A Critical Review of Radical Empiricism in Denying and Proving Religious Propositions

Positivism or radical empiricism is a sensory philosophical and epistemological system that, by entering religious and metaphysical propositions, considers them to lack objective and external reality. From the viewpoint of the radical empiricists, expecting knowledge provision, truthfulness and proof of religious propositions is absurd and futile. Such an impression would lead to considering many truths of the universe, such as God, resurrection, revelation, miracles and spirit as legends. The present article criticizes the empiricist thinking with intra-religious and extra-religious reasons with a “descriptive, analytical, and critical” approach and maintains that the acquisition of scientific and knowledge-providing facts is not merely in the field of the empirical approach; rather, this approach is evaluated within the limits of natural and material truths. On the other hand, religious and metaphysical propositions have a scholarly certainty in a general and knowledge-providing sense, which can even definitively be said that the truthfulness of material and natural entities has acquired its existential and semantic benefits from supernatural truths called knowledge-providing truth (God). In a similar sense, Holy Qur’an and Islamic traditions also prove some supernatural propositions through modification of the experimental method and in the form of moderate empiricism or pseudo-philosophical or pseudo-scientific empiricism.