"Funny that you should only take one element of my actual response:"
I don't see what's funny. I did not misrepresent what you said. I summed it up by comparing your position to Antony Flew's famous parable which is reproduced below.
"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." The other disagrees, "There is no gardener." 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. Well's 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 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?""
Antony Flew has now recognized that he was mistaken. I have never seen a demon but I don't rule them out before I have seen the evidence. Jesus believed they existed and in some cases took authority over them. I find the biblical accounts to be true and trustworthy in areas that I can verify I see no reason to deny those things that I cannot, but that is a different question from that of Theism in general. |
