Antony Flew - No Longer an Atheist

[Simon]

A note from Craig Hazen, Professor at Biola University:

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Perhaps you have heard the dramatic news that legendary British atheist, Antony Flew, has recently turned to belief in God. [See Southern Appeal post on this here] Well, as Paul Harvey would say, here is the rest of the story.

We have been preparing to publish a definitive interview on Flew's change of mind (an interview conducted masterfully by Dr. Gary Habermas) in the January 2005 issue of our academic journal "Philosophia Christi." At the same time, we were planning to release the news to the world-wide media and tell the whole story in the pages of our journal.

Well, as often happens, the story has broken early. ABC News and the Associated Press have posted reports of Flew's embrace of theism.

However, what the news organizations do not have is the EXCLUSIVE, DEFINITIVE INTERVIEW WITH FLEW ABOUT HIS JOURNEY. BUT WE DO!!

Here is an excerpt from the interview to entice you:

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GARY HABERMAS: You very kindly noted that our debates and discussions had influenced your move in the direction of theism. You mentioned that this initial influence contributed in part to your comment that naturalistic efforts have never succeeded . . . Which arguments for God's existence did you find most persuasive?

ANTONY FLEW: I think that the most impressive arguments for God's existence are those that are supported by recent scientific discoveries. . . . I think the argument to Intelligent Design is enormously stronger than it was when I first met it.
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To get the entire interview on line, just go to:
http://biola.edu/antonyflew/

To subscribe to the cutting-edge philosophy journal, Philosophia Christi, just go to: www.biola.edu/philchristi
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[ST88]

Appeal to science? It’s funny how scientific research and theory are the most cited reasons for atheists when debating the existence of God and related issues. What an amazing turn of events.. generally nontheists use the term “science” as if inserting into any conversation automatically adds weight to their position. Now, “appeal to science” is being portrayed as a fallacy.. the old words of and old man.

Intelligent Design is a philosophy of a G/god-created universe, with scientific ideas behind it in order to make it seem more worthy of discussion. This is what I mean by an appeal to science. Christianity has had many different strategies for maintaining its place as "The Way." In modern times, it is often science that is the most effective at convicing people of one thing or another. It would only make sense that Christianity would now start using this tack in order to continue to maintain that it is "The Way." If it could be shown that Christian precepts were in line with scientific findings, then it would still be relevant. It is a fallacy because the application of scientific thought onto Christianity is in the reverse order of what should happen in scientific inquiry.

Suppose Billy Graham, also in his 80s, were to say that he, after decades of ministry, has decided that the scientific evidence leads him to believe that God does not exist. Would you cry "appeal to science!" or "dementia!" then? Of course you wouldn't. Such a story would be all over the news.. and atheists would say, "Billy has seen the light."

Yes, actually I would suspect dementia in this case also, because the man's life has been devoted to one thing -- the one thing he feels so passionate about that he tours and lectures at football stadiums around the world.

I don't think that dementia necessarily implies slurred words or the complete lack of being coherent. It hits different people in different ways. One person may lose their abillity to read a map, another person may not remember all of the cars they've ever owned. And another person may acquire belief in something religious because of a loss of a particular component of rationality. We all change throughout our lives, but towards the end of life we are more prone to brain alterations and injuries due to degredation, chemical buildup, and just the odds of something damaging happening.

The biggest problem many people have with accepting that a loved one may be experiencing something like dementia is that the loved one may be perfectly lucid about many things, and only have what some people call occasional "senior moments" -- whether it's shedding one's clothing in public or forgetting where the car is in the lot or thinking for a few seconds that one is still a fighter pilot in the war. This doesn't mean that the loved one is ready for the funny farm, it just means that they should be watched more closely or possibly taken to see a physician for a cause.

Mr. Flew is clearly a brilliant man, lucid and well-spoken still at his age. This doesn't mean that his reasoning is still intact. It only means that the language center in his brain has been unaffected.

[Simon]

ST88, that was one of the most misleading things I've ever read.

In reality, science grew out of Christianity. Galileo, Newton, Kelvin, Faraday, Pascal, Mendel, Boyle, Pasteur.. we could fill pages with the names of people like these who did great science and loved God.

Intelligent Design theory is a scientific theory worthy of discussion completely outside the realm of theology. Many atheistic scientists recognize this, and have said so.

You mentioned that you think Christianity is irrelevant. Obviously it isn't to you because here you are, devoting time and energy posting a site entitled, "debatingchristianity"; obviously it isn't to the world, given that it is the largest religion in the world (and most polls indicate that atheists are the clear minority).

Your comments about reason and the "language center" of the brain reveal your ignorance as to how the mind and brain interact. If one loses his ability to reason, the fact that he still has the ability to speak does not mean that he will be able to articulate clearly reasonable thoughts as we see in Flew.

I swear.. the atheists reactions to this news is the most pathetic thing I've ever seen. It's all about damage control.. the common response is that, "Yeah but it's not Christianity that he believes!" and then "He is obviously suffering from dementia."

[ENIGMA]

ST88, that was one of the most misleading things I've ever read.

In reality, science grew out of Christianity. Galileo,

Forced to recant his discoveries by his Christian "brothers".

Newton,

Undeniably came up a decent approximation of physical laws based on his observational data, however, the main assumptions that were later overturned by Einstein and Heisenburg were the notions that everything behaved deterministically and that space is an undistortable backdrop for matter to operate on, were almost certainly inspired by his Christian beliefs in a creator that made a clockwork universe. Also, he seemed to have this thing with alchemy...

Pascal,

Great guy with various aspects of mathematics, but his theology is quite demonstatably poor. People compartmentalize rather well I guess.

