Antony Flew Has Died

[lpetrich]

Philosopher Antony Flew died on the 8th of this month.

Professor Antony Flew - Telegraph (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/books-obituaries/7586929/Professor-Antony-Flew.html)
The Associated Press: Anthony Flew, once a prominent atheist, dies at 87 (http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hryVL585PERWgNcGIAFZcOEo3RmAD9F2NPIO0)

Though an atheist for a large part of his life, around 2001-2003, he came to believe in a deist sort of god that does limited amounts of intervention, like seeding the Earth with the ancestors of all its biota. However, he still did not believe in the traditional sort of Abrahamic God.

Xian apologists were quick to jump on this supposed "conversion", and two evangelicals, Bob Hostetler and Roy Varghese, ghostwrote much of Antony Flew's "book" There Is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind. British Tories don't sound very much like Americans, for starters.

The Turning of an Atheist - New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/magazine/04Flew-t.html?_r=1)
Richard Carrier Blogs: Antony Flew's Bogus Book (http://richardcarrier.blogspot.com/2007/11/antony-flew-bogus-book.html)
Secular Web Kiosk and Bookstore :: Antony Flew Considers God...Sort Of (http://secweb.infidels.org/?kiosk=articles&id=369)

-

But he once made a contribution that many of us are now familiar with. In his 1975 book Thinking About Thinking: Do I Sincerely Want to Be Right?, he described what he called the No True Scotsman fallacy.

Teacher: All Scotsmen enjoy haggis.
Student: My uncle is a Scotsman, and he doesn't like haggis!
Teacher: Well, all true Scotsmen like haggis.


So let us mourn this loss.

[David B]

IIRC in his dotage he was led astray by the argument from design.

David

[lpetrich]

IIRC in his dotage he was led astray by the argument from design.
Indeed he was. He had been impressed with the claims of Gerald Schroeder.

[kraut]

Maybe he can now cash in on the insurance of his late conversion.

[Politesse]

I though the atheist community was rather harsh on someone they supposedly respected; for my part, I respect no one who values dogma over common civility, or who believes right thinking can exist without the freedom to disagree. Naming someone senile because they disagree with you is the worst kind of nastiness: attempting to take away someone's individuality for the sake of a petty argument. If you want to disagree with someone, do it on rational grounds, not by attempting to strip away their personhood by implying they have lost their minds. Can you imagine any more hurtful phrase than "he used to be a great man?"

[lpetrich]

Politesse, it may indeed seem like that, but to me, it seems more like "Why did he fall for the sort of argument that he would have quickly rejected some decades earlier?"


There's an article on the Antony Flew by Kenneth Grubbs in Skeptic » eSkeptic » Wednesday, April 21st, 2010 (http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/10-04-21/)
I tried to gain access to Professor Flew for this story, but he was in an Extended Care Facility in Reading, England, tired, confused, and in the paralyzing grasp of advanced dementia. He had been there for well more than a year, and Annis informed me that “Tony is rarely aware of his surroundings anymore.” There would be no interview.

There is a God was published in 2007 by Harper One, the imprint of Harper Collins focusing on predominantly religious and spiritual works. The book is “about why I changed my mind,” Flew writes. His name appears in large print on the jacket. Below it, in considerably smaller type, it reads “with Roy Abraham Varghese.” From the jacket we also learn that the book is the “Winner of the Christianity Today Book Award.” This is a curious honor, given that deism shares almost nothing with Christianity, nor any other religion; but far more importantly, Annis informed me without hesitation that “Tony never came to recognize any of the revealed religions.”

Roy Varghese penned the 18-page Preface. The Introduction is written by Flew, spanning four and one half pages. In it comes the thunderous recant, “I now believe there is a God.” There are two Appendices. Roy Varghese writes the first. Its 22 pages consist of one part “New Atheist” bashing, and two parts tiresome argument. Bishop N.T. Wright, an Oxford New Testament Scholar, writes the second appendix. Before Wright begins his 28-page essay, “The Self-Revelation of God in Human History: A Dialogue on Jesus,” there is a brief paragraph by Flew inviting Wright to contribute, an odd invitation from a deist.
Most of the rest of the book was also written by Roy Varghese, with Bob Hostetler rewriting parts of RV's writing.

