Question of the day

I found a link to a paper entitled "Theology and Falsification" written by Antony Flew in 1968 (by the way, that was a very good year): http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/flew_falsification.html

Flew hits the nail on the head in the following passage:

Now it often seems to people who are not religious as if there was no conceivable event or series of events the occurrence of which would be admitted by sophisticated religious people to be a sufficient reason for conceding "there wasn't a God after all" or "God does not really love us then." Someone tells us that God loves us as a father loves his children. We are reassured. But then 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 "an inscrutable love," perhaps — and we realize that such suffering are quite compatible with the truth of the assertion that "God loves us as a father (but of course…)." We are reassured again. But then perhaps we ask: what is this assurance of God's (appropriately qualified) love worth, what is this apparent guarantee really a guarantee against? Just what would have to happen not merely (morally and wrongly) to tempt but also (logically and rightly) to entitle us to say "God does not love us" or even "God does not exist"? I therefore put to the succeeding symposiasts the simple central questions, "What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or the existence of, God?"

Flew states the question perfectly for any theist who proposes to enter into a debate about the existence of God. What would it take to disprove to you the existence of God? If the theist can't answer this question, there is no point in engaging in a debate because they: "believe because I believe because I believe".

Tomorrow I will relate a personal experience of mine from the summer of 2008 that answered this question in a manner that shook me to the core of my being. In a very real sense, it was an event that was instrumental to my "conversion" to atheism and embarked me on my mission.