Justified True Belief

(●) The philosopher who argued that talk about God is not false but meaningless, and who lived to say that nearly all of his own case had been false. + In 1936 a young Oxford lecturer published a short, confident book that told a whole generation of English readers they no longer had to argue with religion. They could simply stop listening to it. Alfred Jules Ayer, twenty-five years old, was not claiming that Christianity was false. He was claiming something more drastic: that sentences about God say nothing at all, and that a sentence which says nothing cannot be true, cannot be false, and cannot be believed or denied. Language, Truth and Logic sold in the tens of thousands, kept selling for fifty years, and became the book most English speakers met logical positivism through. Logical positivism was the movement standing behind it, a company of philosophers and scientists who held that a sentence says something only if experience could bear on it, or if the meanings of the words already settle it. For Christian readers he matters for a simple reason. For about twenty-five years his argument was the argument, and Christian philosophers writing in English between 1940 and 1970 kept having to answer it before they could say anything else. It was not a dispute about evidence, and that is what made it so hard to get hold of. A believer who had spent years gathering reasons for his faith found that Ayer had moved the fight back a step, to the question of whether he was making a claim in the first place. Here is the part that stays with you. The book was demolished, in the end, mostly by philosophers with no religious stake in the matter, and Ayer granted as much himself. Asked on British television in 1978 what the main defects of logical positivism had been, he answered that nearly all of it was false.

(●) 1910 AD: Born in London to a Swiss Calvinist father and a Dutch-Jewish mother, and sent away to school at seven. + Alfred Jules Ayer was born in St John’s Wood, London, on 29 October 1910. His father, Jules Louis Cyprien Ayer, was Swiss and came from a Calvinist family; he worked in finance, for a time with the Rothschilds. His mother, Reine Citroen, came from a Dutch-Jewish family connected to the one that would give its name to the French car company. Two religious inheritances, then, and the boy took up neither. Partway through the First World War he was sent to board at a preparatory school near Eastbourne, aged seven, which was ordinary enough for his class and lonely enough to matter. He was clever in the way that English schools of the period rewarded without mercy. He won a scholarship to Eton in 1923, finished second in his year and first in classics, and in 1929 won a classics scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford. There his tutors included Gilbert Ryle, a young philosopher who would later become one of the most important in Britain, and who noticed that his pupil had an unusual appetite for the new work coming out of central Europe.

(●) 1933 AD: At twenty-two he sat in on the Vienna Circle and brought logical positivism home as a weapon. + It was Ryle who suggested Vienna. Ayer married Grace Isabel Renée Lees in 1932, and the couple went to Austria, where between January and March 1933 he was admitted to the private meetings of what was known as the Vienna Circle: a group of philosophers, mathematicians and scientists who met around the physicist-philosopher Moritz Schlick to work out what a philosophy fit for modern science would look like. Ayer’s German was shaky and he later admitted he took in less of the discussion than the legend suggests. He took in enough. Their programme had a name, logical positivism. The core of it can be put in one line: the only sentences that say anything are the ones that can be checked against experience, plus the ones that are true by the meanings of the words alone. "Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius at sea level" belongs to the first group, because you can put a thermometer in a pan. "All bachelors are unmarried" belongs to the second, because it is true by definition and tells you nothing about the world. Everything else, the Circle held, only looks like a statement. Ayer came back to Oxford with that idea and a sense of mission. Philosophy in England was still largely a genteel conversation about the good and the real. He was twenty-two and he had, he thought, a tool that would end the conversation.

(●) 1936 AD: Language, Truth and Logic made him famous at twenty-five and handed a generation its argument against religion. + He wrote it in his early twenties, finishing in July 1935 at twenty-four, and Victor Gollancz published it in January 1936. It runs to eight chapters and not many more than two hundred pages, and it is written with the pace of a manifesto. Ayer himself, looking back ten years later, called it "in every sense a young man’s book," written "with more passion than most philosophers allow themselves to show." The first chapter is titled "The Elimination of Metaphysics," and the title is not a figure of speech. Metaphysics, in his usage, means any attempt to describe a reality lying beyond what can be observed: the soul, the absolute, the moral law written into things, God. Chapter six, "Critique of Ethics and Theology," takes the criterion set up in chapter one and turns it on ethics and religion together, and both are found to be saying nothing. The book did not persuade professional philosophers so much as it reached everybody else. Undergraduates, schoolmasters, journalists and clergymen read it. For the next quarter century, an English-speaking Christian who wanted to defend the faith in public was likely to meet Ayer’s objection before any other, often from someone who had never read him and had simply absorbed the conclusion: that religious language is not wrong, it is empty.

