Word: ayers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...than it has been for a generation to talk about the possibility of God's existence. The shift is most striking in the Anglo-American academies of thought, where strict forms of empiricism have reigned. "What science cannot tell us, mankind cannot know," declared Bertrand Russell. And A.J. Ayer, on behalf of logical positivism, decreed that "all utterances about the nature of God are nonsensical." The accepted wisdom was that the only, valid statements were those verifiable through the senses...
Today even atheistic philosophers agree that Ayer's rigid rule is inadequate to deal with human experience. Meanwhile, science, his model for learning, has become less presumptuous and ambitious, its theorizing about cosmic astronomy closer to theology, its promise as savior and absolute explainer of the world somewhat tarnished. In the era of quarks, black holes, physics can seem as baffling as foreign policy in the age of the Ayatullah. Philosophers of science, such as Thomas Kuhn of Princeton, have applied relativism, formerly employed against religion, to scientific knowledge. Cornell President Frank Rhodes, a geologist, once observed that...