Antony Flew on Sufficient Proof
"The Presumption of Atheism" in God, Freedom, and Immortality (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1984), p. 74.Now it is 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 … Some qualification is made — God’s love is “not merely human love” … perhaps — and we realize that such suffering are quite compatible with the truth of the assertion that “God loves us as a father …” We are reassured again … I therefore put … 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?”