ABSTRACT
Some philosophers—advocates of the position called logical positivism—have an altogether different view of the problem. Positivism maintains that the people shouldn't try to answer the question of whether God exists, but should reject it as meaningless. Positivists argue that the sentence "God exists" makes no predictions whatsoever, so it is untestable. It is easy enough to invent auxiliary hypotheses that reconcile what the people observe with the hypothesis that God is responsible for what the people observe. The bare statement “God exists” does not entail observational predictions, but neither does the bare statement “electrons exist.” The typical situation in science is that theoretical statements have observational consequences only when they are conjoined with auxiliary assumptions. There was an observed “wobble” in the orbit that deviated from the predicted pattern. Scientific testing requires that the auxiliary assumptions used should be well supported by evidence; merely inventing them isn’t enough.
