ABSTRACT
Less than 100 years ago, Anglo-American philosophy of religion was embroiled in a literal fi ght for its life. In the 1920s, a movement called logical positivism set up shop and threatened a thinly veiled challenge to religious belief by erecting a blockade to the iron horse of traditional metaphysics. It asserted that the vintage locomotive, and everything that followed down to the caboose, was – in the bright light of scientifi c progress – an outmoded means of transport to true and meaningful belief. Emphasis here belongs on the word “meaningful.” The positivists foreswore the meaningfulness of any statement that could be neither empirically verifi ed nor analyzed as tautological.1 They congratulated themselves for stoking the fi res with enough heat to melt the metal of metaphysics beyond recognition and recovery.2
