Former leading atheist argues for the existence of God
A review of There is a God: How The World’s Most Notorious Atheist
Changed His Mind by Antony Flew with Roy Varghese
Harper Collins, New York, 2007
reviewed by Lita Cosner
Skeptics often cite ‘testimonies’ of former professing Christians who
‘de-converted’ (apostatized) to atheism to show that Christianity is
inherently unreasonable; sure, a person may be raised Christian, but once he is
able to reason for himself, the light of rationality will wash away all that religious
superstition. Of course, they often ignore or dismiss the conversion stories of
former atheists. Antony Flew’s rejection of atheism is a nightmare for skeptics,
because the most influential atheistic philosopher of the twentieth century is rather
harder to dismiss out-of-hand. Flew documents this intellectual process in There
is a God.
From Christianity to atheism
Flew begins the story of his rejection of atheism by explaining how he became an
atheist in the first place. The son of a Methodist minister, Flew went to school
as ‘a committed and conscientious, if unenthusiastic, Christian’ (p.
10), but during his studies began to question his faith. The problem of evil caused
Flew to question the possibility of an omnipotent God. By the time he was 15, he
considered himself an atheist (p. 15), although Flew admits that he ‘reached
the conclusion about the nonexistence of God much too quickly, much too easily,
and for what later seemed to me the wrong reasons’ (pp. 10–11).
Influential atheist works
Photo from
<www. researchintelligentdesign.org>
The 20th century’s most influential atheist thinker, Antony Flew, announced
in 2004 that he accepted the existence of a God.
Flew’s rejection of atheism would not be such a problem for atheists if he
hadn’t been the foremost atheist thinker of the 20th century. In Oxford, Flew
was part of the Socratic club, a forum for debate between atheists and Christians,
of which C.S. Lewis was the president for over a decade. There he presented ‘Theology
and Falsification’, a paper which argued that many theological statements
have so many qualifications attached that they are essentially empty (pp. 43–44).
However, he says, ‘I was not saying that statements of religious belief were
meaningless. I simply challenged religious believers to explain how their statements
are to be understood, especially in the light of conflicting data’ (p. 45).
This 1950 paper sparked many responses, some decades after the paper was presented
(p. 47).
In 1961, Flew published his next atheist work; God and Philosophy was Flew’s
attempt to examine the basis for Christian theism. In a systematic argument for
atheism, he contended that the ‘the design, cosmological, and moral arguments
for God’s existence are invalid’ (p. 49). He argued that the concept
of God must be sufficiently defined before God’s existence can be debated.
He now considers this book to be ‘a historical relic’ (p. 52), and later
in his current book advocates the design and cosmological arguments as valid evidence
of God’s existence.
In 1971, Flew published The Presumption of Atheism. In his final work dealing
with atheism, he argued that as the inherently more rational position, atheism should
be presumed at the outset of any debate regarding God’s existence, and the
burden of proof should be on the theist (p. 53). He notes that the ‘headiest
challenge’ to this argument came from Christian logician Alvin Plantinga,
who argued that the belief in God is ‘properly basic’ for believers
(p. 55). He clarifies that ‘the presumption of atheism is, at best, a methodological
starting point, not an ontological conclusion’, and that the presumption of
atheism could be accepted by theists who have adequate grounds for believing in
God (p. 56).
Indeed, atheism itself has a number of propositions that have to be accepted by
faith, e.g. that something (the universe) came from nothing, non-living matter evolved
into living cells by stochastic chemistry, complex specified information arose without
intelligence, morality arose by natural selection, etc.
From atheism to theism
What I think the DNA material has done is that it has shown, by the almost unbelievable
complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce (life), that intelligence
must have been involved in getting these extraordinarily diverse elements to work
together.—Antony Flew
Flew concentrated on other philosophical areas for the next several decades, only
revisiting atheistic topics to debate people based on his previous works. He took
part in cordial debates with theists, which included one in 1985 with philosopher
and theologian Dr Gary Habermas on the most important reported deed of all, the
proposition that Jesus Christ conquered death itself.1 This debate was held in Dallas in front of a crowd
of three thousand people. It was judged by two panels of experts from leading American
universities: one panel comprised five philosophers who were asked to judge the
content of the debate, and the other comprised five professional debate judges who
were asked to judge the quality of the arguments.
