Antony Flew: The Existence And Belief Of God

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The "Sceptic" says there is no gardener, just as an atheist
denies the existence God. The "Believer" says there is a gardener, like a
theist telling everyone that God exists. The "Believer" tries to prove that
there was a planter, who planted the seeds for the flowers to grow. This
planter takes care of them, a parallelism to God supposedly taking care of "us".

Flew talks about assertions. He states that "what starts as an
assertion, that something exists�may be reduced step by step to an altogether
different status". He uses the example of how if one man were to talk about
sexual behavior, "another man prefers to talk of Aphrodite". They don't seem to
make sense. How can one confuse the idea of a sexual behavior with Aphrodite?
He also points out the fact that "a fine brash hypothesis may be killed by
inches, the death of a thousand qualifications". A good example of this is
when he said that "God loves us as a father loves his children". He states ...

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What he meant is
that if one asserts something then one must deny something. He then goes on by
saying that, "anything which would count against the assertion, or which would
induce the speaker to withdraw it and to admit that it had been mistaken, must
be part of the meaning of the negation of that assertion�.and if there is
nothing which a putative assertion denies then there is nothing which it asserts
either; and so it is not really and assertion." What does he mean by this? He
proposes that if an assertion must be continuously qualified in the face of
evidence that counts against it, then the assertion is meaningless. For example,
the "Sceptic" asking the "Believer", ...

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