@kennethamy,
kennethamy;133730 wrote:But what is meant by God is the traditional meaning, and the question is whether there is a God is meaningless or not on the verification principle. Is the ET thing strongly or weakly verifiable? Apart from that, is it meaningless? And if on some formulation of the verification principle it turned out to be meaningless, would that not lead you to abandon that formulation? Or would you simply say, it was meaningless. You have to test philosophical theories by their consequences. That is pragmatism.
If one is referring to the traditional meaning of God, I would say that the statement "God exists" is meaningless as a proposition. What's your take on it?
The ET thing is strongly verifiable
in principle. I would say that it's meaningless if it is stated as a proposition but not as a question or a simple belief. I think that our disagreement here is mainly due to what we mean when we say that something is meaningless. By meaningless I only mean that it has not yet been proven. If someone said that "ETs exist" they would be making a declaration and yet their declaration has not been verified. What substance does a declaration hold if it has not yet been proven to be true or the declarer cannot yet prove it to be true?
kennethamy;133730 wrote:You cannot mean that it would be false if not yet verified. You think that since it has not been verified that cancer is caused by a virus, that it is false that cancer is caused by a virus? You subscribe to the principle that what is not yet known to be true, is false?
Excuse me for using the wrong word. I don't mean that what is claimed to be true is false because it has not yet been proven to be true. I mean that a proposition (a statement that is declared to be true or false) that has not been proven or cannot yet be proven rests on an empty premise.