(●) 1940 AD: The war took him out of the seminar room and into the Welsh Guards and secret work in France. + Ayer was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Welsh Guards on 21 September 1940, helped in by Ryle, who had found that the regiment could take men whose university teaching would otherwise have kept them out of uniform, and who joined it himself. He interrogated prisoners, then moved into intelligence work with the Special Operations Executive, the wartime organisation set up to run agents and sabotage behind enemy lines, and with the Secret Intelligence Service. He spent time in America and, after the liberation, in France. Two things came out of those years. The first was a working acquaintance with people who were not academics, which he seems to have enjoyed. The second was Paris, where he met Albert Camus and read the French existentialists, and where he formed the low opinion of their prose that he kept for life. His first marriage did not survive the war, and he and Renée divorced in 1941. He would marry three more times after that, and twice it was to the same woman.

(●) 1946 AD: A new introduction quietly conceded that the verification principle needed repair, and the career it had launched carried him to the top of British philosophy. + The second edition of Language, Truth and Logic appeared in 1946 with the original text reprinted unchanged and a long new introduction in front of it. That introduction is the most interesting thing Ayer ever wrote about his own book. The rule at the heart of the book has a name, the verification principle, and it says this: a sentence says something only if observation could bear on whether it is true, or the meanings of the words settle the matter on their own. In the new pages he reformulated that principle in more careful terms, admitted that his account of meaning had been too simple, and allowed that a statement might properly be called meaningful in some senses of the word without satisfying his criterion at all. He kept the substance and gave ground on the machinery. The career went up regardless. In 1946, in his mid-thirties, he became Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College London. In 1959 he returned to Oxford as Wykeham Professor of Logic and a Fellow of New College, where he stayed until he retired in 1978, and in 1970 he was knighted. From 1965 to 1970 he served as president of the British Humanist Association. All the while he was making himself, on radio and television, the best-known philosopher in Britain after Bertrand Russell. There is an irony worth pausing on. In 1972 and 1973 he gave the Gifford Lectures at the University of St Andrews. The Gifford Lectures are endowed for the study of natural theology, which means the attempt to learn something about God from the world by reason alone. They were delivered by a man whose life’s work argued that the subject does not exist, and published in 1973 as The Central Questions of Philosophy.

(●) 1988 AD: He choked on a piece of smoked salmon, his heart stopped for four minutes, and he came back with something to report. + In June 1988 Ayer, then seventy-seven, was in hospital in London with pneumonia when a piece of smoked salmon went down the wrong way. His heart stopped for about four minutes. The doctors got him back, and the specialist was astonished at how lucid he was. His first recorded words to the people around his bed were, by his own account, "You are all mad." He then did what he had done all his life, which was to write about it. "What I Saw When I Was Dead" ran in the Sunday Telegraph on 28 August 1988. He described being "confronted by a red light, exceedingly bright, and also very painful even when I turned away from it," and being aware "that this light was responsible for the government of the universe." Two creatures who were its ministers had been put in charge of space, had carried out an inspection of it, and had failed to do their work properly, so that space was, he wrote, "like a badly fitting jigsaw puzzle," slightly out of joint. Ayer, characteristically, tried to fix the problem by operating on time instead, and waved his watch at the ministers of time until the experience ended. He was scrupulous about what it proved, which was, he thought, very little, and he was just as scrupulous about what it had done to him. "My recent experiences have slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death, which is due fairly soon, will be the end of me, though I continue to hope that it will be," he wrote. "They have not weakened my conviction that there is no god." Something has quietly moved in that sentence. The Ayer of 1936 had said that "there is no god" was as empty a sentence as "there is a god." The Ayer of 1988 was simply an atheist. The other story from these years is one his biographer Ben Rogers records, on the account of Ayer’s stepdaughter Gully Wells, who was there: at a party in New York he walked in on the heavyweight champion Mike Tyson forcing his attentions on a young model named Naomi Campbell, told him to stop, and, when Tyson demanded to know who he was and announced that he was the heavyweight champion of the world, answered, "And I am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic. We are both pre-eminent in our field; I suggest that we talk about this like rational men." Campbell slipped out while the two of them talked. The party is usually placed in the closing weeks of 1987, and a version of the scene reached the London papers early the following year.