Four of the five on the philosophers panel voted that Habermas had won, i.e. the
case he made for the Resurrection was stronger than Flew’s attempts to refute
it, and one scored it a draw. The panel of professional debate judges voted three
to two to Habermas.
At the most recent debate in 2004, at New York University, he declared that he ‘now
accepted the existence of a God’ (p. 74). In that debate, he said that he
believed that the origin of life points to a creative Intelligence,
‘almost entirely because of the DNA investigations. What I think the DNA material
has done is that it has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements
which are needed to produce (life), that intelligence must have been involved in
getting these extraordinarily diverse elements to work together. It’s the
enormous complexity of the number of elements and the enormous subtlety of the ways
they work together. The meeting of these two parts at the right time by chance is
simply minute. It is all a matter of the enormous complexity by which the results
were achieved, which looked to me like the work of intelligence’ (p. 75).
The complexity of the genetic code led Flew to believe that the origin of life required
a ‘creative intelligence’.
Flew was particularly impressed with a physicist’s refutation of the idea
that monkeys at typewriters would eventually produce a Shakespearean sonnet. The
likelihood of getting one Shakespearean sonnet by chance is one in 10690;
to put this number in perspective, there are only 1080 particles in
the universe. Flew concludes:
‘If the theorem won’t work for a single sonnet, then of course it’s
simply absurd to suggest that the more elaborate feat of the origin of life could
have been achieved by chance’ (p. 78).
Flew was also critical of Dawkins’s ‘selfish gene’ idea, pointing
out that ‘natural selection does not positively produce anything. It only
eliminates, or tends to eliminate, whatever is not competitive’ (p. 78). He
called Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene ‘a major exercise in popular
mystification’, and argued that Dawkins made the critical mistake of overlooking
the fact that most observable traits in organisms are the result of the coding of
many genes (p. 79).
Fingerprints of a designer
Flew’s belief in God hinges on three aspects of nature: ‘The first is
the fact that nature obeys laws. The second is the dimension of life … The
third is the very existence of nature’ (p. 89).
The Laws of nature
Every scientist must assume that nature acts in certain predictable, measurable
ways; this is what makes scientific discovery possible. Paul Davies argued that
‘science can proceed only if the scientist adopts an essentially theological
worldview’ (p. 107). However, there is really no reason why nature should
follow laws; the existence of such laws requires an explanation. Three questions
must be answered: ‘Where do the laws of physics come from? Why is it that
we have these laws instead of some other set? How is that we have a set of laws
that drives featureless gases to life, consciousness, and intelligence?’ (p.
108). Flew argues along with many other classical and modern scientists that theism
is the only serious answer.
When Flew was an atheist, he argued that the universe and its laws were themselves
ultimate (p. 134). Every belief has some fundamental assumption; for theists, the
existence of God is the fundamental assumption. Flew, however, took the universe
and its most fundamental features as that assumption. The discovery that the universe
was not infinite threw a wrench into this assumption; if the universe had begun
to exist at some point in time, it was reasonable to assume something caused its
beginning. Because it is more likely that God exists uncaused, rather than the universe,
it is logical to argue for the existence of God from the existence of the universe
(pp. 144–145).
The fine-tuning of the universe
Not only does our universe follow finely tuned physical laws, but laws which seem
to be finely tuned to enable life to exist. The most common atheist answer is to
assert that our universe is one of many others—the ‘multiverse’
speculation. It is interesting that atheists who refuse to believe in an unseen
God, based supposedly on the lack of evidence for His existence, explain away the
appearance of design by embracing the existence of an unknown number of other universes
for which there is no evidence—or even any effect of their evidence.