When someone abandons lifelong convictions, changes their mind, and writes a book to explain it all, we should expect new and dramatic reasoning. Let’s follow the argument spelled out in There is a God.

“Science spotlights three dimensions of nature that point to God,” the argument begins in earnest, summarily invoking the authority of science. “The first is the fact that nature obeys laws. The second is the dimension of life, of intelligently organized and purpose-driven beings, which arose from matter. The third is the very existence of nature.”
In effect, the god of the gaps, and a big change from
Consider this passage from God and Philosophy, written by Flew in 1966: “Certainly it is proper to feel the awe in the contemplation of the human eye or of the single living cell. But no exploitation, however breathtaking, of the limitations and potentialities of materials would give good ground for inferring Omnipotence.” So what changed? Did complexity became more complex? Did design became better designed? Is Flew’s qualification, “however breathtaking,” invalidated by the complexity of DNA?
AF and RV had, in effect, made the argument that "what else can it be but God?" However, AF had earlier criticized it, as Bertrand Russell had done with his famous interplanetary teapot.
This was the reason Flew wrote The Presumption of Atheism back in 1976. It was written to mirror the legal maxim, Ei incumbit probation qui dicit, non qui negat, or “The onus of proof lies on the proposition, not on the opposition.” Flew noted in that book: “If it is to be established that there is a God, then we have to have good grounds for believing that this is indeed so. Until and unless some such grounds are produced we have literally no reason at all for believing.” The absence of evidence hardly qualifies as “good grounds” for anything, much less god, and thus our expectations for some epiphanic insight to leap from the pages of this book and help us understand the basis for Professor Flew’s recantation have been thoroughly dashed.

[lao tzu]

I though the atheist community was rather harsh on someone they supposedly respected; for my part, I respect no one who values dogma over common civility, or who believes right thinking can exist without the freedom to disagree. Naming someone senile because they disagree with you is the worst kind of nastiness: attempting to take away someone's individuality for the sake of a petty argument. If you want to disagree with someone, do it on rational grounds, not by attempting to strip away their personhood by implying they have lost their minds. Can you imagine any more hurtful phrase than "he used to be a great man?"

The pose of a moral high ground by those who have just finished committing a crime against the elderly is utterly distasteful and entirely inappropriate. For shame.

Check your facts, first.

The evidence shows that he died senile after a period of years in which his mental prowess was greatly circumscribed. It's something we would much prefer to avoid mentioning, but in the circumstances it needs to be said.

You speak of civility? The evidence we have is that a formerly great man was cynically exploited by christian zealots looking to capitalize on his failing faculties. You speak of hurtful phrases? An entire book has been erected around the shell of what he once was, written by men who could never aspire to the reputation that was once his.

And now they hope to hide behind the body they abused to escape the condemnation they so richly deserve.

I don't think so.

[Politesse]

It's something we would much prefer to avoid mentioning, but in the circumstances it needs to be said. No. No, it really doesn't. But I've said my piece.

[lpetrich]

That aside, it's disappointing that his mind had gone downhill so much in his final years. It would have been interesting to see him offer a coherent account of his deist god and why he came to disagree with what he had stated in previous years.

[Ray Moscow]

OTOH, it's possible that he really did change his mind about some things, although the way he apparently was exploited makes it nearly impossible to tell.

People do change their minds, even toward mistaken ideas.

[DMB]

I first heard him speak at a conference in the 1990s (I think it was 1996). He was lauded then by some atheists but I found him disappointingly woolly and I wasn't surprised at his subsequent decline.

[lao tzu]

It's something we would much prefer to avoid mentioning, but in the circumstances it needs to be said. No. No, it really doesn't. But I've said my piece.

Quite true. We can leave your unwarranted accusations unanswered and step aside with silent assent while the truly guilty complete the erection of shrines on his defenseless body. We can allow the legacy of his life's work to be overwritten by his philosophical opponents and their theological camp followers of lesser abilities.