(●) 1989 AD: He died in London at seventy-eight, an atheist and less certain than he had been. + Ayer was admitted to hospital again in the early summer of 1989 with a collapsed lung, and died on 27 June, aged seventy-eight. Shortly before his death he had remarried Dee Wells, who had been his second wife and who became his widow. What he left was not a school. Logical positivism as a movement was finished well before he was, and he knew it. What he left was a question that every serious philosopher of religion since has had to answer on the way in: when you say "God loves you," what exactly are you claiming, and what would count for or against it? That question turned out to be answerable. But it had to be answered, and Ayer is the reason.

What He Taught

(T1) A sentence says nothing unless you could check it against experience, or it is true by definition. + Think of what happens when a mechanic tells you the head gasket has gone. You may not know what a head gasket is, but you know roughly what would show he was right: the car does this rather than that, a certain part comes out looking a certain way, the trouble stops when it is replaced. Now imagine he says instead that your car has a restless spirit. You do not know what would show him right, because nothing you could ever observe would count either way. Ayer’s claim is that in the second case the mechanic has not made a false statement. He has not made a statement. This is the verification principle, and it sorts every sentence into three boxes. In the first are analytic sentences, meaning ones that are true purely by the meanings of the words: "all bachelors are unmarried," "seven plus five equals twelve." They are certain, and they tell you nothing about the world, because they are really rules about how we have agreed to use the words. In the second are empirical sentences, the ones observation bears on: most of science, most of ordinary life. In the third box is everything else, and Ayer calls the contents of the third box metaphysics and says the sentences in it are literally meaningless. They may be moving, they may be beautiful, they may express a mood. They do not make a claim. He knew from the start that the principle had to be stated carefully or it would let in everything or nothing, and he spent much of the 1946 introduction trying to get it right. The version he settled on turned on what a statement entails, which is a philosopher’s word for what has to follow if the statement is true. Some statements hand you an observation on their own: "the cat is on the mat" tells you by itself that anyone who looks at the mat will see a cat. Others yield one only in company, so that "the fuse has blown" predicts nothing you could go and look at until you add that the lamp is plugged in and the switch is down. Ayer let both kinds through, the direct and the roundabout. As the next thirty years showed, and as he eventually granted, the careful statement was the hard part.

(Q) "We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express." + Source: A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, chapter 1, "The Elimination of Metaphysics" (second edition, Gollancz, 1946). The principle in its first, informal statement, a page or two into the book, before any of the refinements. Ayer adds at once that if nothing a person could ever experience would bear on whether a putative statement is true, then for that person it is "if not a tautology, a mere pseudo-proposition," which "may be emotionally significant to him; but it is not literally significant." A tautology is a sentence made true by its own wording, and so rules nothing out: "either it will rain tomorrow or it will not." A pseudo-proposition is a string of words wearing the clothes of a statement without being one.

(T2) "God exists" is therefore neither true nor false, and neither is "God does not exist." + Picture a widow at a graveside saying that her husband is with God now. Ask her what would show that she is right and she cannot point you to anything you could go and check, and she would think the question had missed what she was doing. Ayer would agree with her that nothing observable is at stake. What he goes on to draw from that is where the trouble starts. Apply the criterion to theology and the result is strange enough that Ayer took care to separate it from the positions people expected of him. The believer, he argued, is not talking about anything in the observable world. If he were, if "God is angry" simply meant "it is thundering," the sentence would be perfectly meaningful and true whenever it thundered. But no believer will accept that trade. He insists that God is transcendent, meaning beyond and above the world rather than a part of it, and knowable through the world but never defined by it. Very well, says Ayer: then the word "god" is a metaphysical term, and sentences containing it are in the third box. The consequence he draws is the one his readers usually miss. An atheist, he points out, holds that it is at least probable that no god exists, and an agnostic holds that the question is real but undecided. Both of them are treating "God exists" as a genuine proposition, one that is either true or false. Ayer is denying exactly that. His view, he wrote, is not merely different from atheism and agnosticism but "actually incompatible with them." He also extended the point to the soul. To say that a man does not really die is to say something meaningful and, he thought, false. To say that there is something imperceptible inside him which is his real self and goes on living has, he wrote, "no more factual content than the assertion that there is a transcendent god." Late in life he stopped drawing the distinction and simply called himself an atheist, which is what most people had always taken him to be.

