Theology and Falsification

Anthony Flew begins his book, theology and Falsification, with a parable of both explorers who come across a certain clearing in the woods. In the clearing lies a cultivated garden to which the deuce explorers suppose about. The believer supposes that a gardener tends to the plot dapple the agnostic thinks non. After supervising and careful investigation of the garden, i of the explorers, the Believer, states that an intangible, invisible, and insensible  gardener tends to his good garden. The other, the Skeptic, supposes that if an intangible entity as draw by the believer tends to the garden, thus the gardener might as well not pull through (Theology and Falsification, 96).\nThe qualifications made by the Believer could range in the railyards and Flew attributes his goal by a thousand qualifications notion to this flaw, rendering an over-qualified avowal to be meaningless. The supposition the Skeptic makes is how Flew manifests and premises his wrinkle; that withou t reasonable and applied scrutiny, asseverations are meaningless. To be meaningful, Flew states, to assert that such(prenominal) and such is the case is necessarily equivalent weight to abandoning that such and such is not the case  (98). The ghostlike occupy utterances such as beau ideal has a plan or God exists as needed assertions. Flew draws upon negation to denote that assertions are not assertions if they are not falsified and their simulated truths negated. Therefore, Flew states that religious, cosmological utterances held by the religious are anything but assertions. Rather, theological utterances are so erode by qualifications that they are no longer assertions. Flews formulation of his argument is as follows:\n1. For an assertion to be meaningful, the assertion must deny the falseness of the assertion.\n2. The denial of the falsehood of an assertion requires the assertion to be falsifiable.\n3. By definition the falsifiability of an assertion requires the ability to state th...