We can provide cover for the despoilers of the dead.

[lao tzu]

OTOH, it's possible that he really did change his mind about some things, although the way he apparently was exploited makes it nearly impossible to tell.

People do change their minds, even toward mistaken ideas.

From what I've read, I'd hazard that Flew's actual change amounted to little more than an expanded definition of "God" to include Spinoza's and Jefferson's conceptualizations. There is justification for this view, as it's arguably closer to the "God" privately acknowledged by most theists than to the immanent and interventionist "God" publicly promoted by their priesthoods. Nothing beyond this can be supported from even a close reading of "There is no a God," written by Varghese but nonetheless appearing under Flew's name, which by rights should have been subtitled "... and it's not yours."

His support was explicitly given to a god that did not speak to Abraham, that did not impregnate Mary, and that did not whisper into the ears of Muhammad inside a cave. The following extract is taken from Flew's "interview" with Gary Habermas (http://www.biola.edu/antonyflew/) that "took place in early 2004 and was subsequently modified by both participants throughout the year."

HABERMAS: Tony, you recently told me that you have come to believe in the existence of God. Would you comment on that?

FLEW: Well, I don’t believe in the God of any revelatory system, although I am open to that. But it seems to me that the case for an Aristotelian God who has the characteristics of power and also intelligence, is now much stronger than it ever was before. And it was from Aristotle that Aquinas drew the materials for producing his five ways of, hopefully, proving the existence of his God. Aquinas took them, reasonably enough, to prove, if they proved anything, the existence of the God of the Christian revelation. But Aristotle himself never produced a definition of the word “God,” which is a curious fact. But this concept still led to the basic outline of the five ways. It seems to me, that from the existence of Aristotle’s God, you can’t infer anything about human behaviour. So what Aristotle had to say about justice (justice, of course, as conceived by the Founding Fathers of the American republic as opposed to the “social” justice of John Rawls9) was very much a human idea, and he thought that this idea of justice was what ought to govern the behaviour of individual human beings in their relations with others.

HABERMAS: Once you mentioned to me that your view might be called Deism. Do you think that would be a fair designation?

FLEW: Yes, absolutely right. What Deists, such as the Mr. Jefferson who drafted the American Declaration of Independence, believed was that, while reason, mainly in the form of arguments to design, assures us that there is a God, there is no room either for any supernatural revelation of that God or for any transactions between that God and individual human beings.

After this broadside at Aquinas, Flew went on to credit his openness to a revelatory theism to his acceptance of arguments from Gerald Schroeder (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Schroeder).

FLEW: Yes. I am open to it, but not enthusiastic about potential revelation from God. On the positive side, for example, I am very much impressed with physicist Gerald Schroeder’s comments on Genesis 1. (10) That this biblical account might be scientifically accurate raises the possibility that it is revelation.

Schroeder is, as is well known to many of us, but apparently not to Flew at the time, a young earth creationist and consequently a laughingstock in his own field of physics. In a letter to Richard Carrier in early 2005, as described in Carrier's extended notes (http://secweb.infidels.org/article369.html) on the Secular Web, Flew later went on to claim embarrassment for his naivete:

Flew also makes another admission: "I have been mistaught by Gerald Schroeder." He says "it was precisely because he appeared to be so well qualified as a physicist (which I am not) that I was never inclined to question what he said about physics."

This lesson in acceptance of the fringe science being promoted to him was unfortunately insufficient. Later still, he went on to lend support for the teaching of intelligent design in the UK. To the extent that we can follow his thinking, we find the bases of his changes in view became less supportable as his decline continued, as might be expected.

As ever, Jesse

[dug_down_deep]

the "God" privately acknowledged by most theists
How do you know this?

