Sir Alfred Jules "Freddie" Ayer (A.J. Ayer) Quotes
Theism is so confused and the sentences in which "God" appears so incoherent and so incapable of verifiability or falsifiability that to speak of belief or unbelief, faith or unfaith, is logically impossible.
Sir Alfred Jules "Freddie" Ayer
Quotes to Explore
I see philosophy as a fairly abstract activity, as concerned mainly with the analysis of criticism and concepts, and of course most usefully of scientific concepts.
Sir Alfred Jules "Freddie" Ayer
The misfortunes which God is represented in the book of Job as allowing Satan to inflict on Job, merely to test his faith, are indications, if not of positive malevolence, at least of a suspicious and ruthless insecurity, which is characteristic more of a tyrant than of a wholly powerful and benevolent deity.
Sir Alfred Jules "Freddie" Ayer
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.
Sir Alfred Jules "Freddie" Ayer
I take it, therefore, to be a fact, that one's existence ends with death. I think it possible to show how this fact can be emotionally acceptable.
Sir Alfred Jules "Freddie" Ayer
I suddenly stopped and looked out at the sea and thought, my God, how beautiful this is ... for 26 years I had never really looked at it before.
Sir Alfred Jules "Freddie" Ayer
The ground for taking ignorance to be restrictive of freedom is that it causes people to make choices which they would not have made if they had seen what the realization of their choices involved.
Sir Alfred Jules "Freddie" Ayer
But if science may be said to be blind without philosophy, it is true also that philosophy is virtually empty without science.
Sir Alfred Jules "Freddie" Ayer
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.
Sir Alfred Jules "Freddie" Ayer
I do not believe in God. It seems to me that theists of all kinds have very largely failed to make their concept of a deity intelligible; and to the extent that they have made it intelligible, they have given us no reason to think that anything answers to it.
Sir Alfred Jules "Freddie" Ayer
If 'god' is a metaphysical term, then it cannot be even probable that a god exists. For to say that 'God exists' is to make a metaphysical utterance which cannot be either true or false. And by the same criterion, no sentence which purports to describe the nature of a transcendent god can possess any literal significance.
Sir Alfred Jules "Freddie" Ayer
The fact that people have religious experiences is interesting from the psychological point of view, but it does not in any way imply that there is such a thing as religious knowledge...Unless he can formulate this 'knowledge' in propositions that are empirically verifiable, we may be sure that he is deceiving himself.
Sir Alfred Jules "Freddie" Ayer
Theism is so confused and the sentences in which "God" appears so incoherent and so incapable of verifiability or falsifiability that to speak of belief or unbelief, faith or unfaith, is logically impossible.
Sir Alfred Jules "Freddie" Ayer
