Antony Flew, Atheism

In his article, “Theology and Falsification,” Antony Flew poses a question that asks what is required for someone to disprove the existence of God. The basis, or foundation, of such a question is formulated in his belief that to know the meaning of the negation of an assertion is to know the positive meaning of the assertion. He forms this qualification on the back of a previous belief, namely, that “to assert that such and such is the case is necessarily equivalent to denying that such and such is not the case.” Yet, one must ask the question, what is the relationship between the belief of the person asserting and the assertion itself? But for now, to a certain extent, we must say that Flew is correct. When someone asserts that they live in Paris, France, and it became known that in fact, they had actually lived in London, England, then we would say that the assertion, they live in Paris, France was one of two things: either they never lived in Paris, in which case they lied (Flew), or they recently moved from Paris, in which case the assertion, while once true, no longer ceases to be true (Nietzsche). Now, Flew would have us believe that in the case of the existence of God, when we say such an assertion, we necessarily rule out the assertion there is no God. While this is undoubtedly true, it is not the same as our above assertion that someone who lives Paris actually does not live in Paris, as to disprove God’s existence would require evidence unavailable to us. If we were to disprove the assertion that someone lives in Paris we would go to the facts, we would look up names in a telephone book, perhaps investigate on the internet. But when we set out to disprove the existence of God, we no longer have easily reachable tools at our discretion that target the belief. Instead, we use what is at hand, perhaps an argument from the problem of evil, as Flew does in his article. But in asserting an argument against God, such as the problem of evil, we have to ask, what actually have we refuted? Have we refuted belief in God, or simply an understanding of God, which may or may not be accurate? The death by a thousand qualifications (which is supposed to lead us to a type of evidentialist agnosticism) says less about our belief in God, and says more about the one attempting to understand, through analogy, an understanding of God. Would we say that belief in evolution also dies the death of a thousand qualifications when we explain why certain features (which seemingly have no usage) still remain in certain animals, or would we simply say that our understanding of evolution is ever growing, ever changing? Or, perhaps, qualifications of something are only a problem when the object of study is not empirically verifiable, and thus the evidence not scientifically determined? If so, once again, the problem is not qualification, but the criterion for adjudicating justified true belief, in which case Flew should hardly be surprised that any positive ontological statement of God dies the death of a thousand qualifications when thrown into the logical positivist’s waste bucket. Rather, the very complexity of God requires such a distinction. It seems Flew makes a conflation, namely belief in and understanding of. Disproving an understanding of says nothing of its belief in. This is not to say that there is no relationship between understanding and belief, rather there must be if we are indeed reasonable creatures. Yet, the relationship between them is not like a balloon tethered to a pole, where if only we cut loose an understanding of God, the whole notion of God floats away. Rather, if those qualifications about God are correct (and Flew presents no reason why they should not be), then we should not be surprised that cutting away at understandings of God is like Sisyphus eternally pushing his boulder, it’s a process of eternal frustration with no purpose. Or, is Flew right, and ought we to stop believing in evolution because our understanding of it has led to a thousand qualifications?