Twentieth-century perspectives and philosophical comparisons - Flew, Hare and Mitchell

Falsification and the content of assertions

A factual assertion excludes possibilities as well as permitting them. Saying a room is empty rules out someone occupying it. Falsification concerns what could count against an assertion; falsifiability is the possibility of such contrary evidence in principle. An assertion can be falsifiable without being false. Looking through the door could show a person, but until that happens the empty-room claim may be true.

Karl Popper's use of falsifiability concerns the demarcation of science, rather than the claim that every non-scientific sentence is meaningless. Antony Flew applies a related challenge to theology: what circumstances would count against its supposed assertions? His target is their factual quality, not whether religious language affects emotions or behaviour. Verification asks about support; falsification asks about opposition. Retelling Ayer's verification rule does not answer Flew's question.

The distinction between an objection and decisive refutation matters. A missing observation may count against a hypothesis without settling it, because relevant conditions were not met. That is ordinary qualification. The question is whether a speaker recognises any contrary bearing at all, or instead redescribes every outcome as equally consistent with the original claim.

Flew and eroding qualifications

Flew argues that repeated qualifications can remove the content of an apparent assertion. His parable adapts John Wisdom's gardener story. Two explorers disagree about a gardener tending a clearing. Their searches find none, but the believer successively makes the gardener invisible, intangible and otherwise undetectable. Flew asks what remains to distinguish that gardener from no gardener. This is a paraphrase of the story in his symposium contribution, not a quotation. Primary symposium, pp1–2.

The inference concerns a claim's exclusions. If no conceivable outcome counts against it, Flew questions whether it still asserts anything factual. The process is sometimes called death by a thousand qualifications: an initially informative hypothesis is protected until no observable difference survives. The objection is not that adding any qualification is dishonest. It is that indefinitely protecting a claim can empty it.

His theological application concerns divine love amid terrible suffering. If a believer says God's love differs from human love, that may be a legitimate clarification. If the qualification is then used to allow absolutely any treatment without it counting against love, the critic asks what the assertion denies. Calling love mysterious does not alone answer.

A reply can distinguish a transcendent claim from a local scientific hypothesis. A gardener within a clearing should leave ordinary traces; a divine source need not behave like a physical gardener. This weakens a straightforward transfer of experimental expectations, but leaves Flew's more general demand: what content survives, and what would count against it? The reply must explain that content rather than invoke transcendence as a blanket exemption.

Hare, bliks and interpretation

R.M. Hare challenges the assumption that significance must take the form of a falsifiable assertion. His parable describes a student who interprets even friendly conduct from university dons as concealed hostility. Nothing changes that outlook. Hare calls such a fundamental interpretive orientation a blik. This paraphrases pp3–4 of the symposium.

A blik is not merely an isolated opinion maintained stubbornly. It helps determine how experience is understood and what is accepted as evidence. Hare contrasts the student's outlook with an ordinary trusting one and also considers our background confidence in familiar regularities. An outlook can influence conduct profoundly even when a direct empirical test does not establish or overturn it.

Applied to religion, this permits a non-cognitive account: language expresses or embodies an orientation rather than reporting an independently testable divine fact. Non-cognitive does not mean unintelligent or meaningless in every sense. Believing the world trustworthy can shape how one lives. Hare therefore accepts much of Flew's diagnosis about assertions while disputing the inference from non-assertion to lack of significance.

The cost is theological. Many believers intend “God loves people” to say something about an actual God, not merely about their own outlook. Reclassifying it as a blik can preserve significance while giving up their intended factual claim. A further difficulty is judging bliks: if hostile and trusting orientations cannot be tested as assertions, what warrants preferring one? Practical consequences and coherence may offer grounds for judgement, but Hare must explain that standard rather than making sincere commitment sufficient.

Mitchell, evidence and commitment

Basil Mitchell defends religious assertions as evidence-sensitive while distinguishing faith from a provisional hypothesis. In his wartime parable, a partisan meets a stranger who wins his trust and claims allegiance to the resistance. Later conduct sometimes appears supportive and sometimes hostile. The partisan continues trusting while recognising the hostile appearances as a genuine difficulty. This paraphrases pp5–6 of the symposium.

Unlike Hare's student, the partisan admits that contrary evidence counts against his belief. Unlike a detached investigator, he does not agree in advance to abandon trust when a specified test fails. His initial encounter supplies a reason for commitment, and later ambiguity tests that commitment. Mitchell does not simply provide a fixed falsification threshold or say the evidence has no force.

This models a believer who treats suffering as a real problem for divine love but retains faith through other reasons. The claim can remain cognitive: the believer intends an assertion about God. Mitchell distinguishes a provisional hypothesis, a significant article of faith and a vacuous formula. Faith risks becoming vacuous if every conflict is blandly dismissed; taking the full difficulty seriously is essential to his defence.

A critic asks why an initial impression should justify trust against extensive contrary evidence, especially when the alleged divine source is not available for ordinary personal checking. Recognising conflict is better than ignoring it, but emotional struggle alone does not prove rationality. A defender answers that personal and historical judgements often depend on cumulative, defeasible reasons rather than a single decisive experiment. The quality of those reasons remains open to assessment.

Judging the symposium

The participants preserve different things, so comparing them requires more than choosing the most vivid story. Flew demands the exclusions that give an assertion factual content. Hare preserves life-orienting significance by treating religious language differently from assertions. Mitchell tries to preserve both genuine assertion and faithful commitment while allowing opposing evidence to have force.

Consider an original case: a believer says divine care gives them confidence despite an unanswered prayer. Ask three distinct questions. Does the care claim exclude anything, or would absolutely every outcome count equally? Does confidence show a meaningful orientation even if no factual divine claim is made? Is the unanswered prayer admitted as contrary evidence within a wider set of reasons for trust? These questions respectively track Flew, Hare and Mitchell; they are not interchangeable tests.

Mitchell may be preferable when the aim is to explain a believer's truth-claiming faith rather than replace it with an attitude. He describes ordinary trust more fairly than an account requiring instant abandonment after one disappointment. Flew's continuing challenge is that indefinitely withholding a decisive test can still make commitment immune. The defender needs a genuine bearing of evidence and credible reasons, not simply the word faith.

Hare may be more persuasive about language's existential role, but does not preserve the same factual ambition. Flew is strongest against claims whose content has actually disappeared through qualification, but that finding need not apply to every religious assertion. A warranted judgement states which aim matters, tests the account against a serious objection, and distinguishes a claim's meaning, factual quality, truth and practical influence.