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Essay Antony Flew: The Existence and Belief Of God

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Antony Flew: The Existence and Belief of God

Antony Flew starts 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 …show more content…

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

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