FLEW & HARE (1971) "THEOLOGY & FALSIFICATION: A SYMPOSIUM"
Part 1
Part 1
The Falsification Symposium began with Antony Flew setting out the Falsification Principle and its implications for Religious Language. Falsification had originally been proposed by Karl Popper as a way of thinking about scientific knowledge, but Flew applies it to religion.
In this section, Flew concludes the Symposium. He addresses responses to his challenge, which was for religious believers to identify what would count as disproof of the love or the existence of God. In particular, he comments on the responses by R.M. Hare and Basil Mitchell that form part of our Anthology. |
An explanaTION, TO BE AN EXPLANATION AT ALL, MUST EXPLAIN WHY THIS PARTICULAR THING OCCURS; AND NOT SOMETHING ELSE - aNTHONY fLEW
God [has] attributes which rule out all possible saving explanations - Antony Flew
Flew uses the analogy of cashing "a dud cheque". Since cheques aren't used much any more, this might be an odd expression to students. A cheque is a payslip that you can take to a bank and convert into money. A "dud cheque" is on the bank will refuse, because the person who gave it to you doesn't really have any money in their account.
A cheque can look very impressive. For example, I could write you a cheque for a million pounds! But since I don't actually have a million pounds in my bank account, if you presented the cheque at a bank, they would refuse to pay you: the cheque would be a "dud" (useless, fake). Flew thinks religious bliks are the same as dud cheques: they sound very impressive but they can't be turned into meaningful reasons or justifications.
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1984 is a novel by George Orwell, set in a nightmarish future where the Government controls everybody's lives. People who work for the Party (as the Government in the book is called) know that what they are putting in their propaganda and news reports isn't true - but they also convince themselves that it is true, because the Party can never be wrong. Orwell calls this trick of convincing yourself that something is true when you know it to be false "doublethink".
Flew suggests that religious language is also a sort of "doublethink" because believers convince themselves something is true (that a loving God is in charge of the world) while their ordinary experience tells them this is false (because there is gratuitous pain and suffering).
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