(Q) "For if the assertion that there is a god is nonsensical, then the atheist’s assertion that there is no god is equally nonsensical, since it is only a significant proposition that can be significantly contradicted." + Source: A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, chapter 6, "Critique of Ethics and Theology" (second edition, Gollancz, 1946). Ayer is distinguishing his position from the familiar ones, and he credits the point to his Oxford colleague H. H. Price in a footnote. A few lines later he offers the theist what he calls the same comfort he had just given the moralist: "His assertions cannot possibly be valid, but they cannot be invalid either. As he says nothing at all about the world, he cannot justly be accused of saying anything false" (T3).

(T3) Calling an act wrong adds no fact to the world; it only shows how the speaker feels. + The same criterion does the same work on right and wrong, and here the results reached further than the theology did. Suppose you watch a man take money from a till that is not his. "He took the money" is a report; you could film it. Now add "and he was wrong to do it." What have you added? Nothing observable, says Ayer. You have not described a further property of the act, invisible but real, called wrongness. You have expressed your disapproval, in the way a raised eyebrow expresses it. This position is called emotivism, and it is sometimes nicknamed the boo-hurrah theory, because on this account "stealing is wrong" amounts to "stealing, boo." Notice the sting in the tail. If moral sentences state no facts, then two people who appear to disagree about whether something is wicked are not contradicting each other at all, any more than one person who likes oysters contradicts another who does not. Ayer accepted that consequence. Genuine moral argument, he held, is always really about the facts of the case, never about the values. Emotivism outlived his positivism. He went on defending a version of it long after he had given up the rest, and the debates it started, about whether moral language describes anything or only expresses something, are still live in academic ethics. It is also the point at which many people, religious or not, feel the ground move under them. A view on which nothing anyone has ever done was actually, mind-independently wrong is a view that has to be paid for.

(Q) "Thus if I say to someone, 'You acted wrongly in stealing that money,' I am not stating anything more than if I had simply said, 'You stole that money.' In adding that this action is wrong I am not making any further statement about it. I am simply evincing my moral disapproval of it." + Source: A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, chapter 6, "Critique of Ethics and Theology" (second edition, Gollancz, 1946). "Evincing" means showing or displaying rather than asserting, and the distinction is doing the whole job: a groan shows that you are in pain without stating that you are. Ayer continues: "It is as if I had said, 'You stole that money,' in a peculiar tone of horror, or written it with the addition of some special exclamation marks. The tone, or the exclamation marks, adds nothing to the literal meaning of the sentence."

(T4) The rule that judged every other sentence could not pass its own test. + The objection is obvious once someone says it, and it was said early and often. Take the verification principle itself: "a sentence is literally meaningful only if it is analytic or empirically verifiable." Is that sentence analytic? It is not true by the meanings of the words; whole libraries of perfectly intelligible sentences violate it. Is it empirically verifiable? No experiment can be run on it; no observation would show it true or false. By its own ruling, then, it belongs in the third box with the metaphysics it was built to clear out. Philosophers call this self-refuting, meaning a claim that fails by its own standard, the way "I cannot write a word of English" fails when written in English. Ayer’s answer, given in the 1946 introduction, is worth understanding because it is the best answer available and it is still not enough. He said the principle is not an empirical hypothesis at all but a definition: a proposal about how to use the word "meaning," offered for a purpose. A surveyor does something similar when he fixes a datum line, the level he agrees to call zero so that every height on his map can be measured from it. Nobody discovers a datum line and nobody can prove one. You take it or you decline it, and the survey goes ahead on whichever you took. A definition is like that: it cannot be false. But a definition can be refused, and Ayer saw that too. He granted in the same passage that other criteria of meaning are open to anyone who wants one, and that he could hardly expect a metaphysician to accept his. Then came the technical trouble, and it came from the logicians rather than from the theologians. In 1949 the logician Alonzo Church reviewed the second edition and showed that Ayer’s carefully repaired criterion admitted almost any sentence whatever, including the ones it was designed to exclude. Later formulations stopped that leak and sprang others, which is roughly how the following two decades went. The principle never did get a statement that let in the whole of science and kept out the whole of metaphysics, and that failure, rather than any argument from the theologians, is what finished logical positivism.

