Antony Flew Quotes on Knowledge
Antony Flew (1923–2010), the British analytic philosopher whose 1950 paper Theology and Falsification gave mid-twentieth-century philosophy of religion one of its most discussed challenges, applied the Popperian doctrine of falsifiability to theological assertion: a claim about God that no conceivable observation could count against is not merely unverifiable but devoid of cognitive content. Flew defended the broadly empiricist position across decades of work — God and Philosophy (1966), The Presumption of Atheism (1976) — before the late conversion to a non-Christian deism announced in There Is a God (2007), itself the subject of considerable subsequent controversy.
Quotes
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Attributed to Antony Flew:
“Belief in God must be examined, not merely inherited.”
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Attributed to Antony Flew:
“We must follow the argument wherever it leads.”
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Attributed to Antony Flew:
“The presumption of atheism stands until evidence dislodges it.”
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Attributed to Antony Flew:
“I changed my mind because the evidence pointed elsewhere.”
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Attributed to Antony Flew:
“Free inquiry is more sacred than any conclusion.”
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“Theology and Falsification , 1950”
What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or the existence of, God? -
“Craig Vs Flew, University of Wisconsin, 1st January 1998”
[Still an atheist at the time] For Heaven's sake...sorry, perhaps I should have said something else.