[lpetrich]

From Gerald Schroeder,
He professes Orthodox Judaism, and his works frequently cite Talmudic, Midrashic, and medieval commentaries on Biblical creation accounts, such as commentaries written by the Jewish philosopher Nachmanides. Among other things, Schroeder attempts to reconcile a young earth creationism Biblical view with the scientific model of a world that is billions of years old using the idea that the perceived flow of time for a given event in an expanding universe varies with the observer’s perspective of that event. He attempts to reconcile the two perspectives numerically, calculating the effect of the stretching of space-time, based on Einstein's theory of general relativity. Schroeder holds to a theistic evolution view.

Not a Very Big Bang About Genesis (http://www.talkreason.org/articles/schroeder.cfm) - Mark Perakh
Fitting the Bible to the Data (http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/vic_stenger/schrev.html) - Victor J. Stenger

Gerald Schroeder apparently believes that God bounces back and forth at speeds very close to c. This gives him extreme time dilation relative to the Universe, which enables God to see the 14 billion years of the Universe's history as only 6 days. God must therefore have a gamma factor of nearly a trillion.

I remember once misinterpreting that as light quarks in hadrons, which have a gamma factor of around 100 - their time passes about 1/100 as fast as the outside world's time.

Flew, Schroeder, Varghese: What a company! (http://www.talkreason.org/articles/flew.cfm) - Mark Perakh

He claims that Antony Flew was not very well-known for his former atheism until certain Xian apologists started claiming that he was once "the world's most notorious atheist". If anything, Madalyn Murray O'Hair had deserved that titled much more than he ever did.

[lao tzu]

the "God" privately acknowledged by most theists
How do you know this?

How do I know ... what? That the Spinozan or Jeffersonian "God" is closer to the "God" privately acknowledged by most theists than the "God" publicly acknowledged by their priesthoods?

I don't.

Then again, I didn't make that claim. Go look.

As ever, Jesse

[RexT]

Flew gained his sanity and earned his living by way of reason, which is to say clear thinking. But even this method cannot protect a person from ending up at the exact same location as the masters of confusion, deceit, like con artists, evangelists and politicians. Like once meaningful symbols on a chalkboard, we all get erased and fall as dust.

It is unpleasant to see the fall, even more to see others exploiting it. But thus is the glory of human nature -- it exploits its living its sick and dying and even its dead.

There is nothing especially unique about Flew's life or its falling to dust, drastic changes in his body and mind, or in how his opponents seized those moments. Nor is it very surprising that some are offended.

Life goes on and so too the debate about god, which Flew and we all confront in life and in death resolve.

[dug_down_deep]

the "God" privately acknowledged by most theists
How do you know this?

How do I know ... what? That the Spinozan or Jeffersonian "God" is closer to the "God" privately acknowledged by most theists than the "God" publicly acknowledged by their priesthoods?

I don't.

Then again, I didn't make that claim. Go look.

As ever, Jesse
Wait, aren't you making that claim? You stated just that. What am I missing?

[RexT]

Wait, aren't you making that claim? You stated just that. What am I missing?He did make the claim, but then acknowledged that he did not know what most theists acknowledge in private.

I too am puzzled why he then stated that he did not make the claim that he made.

[Politesse]

Probably a matter of "intuition" versus "a claim one feels qualified to defend".

For what its worth, I think his claim is probably accurate for many theists in the modern world, when one gets down to brass tacks. Not all or even most, but for the most part, the conviction which most Christians believe those things the priesthood assigns to God can be demonstrated to be rather low. Most people could not explain the lion's share of the Nicaean Creed, for instance. For all, behavior is often a better indicator than words vis a vis what one really holds to. How many people, Christian and Muslim, claim to believe that the unsaved are consigned to a fiery hell? And how many of them really stick to this when it comes to the deaths of their own loved ones? Strip away the dross, and you're left with a lot of people who do genuinely believe in God, but who hold many of the commonly proposed details of their religion with a markedly lesser degree of conviction. Whether this stripped down portraiture resembles Spinoza's construct is another question; I think that depends more on the person (I think many people's basic notion of God, whether theist or not, stems more from Athens than from Amsterdam).

[RexT]

Well, that's all fine for the sake of speculation, you don't describe most of the Christians I've met, but I'm confident that you describe some amount of Christians.