(Q) "I confess, however, that it now seems to me unlikely that any metaphysician would yield to a claim of this kind; and although I should still defend the use of the criterion of verifiability as a methodological principle, I realize that for the effective elimination of metaphysics it needs to be supported by detailed analyses of particular metaphysical arguments." + Source: A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, introduction to the second edition (Gollancz, 1946). A "methodological principle" is a working rule of procedure rather than a discovery: a way of going about the job, which can be recommended but not proved. Ten years after the manifesto, the weapon that was going to end metaphysics in a stroke has become a habit of mind that still has to argue with each opponent one at a time.

(Q) "I suppose the most important of the defects was that nearly all of it was false." + Source: A. J. Ayer, in conversation with Bryan Magee, Men of Ideas (BBC, 1978), page 107. Magee had asked what he now saw as the main defects of the logical positivist movement, and this was the first thing Ayer said. He softened it immediately, adding that perhaps that was too harsh and that the movement had been "true in spirit," and then named the failure precisely: the verification principle never got itself properly formulated, and to this day has not (T4). The remark is quoted so often partly because it is funny and partly because it is the rarest thing in intellectual life, a man saying it plainly about his own most famous book.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) Christians met him on his own ground, and the argument ran for a decade and a half. + The first substantial public answer came over the wireless. On 13 June 1949 the BBC Third Programme broadcast a debate between Ayer and Frederick Copleston, the Jesuit historian of philosophy who had argued with Bertrand Russell about the existence of God on the same network the year before. Copleston’s strategy was not to defend metaphysics by asserting it but to ask Ayer where his criterion came from and what authority it carried, which is the question that would occupy everyone for the next twenty years. The exchange was printed and reprinted in textbooks, and generations of students met logical positivism through it. Then the argument changed shape. In 1950 Antony Flew, at that time an atheist and a young Oxford philosopher, published a short paper called "Theology and Falsification" in a student magazine. Flew accepted the spirit of Ayer’s challenge but sharpened it: never mind verification, he said, tell me what would have to happen for you to give the claim up. He opened with a parable he had developed from a tale told by John Wisdom. Two explorers come upon a clearing in the jungle where flowers and weeds are growing together, and one of them says a gardener must be tending the plot. They watch and see nobody. So the gardener becomes invisible, then silent, then untouchable, until the second explorer asks how a gardener like that differs from no gardener at all. If a believer will not surrender "God loves us" no matter how much suffering the world produces, then the claim has died what Flew memorably called the death by a thousand qualifications. That paper drew two replies that are still taught. R. M. Hare answered with what he called a blik, his word for a conviction about the world that a person holds with everything and surrenders for nothing. His example was a lunatic convinced that all dons wanted to murder him, who took every mild and respectable don his friends produced as one more proof of how deep the cunning went. Hare’s point was not that the man was sane. It was that the rest of us are running on convictions of the same shape, the conviction that the dons are not out to get us among them, and that no observation is going to settle one of them either way. Basil Mitchell, an Oxford Christian, took a different line, and his was a story about trust. A partisan in occupied country meets a stranger one night who tells him he is on the side of the resistance and asks to be trusted whatever happens. Afterwards the partisan sometimes sees him helping the resistance and sometimes sees him apparently working for the other side, and he goes on trusting him, not because nothing counts against the man but because he has met him and has reason to. Both replies were reprinted with Flew’s piece in New Essays in Philosophical Theology in 1955. In 1960 John Hick added a proposal he called eschatological verification, from the Greek word for the last things: if the Christian hope is true, then the believer will one day stand where he can see that it was, which means the claim is verifiable in principle after all and so meaningful even by Ayer’s rule.

