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Greg Gauthier 2021-05-03 07:55:19 +01:00
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content/post/the-parable-of-the-invisible-gardener.md
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@ -40,7 +40,7 @@ This is a common mistake among the materialists and empiricists. According to se
But, even if we take the parable at its face, there is still a problem with falsification, and this again gets to the way the parable is framed. What if we were to invert Flew's original parable? What would the implications be? [John Frame](http://www.frame-poythress.org/god-and-biblical-language-transcendence-and-immanence/) has actually already done this for us:
> *Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. A man was there, pulling weeds, applying fertilizer, trimming branches. The man turned to the explorers and introduced himself as the royal gardener. One explorer shook his hand and exchanged pleasantries. The other ignored the gardener and turned away: “There can be no gardener in this part of the jungle,” he said; “this must be some trick. Someone is trying to discredit our previous findings.” They pitch camp. Every day the gardener arrives, tends the plot. Soon the plot is bursting with perfectly arranged blooms. “He’s only doing it because we’re here-to fool us into thinking this is a royal garden.” The gardener takes them to a royal palace, introduces the explorers to a score of officials who verify the gardener’s status. Then the skeptic tries a last resort: “Our senses are deceiving us. There is no gardener, no blooms, no palace, no officials. It’s still a hoax!” Finally the believer despairs: “But what remains of your original assertion? Just how does this mirage, as you call it, differ from a real gardener?”
> Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. A man was there, pulling weeds, applying fertilizer, trimming branches. The man turned to the explorers and introduced himself as the royal gardener. One explorer shook his hand and exchanged pleasantries. The other ignored the gardener and turned away: “There can be no gardener in this part of the jungle,” he said; “this must be some trick. Someone is trying to discredit our previous findings.” They pitch camp. Every day the gardener arrives, tends the plot. Soon the plot is bursting with perfectly arranged blooms. “He’s only doing it because we’re here-to fool us into thinking this is a royal garden.” The gardener takes them to a royal palace, introduces the explorers to a score of officials who verify the gardener’s status. Then the skeptic tries a last resort: “Our senses are deceiving us. There is no gardener, no blooms, no palace, no officials. It’s still a hoax!” Finally the believer despairs: “But what remains of your original assertion? Just how does this mirage, as you call it, differ from a real gardener?”
What is immediately obvious from this inversion, is that it is possible to take any set of facts, and apply a story to them that is unfalsifiable. But, that doesn't make the story *untrue*. At worst, it makes the the truth of the story uncertain, if we assume only an empirical test could adjudicate the truth. But what test could be applied in this inverted scenario? The sceptic has rejected anything we might take as reasonably trustworthy. Given the circumstances, the evidence available, and what the two have observed in the clearing and at the palace, it makes a great deal more sense to accept the claims of the gardener and the guards, than to assume they're in some sort of elaborate Matrix-like hallucination.