minor edits

content/post/the-parable-of-the-invisible-gardener.md

@@ -10,23 +10,23 @@ Antony Flew is famous for a few things. Among them is an allegory he included in
 
 > *Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. In the clearing were growing many flowers and many weeds. One explorer says, “Some gardener must tend this plot.” So they pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. “But perhaps he is an invisible gardener.” So they set up a barbed-wire fence. They electrify it. They patrol with bloodhounds. (For they remember how H. G. Wells’ \*The Invisible Man\* could be both smelt and touched though he could not be seen.) But no shrieks ever suggest that some intruder has received a shock. No movements of the wire ever betray an invisible climber. The bloodhounds never give cry. Yet still the Believer is not convinced. “But there is a gardener, invisible, intangible, insensible to electric shocks, a gardener who has no scent and makes no sound, a gardener who comes secretly to look after the garden which he loves.” At last the Skeptic despairs, “But what remains of your original assertion? Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?”
 
-Flew explains the parable, thus:
+Flew explains the parable, thusly:
 
 > ...to assert that such-and-such is the case is  necessarily equivalent to denying that such-and-such is not the case. Suppose, then, that we are in doubt as to what someone who gives vent to an utterance is asserting, or suppose that, more radically, we are skeptical as to whether he is really asserting anything at all. One way of trying to understand (or perhaps it will be to expose) his utterance is to attempt to find what he would regard as counting against, or as being incompatible with, it's truth...  When the sceptic in the parable asks the believer, 'just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardiner at all?' he was suggesting that the believer's earlier statement had been so eroded by qualification that it was no longer an assertion at all...
 
-In other words, the believer was making a distinction without a real difference. Or, to put Flew's claim even more plainly, if there is no real difference in the material reality of an invisible gardener, and an imaginary gardiner, then the believer hasn't made any kind of intelligible claim at all. Logical Positivists like Ayer, would have recognized this immediately as a kind of verification standard. There must be *something* in the material world we can point to, to say, "this is a garden tended by an invisible gardner", or "this is not a garden tended by an invisible gardener". If there isn't, the Positivist will insist, then the claim itself is meaningless. 
+In other words, the believer was making a distinction without a real difference. Or, to put Flew's claim even more plainly, if there is no real difference in the material reality of an invisible gardener, and an imaginary gardiner, then the believer hasn't made any kind of intelligible claim at all. Logical Positivists like Ayer, would have recognized this immediately as a kind of verification standard. There must be *something* in the material world we can point to, to say, "this is a garden tended by an invisible gardener", or "this is not a garden tended by an invisible gardener". If there isn't, the Positivist will insist, then the claim itself is meaningless. 
 
-If the believer could posit a predictive theory about gardens tended by invisible gardeners (or about invisible gardeners themselves), then it would simply be a matter of setting up an experiment that showed those conditions inhering in a situation where an invisible gardener is *not* present, in order to falsify the claim, and if none of our experiments were successful, then the claim would at least be tentatively true (on inductive grounds). This is why Flew includes details like the electric fence and the hunting dogs in the parable. These are rudimentary attempts at *confirmination* of the believer's claim. 
+If the believer could posit a predictive theory about gardens tended by invisible gardeners (or about invisible gardeners themselves), then it would simply be a matter of setting up an experiment that showed those conditions inhering in a situation where an invisible gardener can be shown to be *not* present, in order to falsify the claim. If none of our experiments were successful, then the claim that certain gardens were tended by invisible gardeners would at least be tentatively true (on inductive grounds). This is why Flew includes details like the electric fence and the hunting dogs in the parable. These are rudimentary attempts at *confirmination* of the believer's claim (the corrollory of falsification). 
 
-Flew's allegory has some potency. For decades, it was treated with a great deal of reverence because the idea of falsification (made famous by Popper, but applied first by the Positivists) lay at the heart of the scientific method, and that method had yielded enormously significant results in the decades leading up to 1955. What's more, if what the believer asserts, is indeed a claim about some particular *phenomenon in the material world*, then he does have an issue to contend with. How would he account for Paul's conversion experience on the road to Damascus, or for a paucity of records of Pilate's encounter with Christ in the Easter narrative? Joshua at Jericho? Noah and the flood? Mary's Assumption into heaven? Or, indeed, Christ's resurrection?  
+Flew's allegory has some potency. For decades, it was treated with a great deal of reverence because the idea of falsification (made famous by Popper, but applied first by the Positivists) lay at the heart of the scientific method, and that method had yielded enormously significant results in the decades leading up to 1955. What's more, if what the believer asserts is indeed a claim about some particular *phenomenon in the material world*, then he does have an issue to contend with. How would he account, for example, for Paul's conversion experience on the road to Damascus, or for a paucity of records of Pilate's encounter with Christ in the Easter narrative? Joshua at Jericho? Noah and the flood? Mary's Assumption into heaven? Or, indeed, Christ's resurrection?  
 
-Some of these questions have indeed been dealt with empirically by historians, anthropologists, and archeologists, with mixed results, and, some apologists have spent decades making the case for the historicity of the Bible stories, again with mixed results. But such efforts are always doomed to mixed results. The reason for this, is that many of these claims *are not empirical claims*. 
+Some of these questions have indeed been dealt with empirically by historians, anthropologists, archeologists and even theologians, with mixed results, and, some apologists have spent decades making the case for the historicity of the Bible stories, again with mixed results. But such efforts are always doomed to equivocally mixed results. The reason for this, is that many of these claims *are not falsifiable claims* in the way that Flew wants them to be. 
 
 Flew pins his critique of religious claims to the impulse to qualify:
 
 > ...we see a child dying of inoperable cancer of the throat. His earthly father is driven frantic in his efforts to help, but his Heavenly Father reveals no obvious sign of concern. Some qualification is made: God's love is 'not merely human love' or it is 'inscrutible love', perhaps -- and we realize that such sufferings are quite compatible with the truth of the assertion that 'God loves us as a father'...
 
-It is true that modern apologists often attempt to qualify the attribution of qualities to God. But Flew is expecting these qualifications to signify only some *literal empirical boundary*. In otherwords, some measurable difference must be present in the world, in order for the qualification to mean anything. A color red of a certain shade for example, or a temperature at certain altitudes, or an electrical charge, or in this case, a range of human behaviors expressed under certain conditions. With this as his standard, he asks his symposium fellows, finally:
+It is true that modern apologists often attempt to qualify the attribution of qualities to God. But Flew is expecting these qualifications to signify only some *literal empirical boundary*. In otherwords, some measurable difference must be present in the world, in order for the qualification to mean anything. A color red of a certain shade for example, or a temperature at certain altitudes, or an electrical charge expelled under certain conditions, or in this case, a range of human behaviors expressed under certain conditions. With this as his standard, he asks his symposium fellows, finally:
 
 > ...What would have to occur, or to have occurred, to constitute for you, a disproof of the love of, or existence of, God?