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Summary Of Flew: Death By A Thousand Qualifications

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Homework #1 Flew: Death by a Thousand Qualifications (Handout) 1. Describe the parable of the garden. Explain what Flew means by the death of a hypothesis by a thousand qualifications and how this parable is relevant to this claim. In the parable of the garden, Flew presents two explorers that have stumbled upon a clearing amid a jungle in which grew both flowers and weeds. One explorer states the “garden” must be tended by a gardener and the other dissents by claiming that it is not. They set about finding said gardener by establishing progressively more stringent modes of surveillance to detect him/her/it/ (them?) to confirm or deny eithers claim. With each new mode of observation the explorer who believes in a gardener tending the …show more content…

Honestly? I can’t really answer right now. I would need considerably more time to mule this over and a different medium to articulate my thoughts, but the short, very crude answer goes as follows. I guess that for the time being I agree with Flew’s argument, or its implication, if it is that “theological utterances” aren’t genuine assertions. However, I fail to see how this would devalue them, as I take what is put in parentheses in paragraph three to be implying. Further, I have always seen such utterances as “there is a God” as axiomatic, and if I can liken this statement to the parable above then I also fail to see how “analogous” statements like “there isn’t a God” as significantly different. For each statement the criteria for the confirmation or refutation of them are quasi-arbitrarily set. In example, for the first explorer the presence of the garden is enough to confirm that there is a gardener who tends to it, and therefore he makes his statement, for the other explorer, his inability to find the gardener with his battery of tests is enough to confirm that there isn’t one, and he makes his. In essence, each “assertion” is irrefutable because the criteria for the confirmation or refutation of the statements are set by those making them and employed in ways to confirm the hypothesis of either. One is saying that that which cannot be found exists (outside the context of the “axiom” that there is a gardener) and the other that what

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