In any case, Flew argues that even if there were multiple universes, it would not
solve the atheists’ dilemma; ‘multiverse or not, we still have to come
to terms with the origin of the laws of nature. And the only viable explanation
here is the divine Mind’ (p. 121).
The origin of life
Can the origins of a system of coded chemistry be explained in a way that makes
no appeal whatever to the kinds of facts that we otherwise invoke to explain codes
and languages, systems of communication, the impress of ordinary words on the world
of matter?—Antony Flew
The existence of physical laws which allow life to survive is necessary, but not
sufficient by itself, for the existence of life. The question of the origin of life
became much more complex with the discovery of DNA, a molecule comprising ‘letters’
that code for the instructions to build the machinery of life. A real vicious circle
is that the instructions to build decoding machinery are themselves encoded on the
DNA. That life is governed by a complex code leads to the question:
‘Can the origins of a system of coded chemistry be explained in a way that
makes no appeal whatever to the kinds of facts that we otherwise invoke to explain
codes and languages, systems of communication, the impress of ordinary words on
the world of matter?’ (p. 127).
He pointed out that natural selection can’t explain the origin of first
life. Ultimately, a vast amount of information is behind life, and in every other
case, information necessarily points to an intelligent source, so it is only reasonable
that there be a Source behind this information as well.
Flew’s God
As an atheist, Flew struggled with the idea of an invisible, omnipresent Person,
and how such a person could be identified (p. 148). However, Flew was making embodiment
part of his definition of a person, which isn’t justified. Philosopher Thomas
Tracy defined persons simply as agents that are capable of acting intentionally
(pp. 149–150). Although human persons are embodied, embodiment is not a necessary
component for personhood. Flew admits that ‘At the very least, the studies
of Tracy and Leftow show that the idea of an omnipotent Spirit is not intrinsically
incoherent if we see such a Spirit as outside space and time that uniquely executes
its intentions in the spatio-temporal continuum’ (pp. 153–154).
Flew identifies his god as the god of Aristotle, with the attributes of ‘immutability,
immateriality, omnipotence, omniscience, oneness or indivisibility, perfect goodness
and necessary existence’ (p. 92). He is adamant that his conversion to theism
does not represent a paradigm shift, because his paradigm remains simply to follow
the argument where it leads (p. 89).
Is Flew’s god the God of Scripture?
Some of the attributes of the god that Flew acknowledges are also attributes of
God, but Flew does not acknowledge the Trinity or Christ as the second Person of
the Trinity, both of which are essential Christian doctrines. So although Flew’s
deistic beliefs echo Christian belief in some areas, the god he accepts is not the
same as the God of the Bible, although he professes to remain open to the evidence.
Flew never claims to be Christian; he is a self-identified deist who does not believe
in an afterlife (p. 2). Nonetheless, he is charitable in his comments about the
Christians he came in contact with, writing that his father, a Methodist minister,
shared his ‘eagerness of mind’ even though their intellectual pursuits
led them in different directions (p. 12). Flew concludes that he is ‘entirely
open to learning more about the divine Reality, especially in the light of what
we know about the history of nature’ and that ‘the question of whether
the Divine has revealed itself in human history remains a valid topic of discussion.
You cannot limit the possibilities of omnipotence except to produce the logically
impossible’ (p. 157).
A critique of ‘The New Atheism’
The first of two appendices in There is a God is a critique of the ‘New
Atheism’ by co-author Roy Varghese. Varghese argues that there are some phenomena
that are only explainable in terms of the existence of God (p. 161). His view is
that atheism is a result of a deliberate refusal to look at the evidence, which
is readily available in our immediate experience (p. 163).
First, Varghese argues that something had to always exist, either God or the universe
(p. 165). He maintains that the theist argument is superior because the atheist
says that the eternal existence of the universe is inherently unexplainable, but
theists argue that the eternal existence of God is not inexplicable, just incomprehensible
for humans (p. 165). The atheist view also fails to explain why something exists
rather than nothing, and why the something that exists obeys the laws of nature
(p. 171).
