Antony Flew Quotes on Truth
Antony Flew’s “Theology and Falsification” (1950) and the late The Presumption of Atheism (1976) gave mid-twentieth-century analytic philosophy of religion its most influential application of the verificationist truth-criterion to theological assertion. The central commitment of the early symposium contribution is that meaningful empirical assertion must specify the conditions under which it would be falsified — and that the typical theological claim, when pressed by the standard problem of evil and other empirical challenges, undergoes the famous death by a thousand qualifications through which its initial empirical content is progressively withdrawn until it asserts nothing at all. The framework shaped postwar analytic philosophy of religion through the long Flew-Hare-Mitchell symposium debate and the broader engagement with the truth-conditions of religious discourse — though Flew’s late conversion to a deist position in There Is a God (2007) reopened the question among his subsequent readers.
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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“A less important point which needs to be made in this piece is that although the index of The God Delusion notes six references to Deism it provides no definition of the word ‘deism’. This enables Dawkins in his references to Deism to suggest that Deists are a miscellany of believers in this and that. The truth, which Dawkins ought to have learned before this book went to the printers, is that Deists believe in the existence of a God but not the God of any revelation. In fact the first notable public appearance of the notion of Deism was in the American Revolution .”
Flew's review of The God Delusion