Introduction

During my time at Oxford in 1961 the debates in philosophy of religion were dominated by the question of how believers should respond to the doubts that philosophical critics had about the truth claims of religion. These doubts were mainly twofold. On the one hand, the critics argued that such religious truth claims were irrational since they could not be defended on universally accessible rational grounds. The debate on this challenge focused mainly on the question whether the classical arguments for the existence of God can be shown to be valid proofs or not. Since I had my doubts about these arguments, the question of the rationality of religious truth claims was one that sooner or later I would have to sort out to my own satisfaction. On the other hand, the logical positivists argued that religious truth claims were not only irrational but also meaningless since they had no factual content. One of the clearest statements of this claim was Antony Flew’s challenge to believers to show what possible empirical observations would count as decisive falsification of the truth claims of their faith. If they could not specify any possible empirical observations that could falsify their truth claims then these claims are compatible with whatever happens in the world of our experience. The implication would then be that these claims have no factual meaning. Eventually I would also have to sort out how I could respond to this challenge to my own satisfaction.