Atheists have to deal with consciousness. Although certain areas of the brain are
associated with consciousness, they do not produce consciousness—a
certain area of a person’s brain may show activity when thinking about a certain
idea, but a neurologist cannot tell from that person’s MRI what he is thinking
about.
Second, Varghese contends that most of the ‘new atheists’ do not even
address the origin of life. Only Dawkins attempts an explanation; he claims that
‘a chemical model need only predict that life will arise on one planet in
a billion billion to give us a good and entirely satisfying explanation for the
presence of life here’ (p. 173). Varghese criticizes this as ‘manifestly
inadequate or worse’ (p. 172) and as ‘an audacious exercise in superstition’
(p. 173), and indeed not even such an inadequate model exists.
Third, atheists have to deal with consciousness. Although certain areas of the brain
are associated with consciousness, they do not produce consciousness—a
certain area of a person’s brain may show activity when thinking about a certain
idea, but a neurologist cannot tell from that person’s MRI what he is thinking
about. ‘Consciousness is correlated with certain regions of the brain, but
when the same systems of neurons are present in the brain stem there is no “production”
of consciousness’ (p. 174). Fourth, ‘beyond consciousness, there is
the phenomenon of thought, of understanding, seeing meaning’ (p. 176). ‘At
the foundation of all of our thinking, communicating, and use of language is a miraculous
power. It is the power of noting differences and similarities and of generalizing
and universalizing—what the philosophers call concepts universals, and the
like. It is natural to humans, unique, and simply mystifying’ (pp. 176–177).
The brain plays a part in this process, but there is clearly a non-physical part
to it, as well. Varghese argues that ‘they are the acts of a person who is
inescapably both embodied and “ensouled”’ (p. 178). Fifth, the
atheists have to deal with the emergence of the self, which he calls ‘the
most obvious and unassailable and the most lethal for all forms of physicalism’
(p. 181).
Did God become incarnate?
I think that the Christian religion is the one religion that most clearly deserves
to be honoured and respected whether or not its claim to be a divine revelation
is true. There is nothing like the combination of a charismatic figure like Jesus
and a first-class intellectual like St. Paul. … If you’re wanting Omnipotence
to set up a religion, this is the one to beat.—Antony Flew
The second appendix contains a dialogue between Flew and New Testament scholar N.T.
Wright on the subject of ‘The self-revelation of God in human history’.
Flew begins with some very charitable remarks about Christianity, saying that ‘I
think that the Christian religion is the one religion that most clearly deserves
to be honoured and respected whether or not its claim to be a divine revelation
is true. There is nothing like the combination of a charismatic figure like Jesus
and a first-class intellectual like St. Paul. … If you’re wanting Omnipotence
to set up a religion, this is the one to beat’ (pp. 185–186). However,
he questions the reliability of the New Testament on the subject of the Resurrection,
because the New Testament was written decades after the events they purport to describe,
and the earliest of these, the Pauline letters, have little physical detail. Nevertheless,
he acknowledges that ‘the claim concerning the resurrection is more impressive
than by any by the religious competition’ (187).
Wright begins his rebuttal by showing that the evidence for Jesus’ historical
existence makes Him one of ancient history’s most well-attested figures. He
goes on to show that Jesus is depicted in the Gospels as acting in ways that are
in accord with Jewish belief about God in the Second Temple period (188–92).
He demonstrates that Christian beliefs about the resurrection differed radically
from what pagans believed, and differed substantially from Second Temple Jewish
belief about resurrection. Christian belief about the Resurrection is unanimous
from the earliest traditions through the first four or five generations; Wright
argues that for this to be the case, there had to be a historical Resurrection that
would serve as the basis for this new belief. Wright contends that though the Gospels
were written later than the Pauline letters, the accounts of the Resurrection seem
to stem from an oral tradition going back much earlier. Flew is impressed with Wright’s
argument, and re-states that ‘you cannot limit the possibilities of omnipotence
except to produce the logically impossible. Everything else is open to omnipotence’
(213).