(†) What finally sank the principle was logic rather than theology. + It is worth being honest about how logical positivism ended, because the story flatters no one. It was not argued down by Christians. It came apart in the hands of the logicians who tried to state it properly, most of them with no interest in theology at all. The problem was always the same, and it was a problem about where to draw a line. A criterion loose enough to admit what science plainly needs turned out to admit metaphysics too, and a criterion tight enough to exclude metaphysics excluded science along with it. Take a law of nature, something nobody doubts, such as the claim that an unsupported stone near the surface of the earth falls. No run of observations, however patient and however long, finishes the job of checking that, because the claim covers every stone anywhere at any time and nobody has watched them all. Or take a statement about the distant past. No observation available to anyone now will show you Caesar crossing the Rubicon, and yet the historian who says he crossed it is plainly saying something. Or take the furniture of physics, the electrons and the fields nobody has ever laid eyes on, which kept falling on the wrong side of the line alongside the soul. Alonzo Church’s 1949 review showed the repaired version admitting nearly everything. Carl Hempel, who had come up inside the movement himself, spent years surveying the attempts to state the criterion properly and concluded that not one of them had worked. By the time Ayer gave his 1978 answer to Bryan Magee, no one was defending the principle in its original form. For Christian thinkers the lesson was double-edged and they mostly took it well. The gospel had not been rescued by an argument; a rule that had been aimed at it had broken on its own terms. The old questions were simply open again.

(†) When it fell, philosophy of religion came back to life in the English-speaking universities. + What happened next is one of the more surprising academic reversals of the twentieth century, and Ayer is part of the reason it counted for so much. A generation had been taught that talk about God was not even a topic. When that verdict lapsed, the topic came back with the tools of analytic philosophy, the same tools Ayer had used, now in the hands of people who thought the claims were true. Alvin Plantinga’s God and Other Minds appeared in 1967, and it began from something everyone does without thinking. You cannot get inside another person’s head. No experiment will show you that the man across the breakfast table has an inner life of his own rather than merely behaving as though he had one, and yet nobody proposes to give that belief up, and nobody says the man who holds it is talking nonsense. Belief in God, Plantinga argued, is in no worse epistemic shape than that, which is to say no worse off as a piece of knowledge, measured by whatever standards we use for deciding when holding a belief is reasonable. Richard Swinburne went at the charge of meaninglessness at its root, devoting a whole book, The Coherence of Theism (1977), to showing that the concept of God can be stated without contradiction, and only after that arguing that it is likely true. William Alston worked on religious experience, and on whether it can count as a way of perceiving anything. In 1984 the journal Faith and Philosophy began, which meant the subject now had a room of its own to be argued out in. The best measure of the change comes from someone with no stake in it. The atheist philosopher Quentin Smith, writing in 2001, dated the shift to Plantinga’s 1967 book and observed that "God is not ‘dead’ in academia; he returned to life in the late 1960s and is now alive and well in his last academic stronghold, philosophy departments." Sixty-five years after a twenty-five-year-old ruled the subject out of existence, the subject was among the liveliest in the field.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: a God who has spoken, a claim that can be checked, and a right and wrong that are not a tone of voice. + Ayer deserves the courtesy of a full disagreement, and there are four places where Christian faith does not merely dispute him but describes a different world. - God has not stayed beyond the reach of experience. Ayer’s transcendent god is defined in such a way that nothing observable could bear on him, and that is a fair description of some philosophers’ god. It is not a description of the God of Scripture, who is said to have acted in public: "Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son" (Hebrews 1:1–2). The central Christian claim is not that an indescribable something lies behind the world. It is that "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth" (John 1:14). Whatever else that is, it is a claim about a person other people could see. - Christianity stakes itself on an event that could have gone the other way. Flew’s question, what would make you give this up, has a printed answer older than the question. Paul names the falsifying condition himself: "And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain" (1 Corinthians 15:14), and again, "And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins" (1 Corinthians 15:17). Preaching in Athens, he grounded the coming judgment in the same public fact, that God "has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead" (Acts 17:31). This is not a claim insulated from evidence. It is a claim about a body in a tomb on a particular weekend, and its defenders have always known what would sink it. - The knowledge is meant to be available to everyone, not only to the devout. Scripture does not treat God as hidden behind a definition. "For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse" (Romans 1:19–20). Theologians call this general revelation: what creation and conscience make available to any person anywhere, as distinct from the special revelation of Scripture. On that account, the third box was never empty. - Moral words do more than show a feeling. If "you were wrong to do that" only evinces disapproval, then the man who tortures a child for pleasure is not mistaken about anything; he simply has different tastes, and the person who objects is booing. Scripture speaks as though the description were true or false: "Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness" (Isaiah 5:20). You cannot call a thing evil good unless there is a fact about which it is. Ayer, for what it is worth, lived as though there were. The best-known story of his old age is of a seventy-seven-year-old man walking into a room to stop something he could not have called wrong, and stopping it.