supplemental material

I’ve included the Theology and Falsification essay in its entirety below, as well as a link to a book of essays that it comes from. In addition to this, I’ve included a short recording that covers the argument, it’s context and some of the original responses to Flew’s argument. In addition to this, I’ve included an article by John Wisdom. This article contains the original parable of the Invisible Gardener.

reflection

In this week’s seminar I talked about how the critiques of theism have been a driving engine in the development of theological and philosophical thought. 

When a position is critiqued, the critique itself opens up new avenues to be explored, avenues that themselves become open to critique. In this dialectic journey of thesis and antithesis, a richness and depth evolves. Until eventually we discover that the movement itself, rather than the always illusive endpoint, is where the life is.

Yet I also mentioned how this movement can be stifled in various ways. One of them being cleverly captured in today’s reflection. In a nutshell, Flew employs a parable to warn against what I would term a ‘false dialectic’, which - to mix a metaphor - keeps moving the goalposts to avoid moving forward. 

Today’s reflection gives us a chance to think about whether we have ever fallen foul of this stagnation. Something we might have done through fear of entering into unknown territory.

In truth, this is a temptation for all of us. It is in no way limited to the religious world, as we witness everyday on social media. Many of us, for instance, defend our political positions in a way that is similar to how the apologist defends the invisible gardener.

While Flew focuses here on religion, he reveals a pervasive strategy that is alive and way today. A strategy threatens to extinguish genuine, productive conversation in various arenas, whether that be the religious, political or cultural.

Theology and Falsification

Antony Flew (1923 – 2010) was an analytic philosopher, most notable for his work related to the philosophy of religion. The following excerpt is from an essay called ‘Theology and Falsification’. An essay that is widely regarded to be the most widely read philosophical publication of the twentieth century. It has undergone at least forty reprints and been translated into multiple languages.

The paper was a development of a paper first read to the Socratic Club (founded by C.S. Lewis). In this paper we encounter the famous parable of the invisible gardener. I've included this paper because it offers one of the clearest and most concise expressions of the analytic argument against God as a being.

Part of this excerpt gets a little complicated if you're not used to philosophy, but the parable itself - and the concluding paragraphs - make his point quite clearly. I've recorded myself reading the excerpt, as well as providing a written version.

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