 This brings us to the question of why religious statements should be held by to fall foul of the verification principle. Why can’t religious statements legitimately be regarded as scientific hypotheses (as Swinburne 1994, among others, argues)? Religious statements do in many cases appear to have implications for what is or should be observable. We can predict, for instance, that a world created by God will exhibit various kinds of orderliness. It seems, therefore, that some religious statements should be in a good a position to satisfy the standards of literal content set up by the empirical verification principle. Ayer’s reply to this argument is surprisingly terse. Suppose, he argues, that “God exists” entails that there should be observable regularities in nature. If that exhausted the observable results of “God exists” then “to assert the existence of a god will be simply equivalent to asserting that there is the requisite regularity in nature” (1936: 115). Clearly, Ayer contends, this is not all that religious believers intend to assert in saying that God exists: they are committed to the existence of an unverifiable supernatural agent.