultimately rooted in nothing other than instinct. Whether or not one finds that self-evidently true idea distasteful or not doesn't have anything to do with whether or not it's correct - we cannot *prove* with logical a priori observation that scientific laws will not suddenly change, and there is, in fact, no logical reason to assume they will *not* suddenly change - from a sheer logical a priori standpoint, there is no reason to think that if I release a ball from my hand that it will fall down and not up (or not move at all). The _guiding principle_ that the nature of the observable world doesn't vary from moment to moment is not something you can "know" in the same way you "know" that mathematical proofs constitute truth, or the way one "knows" facts stored in one's memory, which is fallible. Put another way, the question you're posing has been answered before, and the answer lies in the fact that at the end of the day humans have certain patterns of thought so deeply ingrained in their biology that we cannot help but accept them. One cannot use empirical, observable scientific methodology to know everything we call "knowledge" because not everything is observable. But the question of "where does it all come from?" doesn't justify the supposition of some arbitrary external agent to grant us that knowledge. We just have to accept the self-evident notion that no system of thinking and knowledge will be complete and able to answer all of the possible questions it might permit somebody to ask about it. Even God itself would have beliefs or notions it could not justify - for example, if God exists, what could God say to the question: "Why does God exist?" What is God gonna say in response that couldn't be attacked in the exact same way Craig is applying here to critique logical positivism? Is God just going to say "My existence is necessary" - that's no different from just saying "accept that it's true." The whole point here is that the question of theism is actually irrelevant to the question of the rigorous and objective and stringent study of _epistemics_ but theologians like Craig just have difficulty accepting that because they want their worldview to somehow be comprehensive so that they can somehow offer it as an intellectually sound framework to explaining the nature of total reality. That's a mistaken thought process though because there will _always_ be a foundation that is not self-justifying in _any_ epistemic framework. Instead of trying to skirt that self-evident fact one would do much better to just embrace it.

DerMacDuff It is true that he misrepresents the verification principle, as it is seen as one of the axioms of logcal positivism. However, logical positivism actively works against Lane Craigs agenda, since it defines all metaphysical discourse as meaningless. In logical positivism, there exists two kinds of statements (sorry if this is translated badly): Analytical statements and synthetic statements. Analytical statements are sentences that are logically meaningful. This means, that the sentence is true by the definition of the words used in the sentence. An example would be "I am the child of my biological mother and my biological father". This is always true because of the definitions of the words child, biological mother and biological father. Synthetic statements are meaningful sentences that are not analytical. These sentences must abide to the verification principle. An example would be "My bag is blue", which can swiftly be empirically verified of falsified. Since metaphysical existances and laws can not be empirically verified or falsified, the claim that these should exist is not a synthetic sentence. Neither is it analytical, as a claim of existance begs for empirical verification. In this regard, logical positivism works against Craigs agenda, since he is a firm believer and preacher of the existance and decree of God (which is a metaphysical existance). Metaphysics is simply deemed meaningless by logical positivism. Sorry for the wall of text. Feel free to correct me, if I made any mistakes.

+Victor Scheff "He's confused." A statement that proves that yo uare confused.