I decided to read Antony Flew's book "There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind". This book was particularly interesting because I hear so much more about religious individuals turning to Atheism but I don't hear so much of the reverse occurring.
Let me know what you think, do any of Flew's arguments speak to you?
Flew's "Dictionary of Philosophy" was one of my first purchases, when I discovered philosophy in the '70s... so it was quite a surprise when he converted (de-converted?).
ReplyDeleteFrom the NYTimes Magazine, 2007:
Unless you are a professional philosopher or a committed atheist, you probably have not heard of Antony Flew. Eighty-four years old and long retired, Flew lives with his wife in Reading, a medium-size town on the Thames an hour west of London. Over a long career he held appointments at a series of decent regional universities — Aberdeen, Keele, Reading — and earned a strong reputation writing on an unusual range of topics, from Hume to immortality to Darwin. His greatest contribution remains his first, a short paper from 1950 called “Theology and Falsification.” Flew was a precocious 27 when he delivered the paper at a meeting of the Socratic Club, the Oxford salon presided over by C. S. Lewis. Reprinted in dozens of anthologies, “Theology and Falsification” has become a heroic tract for committed atheists. In a masterfully terse thousand words, Flew argues that “God” is too vague a concept to be meaningful. For if God’s greatness entails being invisible, intangible and inscrutable, then he can’t be disproved — but nor can he be proved. Such powerful but simply stated arguments made Flew popular on the campus speaking circuit; videos from debates in the 1970s show a lanky man, his black hair professorially unkempt, vivisecting religious belief with an English public-school accent perfect for the seduction of American ears. Before the current crop of atheist crusader-authors — Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens — there was Antony Flew.
Flew’s fame is about to spread beyond the atheists and philosophers. HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins, has just released “There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind,” a book attributed to Flew and a co-author, the Christian apologist Roy Abraham Varghese. “There Is a God” is an intellectual’s bildungsroman written in simple language for a mass audience. It’s the first-person account of a preacher’s son who, away at Methodist boarding school, defied his father to become a teenage atheist, later wrote on atheism at Oxford, spent his life fighting for unbelief and then did an about-face in his old age, embracing the truth of a higher power. The book offers elegant, user-friendly descriptions of the arguments that persuaded Flew, arguments familiar to anyone who has heard evangelical Christians’ “scientific proof” of God. From the “fine tuning” argument that the laws of nature are too perfect to have been accidents to the “intelligent design” argument that human biology cannot be explained by evolution to various computations meant to show that probability favors a divine creator, “There Is a God” is perhaps the handiest primer ever written on the science (many would say pseudoscience) of religious belief.
Flew’s “conversion,” first reported in late 2004, has cast him into culture wars that he contentedly avoided his whole life. Although Flew still rejects Christianity, saying only that he now believes in “an intelligence that explains both its own existence and that of the world,” evangelicals are understandably excited. For them, Flew has become very useful, very quickly... (continues)
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/magazine/04Flew-t.html
Though surprising from him, the thesis that a god is possible is really not very bold or interesting. Even Bertrand Russell conceded the possibility of god, comparable to the possibility of "a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit" between Earth and Mars. The interesting questions are always about probability, plausibility, reasonableness etc. Reading the Times profile leaves me sad for Flew, a confused old man who didn't really retain full possession of his own mind. But he wasn't wrong, for all we know (in the strongest Cartesian sense of knowledge-as-certainty), a god is possible... but probably not a god most of us would consider worthy of worship, unless the problem of suffering can somehow be rationalized.
DeleteThis presentation made me wonder how many atheists are open to the possibility of religious alternatives such as simulation theory.
ReplyDeleteI was wondering the same thing, because he started as a Christian then weNt to atheism them back to the possibility of the belief in God, but my question did he come to the possibility there may be a God because that was how he was raised/
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