The university debate (Flew, Hare, Mitchell)

• Flew was an atheist
• (Flew on falsification) Wisdom asks us to imagine two people at a run down garden, one person notices the flowers and organisation so says there is a gardener and another notices the weeds and concludes nobody has been tending it. Although two people can be presented with the same empirical evidence, their responses do not need to be the same. The atheist may focus on disorder as absence of any divine plan and the theist attends to the beauty as evidence of divine intelligence.
• Flew’s reworking of Wisdoms garden parable

  2 people find clearing in jungle. Don't observe a gardener, sceptic says there's no gardener. Other person believes they come at night, they stay up at night, non believer still doesn't believe. Other says gardener must be invisible. Put an electric fence and dogs, still nothing. Person says must be odourless and intangible. Sceptic asks how the two differ. Flew shows how a statement can start as assertion about world, but then modified bit by bit so ends up not being assertion. For Flew, this has significant implications for religious assertions.
• Flew calls watered down assertions that no longer say anything ‘death by a thousand qualifications’ and according to him, religious assertions are not really assertions at all because, like Ayer, he believes an assertion is meaningful when it is factually significant. For flew, to know the meaning of an assertion you must also know its opposite. If there is no opposite then there is no assertion at all. Flew argues that religious people, rather than accept their assertions may be false, change and qualify their assertions rather than give them up.
• Mitchell’s response to Flew (the partisan)

  He tells a parable to disagree with the view that religious beliefs are unfalsifiable

  Imagine your country has been invaded and you become a partisan, a member of the resistance movement hoping to overthrow the occupiers. A stranger says he is a resistance leader, and asks you to trust him. He sometimes acts for the resistance and sometimes against. This worries you but your trust overcomes this worry and you continue to believe this stranger is on your side, and you do not give up on this belief even though many things may suggest you are wrong.
• Mitchell argues that your belief is meaningful even though you refuse to give it up. Mitchell does not think it is a blik because there are occasions where you doubt yourself which shows your belief is falsifiable. This parable reflects the doubts believers have and don’t just shrug evidence off like Flew claims. We could use Hick’s eschatological verification and say the truth will be revealed and verified. Mitchell has a cognitive approach like Flew, because he believes ‘god loves the world’ is a genuine statement and factually significant, but unlike flew, he thinks it can be falsified.
• Hare’s response to flew (bliks and the lunatic)

  parable of the lunatic

  A lunatic is convinced that all tutors want to murder him, his friend introduces him to many respectable tutors but he is still convinced they want to murder him. Their kind tone makes him believe they are just being deceitful and they are all plotting against him.
• parable of the lunatic/ paranoid student:

  The lunatic cannot imagine being wrong so his claim is unfalsifiable, Hare does not agree that due to the failure of falsifiability it is not an assertion, but instead the view of the student is due to his way of seeing the world that scaffold his beliefs. Hare calls this a blik, an interpretation/ attitude that underpin a belief (a way of seeing the world) and says we all have bliks. He says the student’s blik is wrong and the tutors bliks are right.
• Wittgenstein’s rejection of cognitivism

  says religious claims are not claims about the world in the same way scientific claims are.

  realised we shouldn’t rule out language as meaningless just because it is not falsifiable.

  he rejected cognitivism and the idea that a single theory of meaning was possible.

  Says if we want to find the meaning of a word we should look for how it is used.
• Wittgenstein language game says speaking of language is part of an activity, used ‘game’ to refer to the rules depending on the context, not in a competitive sense.

  he says statements are meaningful as long as they are understood by other language users in a specific context. He therefore thinks unlike Ayer that morality, art poetry ect are all meaningful, they are all language games.

  so to understand religious statements we need to be part of the religious language game, if we do not share the beliefs we cannot fully understand.
• Wittgenstein's language game argument is a problem with Flew and Ayer, they think there is only one way language can be meaningful, and they treat one language game like they came from another ( treating religious talk as if it was scientific talk). For Wittgenstein, science and religion are two different language games.