FLEW & HARE (1971) "THEOLOGY & FALSIFICATION: A SYMPOSIUM"
Part 1
Part 1
Flew & Hare's 1971 essay begins 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 illustrates the problem of unfalsifiable religious language with the Parable of the Gardener. He then lays down a challenge to the other philosophers contributing to his Symposium (as this collection of essays is called), which is to explain what would count as disproving the existence of a loving God. |
Flew begins with the Parable of the Gardener. He didn't invent it: it was originally written by another philosopher, John Wisdom, in 1944. However, Flew has altered Wisdom's original story to make his own point.
You can read Wisdom's original parable here.
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The 'tests' that the explorers set up represent different ways of trying to prove the existence of God. None of them is successful. The 'tests' could also represent events in history that challenge the idea of a loving God who intervenes in the world - for example, the Holocaust.
After each test fails, the religious believer doesn't give up on the idea of God, but adjusts his definition of God to explain God's failure to act, appear or intervene. This would be ideas like God existing outside of time, being an invisible spirit, not intervening because of freewill, etc.
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The Parable of the Gardener illustrates how the Falsification Principle applies to religious language. Flew supposes that religious belief starts out as a simple belief in a God who can be disproved. For example, centuries ago the Ancient Greeks believed in a group of gods who quite literally lived on top of Mount Olympus. Mount Olympus is real and today you could climb it, but you wouldn't find the Greek gods living up there. The religious beliefs of the Greeks were falsifiable and have been falsified.
However, more sophisticated religions came along, like Christianity. The Christian God doesn't live anywhere; he's a bodiless spirit who is omnipresent. This sort of God cannot be disproved by a curious mountaineer. However, Flew doesn't think this is a good thing. By making their God unfalsifiable, Flew thinks Christians have made their religious language meaningless. |
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Flew's "process of qualification" can be illustrated in a more obvious way. Some people think aliens exist and visit the earth in UFOs. They even think they've been kidnapped by aliens, taken up to the mother-ship and 'probed' by them in weird experiments. When you point out that there's no evidence of these UFOs or the 'probing' they went through, UFO-believers often claim that there was evidence but it was removed or destroyed by "men in black" who work for the government, which is in league with the aliens.
In other words, they develop a conspiracy theory. They are "qualifying" their original (disprovable) assertion about UFOs and aliens, and turning it into a theory that cannot be disproved, because the men in black have alien gizmos that can wipe memories or make things disappear. |
death by a thousand qualifications - Antony Flew
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Liberal religion doesn't believe in a literal heaven or hell, Devil, Adam & Eve, Jesus' resurrection, miracles or even a literal "God". This is philosophically very clever, but it easily turns into the "death by a thousand qualifications" that Flew warns about.
Of course, many Christians are just as suspicious as Flew is of the "qualifications" that liberal theologians introduce into their religion. This TV debate features a Christian apologist (defender of religion) who gives a clear summary of Flew's parable and explains why he thinks the Parable is a good attack on liberal Christianity but not on fundamentalist Christianity.
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An example of this would be the debate created by the publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.
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To assert that such-and-such is the case is necessarily equivalent to denying that such-and-such is not the case - Antony Flew
Here are suggestions for things that might count against a loving God:
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Yet people still carried on believing in God and continue to this day - so clearly, NOTHING is so awful it makes people give up belief in a loving God.
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In the 1980s, David Jenkins (the Archbishop of Durham) caused an outcry when he suggested he didn't believe Jesus physically rose from the dead. Jenkins always insisted he was misquoted, but in 2002, a survey suggested a third of the Church of England's vicars and bishops didn't believe Jesus rose from the dead either. This suggests a lot of liberal Christians exist who have religious beliefs that cannot be falsified.
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