Perhaps some readers can explain to me why the piece was so famous and influential. Little did I know that I was walking in the footsteps of a famous philosophical Popperian! But it seems to me that you needn’t be an Einstein to realize that if you take “the God hypothesis” as an existence claim, then the complete resistance of its supporters to entertaining notions of disproof renders that hypothesis unworthy of consideration. And what could possibly convince people to abandon their belief that the deity is, as Giberson asserts, good, loving, and just? If the Holocaust cannot do it, then nothing will. Most scientists can tell you what observations would convince them of God’s existence, but I have never met a religious person who could tell me what would disprove it. I’ve made precisely the same point many times (but without Flew’s philosophical panache or credibility) as in this New Republic article: The entire content can be succinctly expressed in Flew’s last sentence: “What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or of the existence of, God?” His point is that there is nothing, and that therefore the “God hypothesis” cannot be, as Flew puts it, an assertion “that such and such is the case”-the “case” being that God not only exists but is a loving being. I’m actually surprised that this piece, which is quite good (albeit written in academic-speak) was so popular, for what it says seems self evident. The piece itself is short enough that I’m reprinting it below you can find it widely distributed on the internet. There is some dispute about whether Flew’s mental faculties were degenerating at the time, but from what I’ve read his mind seemed sound enough to attest to the genuineness of his “conversion.”Īt any rate, Gavin noted that Flew’s piece, “Theology and Falsification”, was perhaps the most widely-read bit of philosophy in the latter twentieth century (the link also has a short account by Flew, written in 200o, describing its reception and the circumstances of its composition (it was first published in a book in 1955). Later in life he appeared to renounce this stand, publishing a book, T here Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, announcing that he was a theist.
Many of you know that Flew, who died last year at 87, was a British philosopher famous for his defense of atheism.
In my recent post on why I was reading theology, commenter Gavin Phillipson called my attention to a very short article by Antony Flew.
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