Search This Blog

Saturday, August 7, 2010

Episode 4 - Theology and Falsification


Episode 4 of the podcast is available for download here. In this episode, a classic contribution to 20th century philosophy of religion is analysed. The contribution in question is the symposium in which Antony Flew's short paper "Theology and Falsification" was presented and discussed.

You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

It's been awhile since I read Flew's paper and re-reading it for this podcast made me realise how many important issues it, and the symposium accompanying it, raise. This is all the more impressive given how short and relatively devoid of formal argumentation the original papers are. Admittedly, I may be getting more out of it thanks to my reading in the interim. I will also confess that I have adopted a favourable interpretation of Flew's work.

The original paper, along with the responses of R.M. Hare and Basil Mitchell can be found here.

Horsburgh's critique of Hare's notion of bliks is available here.

Finally, I prepared some notes to accompany the show.

Flew's Argument


click to see a larger version




Hare's Argument


click to see a larger version




Mitchell's Argument


click to see a larger version




Flew's Responses


click to see a larger version




Horsburgh on Hare


click to see a larger version


Edit: Almost forgot to include this. It's William Lane Craig talking about the role that evidence and argument play in his religious faith. A nice illustration of what Mitchell's argument can lead to:

No comments:

Post a Comment

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...