A typical naturalistic attack on the legitimacy of religious belief is an expression of methodological naturalism: "Only beliefs about naturalistic matters can have any solid evidence or reasoning to back them up." In other words, the attack says that religious believers cannot have any solid reasons for their religious beliefs (assuming those beliefs deal with the transcendent). Surely everyone is aware of such attacks. But this style of attack is NOT Flew's approach. Flew does look at the way that religious belief relates to potential evidence, but he does not say there is no evidence for religious belief. Instead, he argues that there is no evidence that is ever allowed to count against religious belief, by those who hold the beliefs. This fact, he claims, shows that religious belief, as it actually functions in the worldviews of religious believers, is totally empty -- that it says nothing meaningful about the world, nothing that could be true or false.
So, Flew's argument does not conclude that religious belief is without evidence. Rather, it concludes that religious beliefs are in a way meaningless. More specifically, religious beliefs are not true and they are not false. This means that when someone says that Jesus died to save us from our sins, or that God loves us, or that God is not to be trusted -- they have not said anything the could be true. They have not said anything that could be false either.
Your first reading task is to figure out Flew's argument for this position.
As you read, you will notice that Flew talks a lot about whether religious beliefs are "falsifiable". That just means whether any logically possible event or experience would count as evidence against their truth. Flew claims that religious beliefs are not falsifiable. (Note: that is not at all the same as claiming that religious beliefs are true.) "Falsifiable" is pretty close to "testable".
To turn in:
State in a sentence or two why Flew thinks that a belief that is not falsifiable cannot be true or false. (I.e., if a belief cannot be tested in experience, why would that supposedly mean that it is neither true nor false?)