I think that pinning down a majority of Christian's actual beliefs is an impossible task. I'd be surprised to find even two Christians that completely agree.

[Politesse]

Well, that's all fine for the sake of speculation, you don't describe most of the Christians I've met, but I'm confident that you describe some amount of Christians.

I think that pinning down a majority of Christian's actual beliefs is an impossible task. I'd be surprised to find even two Christians that completely agree.

I don't see how someone who understands human nature would even expect to.

[RexT]

I don't see how someone who understands human nature would even expect to.I agree that human nature makes us pretty much predictable to a large extent. But the source of the problem here is not only human nature, but also a problem encountered by those who are self-deluded into believing a myth that is self-contradictory.

It's not a problem for mathematicians for example because their belief in axioms is not based on private or subjective data but self-consistent statements that, not merely two or some number but all agree is true and for the same reasons.

The problem with myth belief is in its inherent ambiguity. The reason that no two Christians believe the same is not only because people are different, but because their beliefs are inconsistent, paradoxical and really nonsensical.

[lao tzu]

the "God" privately acknowledged by most theists
How do you know this?

How do I know ... what? That the Spinozan or Jeffersonian "God" is closer to the "God" privately acknowledged by most theists than the "God" publicly acknowledged by their priesthoods?

I don't.

Then again, I didn't make that claim. Go look.

As ever, Jesse
Wait, aren't you making that claim? You stated just that. What am I missing?

Wait, aren't you making that claim? You stated just that. What am I missing?He did make the claim, but then acknowledged that he did not know what most theists acknowledge in private.

I too am puzzled why he then stated that he did not make the claim that he made.

Forgive the unreadable hash of a too-tightly interwoven sentence. The quoted "claim" was nothing more than a sentence fragment, a noun in fact, making it necessary for me to make some attempt at reading a claim into it in order to discover the source of confusion.

My actual claim is that Flew's position can be justified, and that it is "arguably closer" — which falls short of an actual claim — to the breadth of theistic beliefs held by individual theists than to the positions promoted by the guardians of orthodoxy.

This is an argument yet to be made rather than a fact that has been observed. It was never my intention to demonstrate it conclusively, and it is not something I "know." I do suspect it's true, though. I've long had similar thoughts, based on nothing more than private conversations with fellow christians when I was an adherent, and christian friends and relatives since I left faith behind. Since then, I've followed The Pew Forum's high-quality surveys of religions belief in America, which add further weight to the impression, without actually confirming it.

Flew's non-revelatory and non-interventionist God is far from their historical beliefs, but I find that the christians and muslims I know don't expect anything especially different from their gods today. Their gods don't do those things anymore. They believe in interventions and revelations that happened some time in the distant pass to other people, not themselves. They don't expect to see these things occur in their own lives. They look askance at miracle claims, while allowing for their possibility, as does Flew. Is this typical or does it represent as much as a majority? I don't know, but I suspect it's true, and I'm sure that strong arguments can be mustered. Certainly there are plenty of counter-examples, but aren't they confined to that minority who attend worship services every week?

I don't believe it's proper to identify any minority position as definitive for the larger group. In terms of the larger group then, all of those we'd describe as theists, I'd say Flew's Deistic conception of a god, even if it is not a good fit, is at least as fitting as the conception promoted by the guardians of orthodoxy.

As ever, Jesse

[dug_down_deep]

Your experience of typical Christian beliefs is alien to me. Most of the Christians I know believe fully in an interventionist god.

[RexT]

Your experience of typical Christian beliefs is alien to me. Most of the Christians I know believe fully in an interventionist god.Yeah, me too. And that explains why many pray for such intervention and are quick to give god credit for perceived miracles.

Whether the Christians I'm familiar with represent a majority is unknown to me.

[lao tzu]

Your experience of typical Christian beliefs is alien to me. Most of the Christians I know believe fully in an interventionist god.

Do they? What's the reaction from most christians you know when their fellow adherents blame the wrath of god for Katrina, or the Indonesian tsunami, or put any other interventionist spin on modern events? The reaction I see is what I like to call the "pious cringe." They're deeply embarrassed by the crazies among them.