This of course underlies the importance of the Resurrection debate with Habermas
cited earlier. Flew still has no good answers to the strong case for the Resurrection.
Controversy regarding authorship
In the wake of its release, some skeptics claimed that the ideas expressed in There
is a God did not really reflect Flew’s position and that he was being
used by evangelicals.2 First,
Flew’s position is only close to the evangelical position in that deism is
closer to evangelical Christianity than atheism; if evangelicals were trying to
use Flew, they certainly did not do a very good job, as his book ends with him still
questioning the reliability of the New Testament, the existence of an afterlife,
and other core Christian concepts. The skeptics suggested that Varghese was the
true author of the book, and that Flew was becoming mentally unstable in his advanced
age. Flew does suffer from nominal aphasia, a condition which makes it hard to remember
names, but denied all the allegations of ghost-writing and affirmed that the book
was in line with his theistic views entirely.3
Indeed, these accusations also make little sense given the interview that Flew gave
to none other than his former debate opponent, Gary Habermas.4
Conclusion
Many atheists say that religion is inherently unreasonable, and that if someone
comes to faith in any deity, it is only because of a religious experience that is
best unverifiable and at worst a form of delusion. However, Flew’s deistic
argument is useful in that he, using arguments completely on the natural level,
makes a powerful argument for God’s existence.
‘I must stress that my discovery of the Divine has proceeded on a purely natural
level, without any reference to supernatural phenomena. It has been an exercise
in what has traditionally been called natural theology. It has had no connection
with any of the revealed religions. Nor do I claim to have had any personal experience
of God or any experience that may be called supernatural or miraculous. In short,
my discovery of the Divine has been a pilgrimage of reason and not of faith’
(p. 93).
Readers looking for an apologetic for Christianity will be disappointed, but the
book is a good read. The book is powerful evidence that one can come to a belief
in theism purely from the evidence. It is also a lesson that design alone is not
enough for saving faith; that needs special revelation, which
is likewise backed up by credible historical evidence as Habermas and Wright
showed.
Update: Antony Flew died on 8 April 2010, at the age of 87, according to
the
obituary in the Telegraph (UK, 13 April 2010).
A reader’s comment
Emily R., Australia, 30 November 2011
It is bewildering to me that Flew could come to the conclusion of God’s existence but not that of Christianity’s truth. He stated the problem of evil as a major one that drove him to become an atheist, but without a Messiah to resolve sin and suffering, God remains weak of will, strength or goodness, none of which are desirable or admirable. Flew is convinced of the orderliness of the universe as well as its existence, leaving non-Eastern religions to answer the question of evil; as far as I can understand, Christianity/Judaism is the only one of these to answer it with any degree of coherence. With the Temple records destroyed (disallowing anybody from claiming descent from David), the Messiah must have come already, leaving Christianity. It is really the only logical conclusion from the premises that he has already agreed with, so it is truly bizarre that he did not reach it. |
Related articles
Further reading
References
- Habermas, G.R. and Flew, A.G.N., Did Jesus Rise from the
Dead? The Resurrection Debate, Miethe, T.L. (Ed.), Harper & Row, San Francisco,
CA, 1987. Return to text.
- For instance, Oppenheimer, M., ‘The Turning of an Atheist’,
New York Times, 4 November 2007, <www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/magazine/04Flew-t.html>.
Return to text.
- See Varghese’s response at <blog.christianitytoday.com/ctliveblog/archives/2007/11/doubting_antony.html>.
Return to text.
- My Pilgrimage from Atheism to Theism: an exclusive interview with former British atheist Professor Antony Flew
by Gary Habermas, Philosophia Christi, Winter 2005.
Return to text.
| The information on this site can change lives—former atheists tell us so. Why? Because it’s information people haven’t heard before. So keep it coming by supporting the researchers and writers at CMI.  | | |
|
