By Schubert Ogden
...
Because religious utterances are typically of this kind, being about human existence and its authentic realization, many, if not all of them, are factually falsifiable. Of course, the qualification is essential, since foundational religious utterances about God's existence and essential nature and activity arc strictly metaphysical and so in no way subject to factual falsification. But true and important as this is, it is also true that specifically religious utterances are in many cases the kind of utterances whose truth or falsity is entirely a matter of fact. Given the essential content of these utterances, indeed, it could not be otherwise. Thus, from the standpoint of Christian faith, for instance, this logical truth but reflects the truth of its own witness that our creation and consummation alike are not necessary but free, being entirely the gift of God's grace to be obediently received by the faith that works through love.
...
Given the axioins axioms of classical Christian theism., especially the archaxiom of the divine "simplicity", it follows necessarily that no assertion about God can be factually nonfalsifiable unless all assertions about God are so. In other words, the classical theist can consistently construe the theistic issue as a properly metaphysical issue only by accepting the implication that it is nothing but a metaphysical issue -- with the further ilnplication that God is insofar forth irrelevant to our life in the world because it can be of no possible relevance to God.
But how different the case of the neoclassical theist, who frankly rejects the axiom of "simplicity," maintaining instead that God is not a rnonopolar monopolar but a dipolar God, who -- although existing necessarily as God -- essentially exists only as the God of some world of contingent individuals other than Godself, to all of which God is related internally as well as externally. Given these alternative axiom, the fundamental assertions that God exists and exists as God, as the one universal individual who is the all-inclusive ground and end of all other individuals and events, are all strictly metaphysical assertions and as such immune to factual falsification. But if these assertions are true, they necessarily imply that any number of other, merely factual assertions must also be true, even though they do not imply, of course, just which such assertions actually are true. Furthermore, necessarily included among sllch ,1sserUons such assertions are certain factual assertions about God, all of which hzwe have the forrn form of asserting that God sOlnehow is somehow appropriately related internally to just this, that, or the other particular world of contingent individuals and events 'thilt that in fact happpens happens to exist. Being factual, these assertions Clbout about God are so far frOln from being immune to factual falsification as to be factually falsifiable in a perfectly straightforward sense. Had some other world existed than actuaHy actually exists, God would appropriately related to it instead, and any assertion that God is son1.ehow somehow related to the actual world would of necessity be false. This need not ilnplyimply, naturally, that such factual c1ssertions 1:1S111(1), be l11.ade assertions as may be made about God are also empirically falsifiable, in the sense, say, til,lt that their lneaning meaning is equivalent to their "empirical expectations."
Although for a neoclassical theisln theism the truth that God exists and exists as Cod God is strictly metaphysical and therefore factually nonfalsifiable, God's essential nature as God, as . modally coextensive with all actuality and all possibility, implies that God is also the ever-growing whole of all factual truth, and therefore precisely "suprernely supremely relevant." One l11.ay may also observe that, although the sheer existence of God as metaphysically necessary can tndecd milke indeed make no factual difference, this is not at all so of 111.y my belief in God's existence or of my willingness to entrust myself and now to God's real, f(lctual factual relation to Ine me and and my world and to live in loyalty to thelnloving them -- loving God and all other things in God. To both belief in God and obedient faith in GocC God in the sense of trust in God and loyalty to God, there are very real factual alternatives; and so far as the witness of Christian faith is concerned, they LTla.ke make just the factual differences that are by far tIle the most important for every single 011.(' one of us.