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To: Soliton; SeekAndFind; maryz
Summary: Flew is senile, he fell for the Discovery institutes nonsense, and he tells provable lies to advance his new cause.

Characterization of the above: argumentum ad hominem abusive and manifestly untrue but typical of someone like Dawkins.
16 posted on 07/20/2008 7:42:06 PM PDT by aruanan
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To: aruanan; SeekAndFind; maryz
Characterization of the above: argumentum ad hominem abusive and manifestly untrue but typical of someone like Dawkins.

But what if it's true?

This is from Flew in 2001:

"Richard C. Carrier, current Editor in Chief of the Secular Web, tells me that "the internet has now become awash with rumors" that I "have converted to Christianity, or am at least no longer an atheist." Perhaps because I was born too soon to be involved in the internet world I had heard nothing of this rumour. So Mr. Carrier asks me to explain myself in cyberspace. This, with the help of the Internet Infidels, I now attempt.

Those rumours speak false. I remain still what I have been now for over fifty years, a negative atheist. By this I mean that I construe the initial letter in the word 'atheist' in the way in which everyone construes the same initial letter in such words as 'atypical' and 'amoral'. For I still believe that it is impossible either to verify or to falsify - to show to be false - what David Hume in his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion happily described as "the religious hypothesis." The more I contemplate the eschatological teachings of Christianity and Islam the more I wish I could demonstrate their falsity.

I first argued the impossibility in 'Theology and Falsification', a short paper originally published in 1950 and since reprinted over forty times in different places, including translations into German, Italian, Spanish, Danish, Welsh, Finnish and Slovak. The most recent reprint was as part of 'A Golden Jubilee Celebration' in the October/November 2001 issue of the semi-popular British journal Philosophy Now, which the editors of that periodical have graciously allowed the Internet Infidels to publish online: see "Theology & Falsification"."

17 posted on 07/20/2008 7:51:02 PM PDT by Soliton (Investigate, study, learn, then express an opinion)
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