Abstract

John Hick has attempted to meet the verificationist challenge of the meaningfulness of theistic claims by means of what he calls eschatological verification. Although Hick does not think that our current awareness of the universe provides us with any unambiguous evidence by which to verify statements about God, he predicts that there will be an eschatological afterlife in which these theistic claims can be verified, and he thinks this possibility should provide these claims with factual meaning. ;By examining the overall implications of Hick's system of thought, however, I will try to show that the notion of eschatological verification is not an essential component of his thinking, in that his system allows the conditions he believes would verify theistic claims to obtain at the present. In the course of seeing this, it will become apparent that the possibility of these conditions obtaining now, as well as the possibility of Hick making eschatological predictions, are both dependent upon his account of religious experience. Therefore, upon showing finally that Hick does not seem to have a viable account of religious experience, I will conclude that Hick has no grounds for cognitive theistic claims. His system can be understood to reduce to secularism. For entailed by Hick's position is that a naturalist or secularist interpretation of the universe would be acceptable were it found that there are no grounds for religious belief