What is the concept of falsification?

Question

preferably according to Flew's parable of the Gardener! Thankss :-)

Answer 1

Falsification entails the disacknolwedgement of an assertion by the circumstance of an indefinable negative.

Anthony Flew reasoned that an assertion is logically equivalent to the denial of its negation. In other words, "Salt is good" = "It is NOT the case that salt is not good." The former statement is the assertion, the latter is its negative.

Moreover, assertions are often addled by delusion and quibble; and therefore are not assertions at all. The way to "falsify" these assertions as Non-assertions is to expose the LACK of a definable negative.

"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?"

- from the parable of the Gardener.

if you cannot deny that god is imaginary, how can you prove that he is divine? How do you know the difference between the two (divine & imaginary) without being stricken by delusion or ignorance?