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 Sceptic 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 et al. 1955, 96)
Flew explains his point by saying, “In this parable we can see how what starts as an
assertion, that something exists or that there is some analogy between certain complexes
of phenomena, may be reduced step by step to an altogether different status, to an
expression perhaps of a `picture preference.' ” And this, according to Flew, is what
typically happens to theological assertions: starting out as (apparently) “vast
cosmological assertions,” they are progressively qualified in the face of objections until
there is nothing left; they die the “death of a thousand qualifications” (97). They are
incapable of being falsified, and for that reason meaningless.
There are logical difficulties in the way Flew presents his challenge, but his central point
has struck many readers as compelling: “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” (Flew et al. 1955, 98–99). We may ask, Is the
assertion about God's love really saying anything, as opposed to providing some vague
emotional reassurance? Flew challenges his fellow symposiasts with the question, “What
would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or
of the existence of, God?” (99).
In his response, R. M. Hare concedes that “on the ground marked out by Flew, he seems
to me to be completely victorious.” So he counters with a parable of his own, about a
“lunatic who is convinced that all dons want to murder him” (Flew et al. 1955, 99).
Introduced by his friends to an assortment of dons, all of whom manifest kindliness,
goodwill, and a complete absence of murderous intentions, the man remains convinced
that they are secretly plotting against his life. Hare describes this situation by saying that
the man “has an insane blik about dons” (100), whereas we have a sane blik about them.
A blik, then, is a sort of attitude toward, or way of looking at, the world that is not based
on reasons (for the lunatic has all the reasons the rest of us have to believe in the
harmlessness of dons), but that determines in a profound way our feelings about and
responses to various situations. And religious belief should not be treated (as Flew has
done) as though it were a sort of explanatory hypothesis; rather, religious assertions
express a blik, a fundamental attitude, in which a religious person differs from an
unbeliever. Flew's rebuttal is terse: “If Hare's religion really is a blik, involving no
cosmological assertions about the nature and activities of a supposed personal creator,
then surely he is not a Christian at all?” (108). Hare's theory of bliks is
end p.423
representative of a number of similar proposals, for instance, by R. B. Braithwaite (1955),
in which the cognitive content of religious belief is surrendered in the interest of
defending its personal and ethical significance in the life of the believer.