How can I start
this paper? Hmmmm.....??? Let's begin with the parable. Antony Flew starts off his speech by telling
the audience this story of two explorers that accidentally came upon a garden
in a jungle. In this garden, there were
many beautiful flowers and weeds. One
explorer says, "some gardener must tend this plot". While the other disagrees, "there is no
gardener". So, these two explorers
tried to figure out who was right and who was wrong. They waited the whole night, but no gardener
was ever seen. Then the
"Believer" said that there must be a gardener, that he "is an
invisible gardener". He tried
everything he could to convince to the "Sceptic" that he was right,
barbed-wire, electrifying fence,
patrolling bloodhounds. But no
gardener was ever found. Still the
"Believer" was not convinced.
He gave the "Sceptic" many excuses as to why they couldn't see
the gardener. The "Sceptic"
told him that he was crazy because what started out as a simple assertion that
there was a gardener, turned into "an imaginary gardener".
This parable that Flew is using is clearly an
analogy to the existence and belief of God.
The garden represents God, "...invisible, intangible,
insensible...". 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 that when we
see a child dying of cancer, his "earthy father" is there, to help
him, nurture him, trying his best for his son.
But his "Heavenly Father", God, is no where to be found, that
he "reveals no obvious sign of concern". The qualification that is made is that
"God's love is not a merely human love or it is an inscrutable
love." What started as a simple
statement "God loves us as a father loves his children", has now
turned into this complex idea that "God's love is not a merely human
love..." Also this new, complex
thought, have started even more questions about that nature of God's love, "what is this assurance of God's love
worth..." This is what Flew was
talking about, "death of a thousand qualification", something that is simple, is turned into a complex idea that needs more
answering.
Flew also talks about other assertions such as
"God has a plan", "God created the world". He calls them, a "peculiar danger, a
endemic evil, of theological utterance."
He states that they first look "very much like assertions, vast
cosmological assertions", but there is no sure sign, no evidence that
"they either are or are intended to be, assertions".
Flew said that,
"for is the utterance is indeed an assertion, it will necessarily be
equivalent to a denial of the negation of that assertion." 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", "Just
how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener
differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?" He was telling the "Believer" that
there was no gardener, because they had watched the area for a long period of
time and he never showed up. The
evidence counts against the gardener.
The "Believer's" statement had been "so eroded by
qualification that it was no longer an assertion at all." It was now very meaningless. He claims that in order for a belief to be meaningful it must be possible
for it to be disproved.
R.M. Hare also
starts his speech with another
parable. It is about this
lunatic, who was "convinced that all dons want to murder him." A "don" refers to a Professor at
an English University. He believes that
they are all out to get him. He had this strong "blik." Hare refers to a blik as an "undefined
term that appears akin to an unprovable assumption." A blik is like a very strong belief, I
guess.
Many would say
that this person is "deluded."
But what this mean? What is he
deluded about? He strongly believes that
they were out to get him. But his
friends have shown him that they were not.
Hare refers to him as having "an insane blik about dons." That our bilk is sane. He explains that there are two sides to every
argument.
Hare uses another
example to give a better understanding of what a blik is. He talks about how when he is driving, he
notices that his movement with the steering wheel will be followed by a
corresponding alteration in the direction of the car. He thinks about steering failures, skids, and
how his car is made. He said that he knows
what must go wrong (problems like the steel rods break or joints are defected)
if he was to have a steering failure. He
said that he have a "blik about steel and its properties." What he probably meant was that, he knows
that steel is a very strong compound and that it does not break that easily.
So, his blik is a sane one. But what if
he were to switch his blik? "People
would say I was silly about steel", that he was crazy. There would be a difference between the
respective bliks. For example, he would
never go inside a car because he would feel that the care is unsafe.
Hare goes on to
say that our perspective of the world depends on our bliks about the world and
that differences between bliks about the world cannot be settled by observation
of what happens in the world. He is
trying to say that one's bliks is one's bliks, no matter what everyone tells
you, no matter how much evidence there is to prove one wrong. That the individual will continue to have the
same blik.
Hare points out
that Flew "selects for attack is to regard this kind of talk as some sort
of explanation." Hare believes
that without a blik, we can not explain what goes on in the world, "there
can be no explanation" because it is "our bliks that we decide what
is and is not an explanation". The
example that he gives is what if "everything that happened, happened by
pure chance." He says that this is
not an assertion because anything will happen or not happen. There is no asserting something because we
are not trying to deny something here.
This is totally different from Flew's argument, that if one asserts
something that one must deny something.
With this belief, he says "we should not be able to explain or
predict or plan anything." Thus,
they are no different then from someone who doesn't have this belief because
they will not be asserting anything.
"This is the sort of difference that there is between those who
really believe in God and those who really disbelieve in him," said
Hare.
Hare concludes
that there is a very important difference between Flew's parable and his. He tells us that in Flew's "the
explorers do not mind about their garden, they discuss it with interest, but
not with concern." But in his,
"my lunatic, poor fellow, minds about dons, and I mind about the steering
of my car." What is he trying to
say here? I think that he's trying to
mention that in Flew's argument that people, the explorers, don't mind about
God. They talk about it and everything
but are not "concern." What
exactly does this mean not "concern"?
Hare tries to point that in his parable that his explains care about
themselves. They care about what goes on
around them. They not only talk about
it. "It is because I mind very much
about what goes on in the garden in which I find myself, that I am unable to
share the explorers' detachment," said Hare. He tried to point out that if he was in the
same situation, he would not share the same views as the explorers. Which is a belief in the gardener, a belief
in God.
Both of these man
had some strong viewpoints. Flew
states, if one asserts something, then
one must deny something. What Hare is
trying to say is that, there is two sides to every idea or
"assertions", a blik. That
that is a sane blik and a insane blik.
Most people have the sane one and those who don't share this view is
point as lunatics. But no one is not
trying to deny something here. The
person with the insane blik is not wrong or that he's not trying to deny
something, it's just that his views are different. Flew states, "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?" Hare's reply to
this question is that he calls this "completely victorious." Nothing have to occur because those who does
not share this belief in God have an insane blik. They are not trying to deny that God doesn't
but rather that they views are just different.
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