Stephen Law

Here's a first draft article for THINK. Any errors, do let me know....   Ayer on Religious Language   Stephen Law   ABSTRACT: Here is a brief introduction to Ayer’s radical criticism of religious belief. According to Ayer, a sentence like ‘God exists’ doesn’t assert something false, rather, it fails to assert anything at all.   Religious belief is of course criticised on a variety of fronts. Critics often focus on the truth-claims of religions, such as that a God or gods exist, that Jesus rose from the dead, or that there is an afterlife. They insist these claims are unjustified. Some go further still, arguing not only is it not reasonable to believe these claims are true, it’s reasonable to believe they are all false.   However, there is another much more radical kind of criticism to consider. This more radical sort of critics agrees with the religious naysayer that religious claims are not true. However, they also insist that neither are they false. In fact, according to the more

  A while back I wrote a paper on the existence of Jesus. It is available  here . I wrote the paper because I was struck by the vehemence with which many Biblical experts insisted that anyone who doubted whether the New Testament documents alone establish the existence of Jesus beyond  any  reasonable doubt was a crank, or at least horribly ignorant.    In my paper I argue (i) that the three most popular criteria by which various non-miraculous New Testament claims made about Jesus are supposedly corroborated are not sufficient, either singly or jointly, to place his existence beyond reasonable doubt, and (ii) that a prima facie plausible principle concerning how evidence should be assessed – a principle I call the contamination principle – entails that, given the large proportion of uncorroborated miracle claims made about Jesus in the New Testament documents, we should, in the absence of independent evidence for an historical Jesus, remain sceptical about his existence.   Here is the

A while back I wrote a paper on the existence of Jesus. It is available  here . I wrote the paper because I was struck by the vehemence with which many Biblical experts insisted that anyone who doubted whether the New Testament documents alone establish the existence of Jesus beyond  any  reasonable doubt was a crank, or at least horribly ignorant.    In my paper I argue (i) that the three most popular criteria by which various non-miraculous New Testament claims made about Jesus are supposedly corroborated are not sufficient, either singly or jointly, to place his existence beyond reasonable doubt, and (ii) that a prima facie plausible principle concerning how evidence should be assessed – a principle I call the contamination principle – entails that, given the large proportion of uncorroborated miracle claims made about Jesus in the New Testament documents, we should, in the absence of independent evidence for an historical Jesus, remain sceptical about his existence.   Here is the c

How reasonable is it for the religious to believe the central tenets of their respective religions? According to many atheists: not very. Many atheists suppose it is in each case unreasonable for Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Bahá’ís, Quakers, Mormons, Scientologists, and so on to believe what they do. The religious person usually takes a different view of at least their own religious belief. They suppose science and reason do not significantly undermine, and may indeed support, the core tenets of their own faith. The same is true of non-religious theists. They consider their brand of theism is reasonably, or at least not unreasonably, held even if no particular religion is. Indeed, many theists consider atheism unreasonable. Even when participants in discussions between atheists on the one hand and defenders of some variety of religious or theistic belief on the other include intelligent, philosophically sophisticated and well-informed people striving to think carefully and objec