Does the typical christian even pray any more? And when they do, is it for their god to intervene in fixing the wiring? What I hear are prayers for help in coming to terms with some tragedy. Spiritual interventions if you will. But maybe you have a different idea of "believing fully" in interventionism than I do.

Your experience of typical Christian beliefs is alien to me. Most of the Christians I know believe fully in an interventionist god.Yeah, me too. And that explains why many pray for such intervention and are quick to give god credit for perceived miracles.

Whether the Christians I'm familiar with represent a majority is unknown to me.

That's the real question, Rex. How can we know what "most" of them think when "most" of them don't even bother to speak about their beliefs, allowing the more vocal adherents to gain disproportionate attention. That's why I appreciate the efforts of the Pew Foundation. I can't find a better source of religious surveys.

As ever, Jesse

[lpetrich]

It may depend on which Xians you are talking about - nominal Xians vs. those who are heavily involved in their religion. So be careful about that.

Also watch for differences between many liberal Xians and many conservative/evangelical/fundamentalist Xians. The former often seem to believe in a benevolent but wimpy God, and the latter in a meddlesome God who is always right but not really benevolent.

[Politesse]

Does the typical christian even pray any more? And when they do, is it for their god to intervene in fixing the wiring? What I hear are prayers for help in coming to terms with some tragedy. Spiritual interventions if you will. But maybe you have a different idea of "believing fully" in interventionism than I do. This varies a lot. I remember back in seminary an occasion where a class of future Lutheran pastors did a field trip to worship with an inner city Pentecostal refuge. The former group was somewhat shocked by the willingness of the latter to pray quite directly and specifically for miracles and so forth. Heal so and so, let such and such legislation pass, let this person who isn't here show up next Sunday please Lord, cure my addiction to such and such, etc. Not typical Lutheran behavior at all.

[lao tzu]

It may depend on which Xians you are talking about - nominal Xians vs. those who are heavily involved in their religion. So be careful about that.

Also watch for differences between many liberal Xians and many conservative/evangelical/fundamentalist Xians. The former often seem to believe in a benevolent but wimpy God, and the latter in a meddlesome God who is always right but not really benevolent.

That's a serious problem for anyone wanting to conduct surveys. I don't know of any better solution than the one that's actually used ... self-identification. If they say they're christian, or jewish, or whatever, their answers get lumped in with everyone else that identifies as such.

As ever, Jesse

[dug_down_deep]

Your experience of typical Christian beliefs is alien to me. Most of the Christians I know believe fully in an interventionist god.

Do they? What's the reaction from most christians you know when their fellow adherents blame the wrath of god for Katrina, or the Indonesian tsunami, or put any other interventionist spin on modern events? The reaction I see is what I like to call the "pious cringe." They're deeply embarrassed by the crazies among them.
Yes, they're embarrassed by it, I think. Most of them believe in a "loving god", so I don't think they take such nonsense seriously, but I haven't really asked. There is a difference between believing in intervention and believing in nutty statements from fundamentalists.

Does the typical christian even pray any more? And when they do, is it for their god to intervene in fixing the wiring? What I hear are prayers for help in coming to terms with some tragedy. Spiritual interventions if you will. But maybe you have a different idea of "believing fully" in interventionism than I do.
No, people pray for good results. It happens all the time. There are even "prayer chains", where prayer requests are assigned to congregations so that the greater numbers of prayers can (presumably) have a greater influence. There are the kinds of prayers you speak of too, for personal spiritual (or psychological) strength or clarity or whatever, which I also happen to believe work, for whatever reason.

[Rie]

Hell most of the Christians, not the Catholic ones, just believe in this ever loving man/God called Jesus, whose actual existence is up for grabs, and say 'Praise God' and 'Amen" a lot.

As to intervention by said Jesus/God I'm not sure that their minds are of the sort that enquires any further than 'Praise Jesus" and then they go on knitting. Oh, and they are assured it seems of a place in Heaven after death.

[BWE]

shouldn't the title be. "Antony Flew Has Flown"
??