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The Verification Principle is the view held by Logical Positivists that for a statement to be meaningful, it has to be verified either by analysing the content of the statement on the basis of empirical knowledge or by assessing it against empirical data. The Verification Principle can be seen as a challenge to religious belief because religious belief is based on faith and a priori knowledge whilst the Verification Principle states that all religious statements must be, therefore, meaningless, as they cannot be verified on the basis of any empirical knowledge or data. However, philosophers such as Tillich, Aquinas and Ramsey would refute the statement that the Verification Principle offers a challenge to religious belief, as words and statements are merely symbols and models of what we really mean to say.

The Verification Principle argues that for a statement to be meaningful, it has to be verified either by analysing the content of the statement on the basis of empirical (sense based) knowledge or by assessing it against empirical data, therefore, eliminating metaphysical statements. For example, All dogs are mammals' is analytic because the truth in the statement can be assessed by the context of the statement and There was a hurricane in Texas on Thursday' is synthetic because the truth would have to be verified by looking to see whether there was a hurricane in Texas on Thursday. When applying the Verification Principle to religious statements, Logical Positivists concluded that they could not be verified as, according to religious believers, G-d lies beyond the sense- based realm and, therefore, are meaningless. Logical Positivists based their work on the teachings of Ludwig Wittgenstein who, in his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus stressed that language had to be something other than itself and that meaningful language involved words defined by the real world of objects. It is unfortunate; therefore, that his work was somewhat misunderstood, as he believed that mystical statements were important and could only be spoken about in equivocal language. However, direct sense-based verification may not be the only means of assessing the validity of a statement, especially concerning religious belief, as we may not be able to directly communicate or sense G-d, but we can feel his effect in the world around us. Scientific statements such as the Big Bang created the Universe' and historical statements cannot be absolutely verified, as we were not there to observe

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