Mendel,

I must grant this, since without all the free time in the garden that comes with being a monk, it would be hard to come up with such data.

we could fill pages with the names of people like these who did great science and loved God.

That's good. All that it shows is that people compartmentalize well.

Intelligent Design theory is a scientific theory worthy of discussion completely outside the realm of theology. Many atheistic scientists recognize this, and have said so.

Fine then, lets drop it in the minefield. Two questions must be answered first though:

1) What predictions does it make?
2) What sets of data would result in its being substantively rejected?

Since I have only heard a few bits and pieces concerning 1 and an effective silence concerning 2, it doesn't appear to be minefield worthy just yet...

You mentioned that you think Christianity is irrelevant. Obviously it isn't to you because here you are, devoting time and energy posting a site entitled, "debatingchristianity"; obviously it isn't to the world, given that it is the largest religion in the world (and most polls indicate that atheists are the clear minority).

A growing minority, as opposed to Christianity which is a shrinking plurality, and not even that if you consider the various divisions of doctrine.

I swear.. the atheists reactions to this news is the most pathetic thing I've ever seen. It's all about damage control.. the common response is that, "Yeah but it's not Christianity that he believes!" and then "He is obviously suffering from dementia."

At least we readily acknowledge that he was an atheist and is now a deist, as opposed to Christianity when its biggest name of Christian faith leave the fold.

You mentioned Billy Graham earlier in this thread, but what you did not mention (or even know, I suspect) was that Billy Graham did not always preach alone, but with a man who, by all accounts, was intelligent, charismatic, and even a more gifted preacher than Billy Graham. He happened to become an agnostic roughly around the time that Graham's Los Angeles crusade was put in the national spotlight.

Run a Google search on "Charles Templeton" and see what you find.

Funny how many people know the name of Billy Graham, but not the name of Charles Templeton...

[ST88]

ST88, that was one of the most misleading things I've ever read.

In reality, science grew out of Christianity. Galileo, Newton, Kelvin, Faraday, Pascal, Mendel, Boyle, Pasteur.. we could fill pages with the names of people like these who did great science and loved God.

I wouldn't disagree with this. Although modern science grew out of an ideal to recognize and document God's plan for the world, it also took ideas from Pagan Ancient Greece in order to devise methods to discover that world. Christianity had a hold on scientific thought for a very long time. It was the dominant force in scientific inquiry because it was assumed that God was behind everything. Whether or not the above scientists were doing their work for the Glory of God, however, is irrelevant. The work was done, and the results speak for themselves. In this way, God was not disproved or refuted by this type (or any other type) of scientific thought. The only thing that this did was to clarify that God did not need to use his hand in order to make the systems they studied work.

There was a time in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when God was deemed irrelevant because of this. My own personal opinion is that this resulted in the hyper-awareness of the God of personal behavior. And, as a result of this, many people became disenchanted with Christianity: because of the restrictiveness of its moral code. Naturally, this isn't true for everyone, but church participation did dwindle and has dwindled since the turn of the 20th century. People still identified themselves as Christian, but were "non-practicing".

Let me say that I don't think there was any conscious decision to make Christianity relevant in terms of science. I think there were many ideas bandied about since 1900, but the rise of a type of science that was difficult for the lay person to comprehend -- quantum mechanics -- led many religious people to declare that the unknowability in this new science had something to do with God. It's a very elegant and neat progression of Christian thought. Before the 19th century, many people were suspicious of scientists and their sciences, largely because much of it was later proved to be hokum, and because there was general resistance to new ideas. But now you have a better communication infrastructure -- scientists know what others are doing in their field and other fields much more quickly, more is known about how to design experiments in order to make them valid, and the idea of "science" has permeated society in general as something that is trying to find "answers."

Add Christian ideas and stir.

Intelligent Design theory is a scientific theory worthy of discussion completely outside the realm of theology. Many atheistic scientists recognize this, and have said so.

I didn't say it wasn't worthy of study. It's an interesting theory. In my opinion it says more about the people who think it's true than it does about the way the world came to be.

Again, this is a natural progression of Christian thought. The main objection of Creationism, I believe, was the idea that THE GOD was behind it all. So naturally, the next step is to remove THE GOD and make it an intelligent force of some kind (wink wink). And again, I don't think this was a conscious choice by someone to set up ID as this kind of answer, I think it is just the most successful in promoting the view that Creation was an intended event.

You mentioned that you think Christianity is irrelevant. Obviously it isn't to you because here you are, devoting time and energy posting a site entitled, "debatingchristianity"; obviously it isn't to the world, given that it is the largest religion in the world (and most polls indicate that atheists are the clear minority).

I hope I didn't say it was irrelevant in a general sense, only to scientific explanation of the world. It is certainly relevant to the extent that it helps explain and expose the way human behavior works.

Your comments about reason and the "language center" of the brain reveal your ignorance as to how the mind and brain interact. If one loses his ability to reason, the fact that he still has the ability to speak does not mean that he will be able to articulate clearly reasonable thoughts as we see in Flew.

This is incorrect. The language center is a separate structure. There are many examples of unaffected reasoning power that are coupled with a speech deficit. Sufferers of Wernicke's aphasia think they are speaking very clearly, when in fact they are speaking gibberish. Unaffected speech power does not imply that the rest of the brain is unaffected. There are numerous syndromes of memory loss, for example, in which speech and language are unaffected.

I swear.. the atheists reactions to this news is the most pathetic thing I've ever seen. It's all about damage control.. the common response is that, "Yeah but it's not Christianity that he believes!" and then "He is obviously suffering from dementia."

I did not say, he is obviously suffering from dementia. What I said was:

I also do not discount dementia.

All I'm saying is that this is a big shift in thinking, and it is not out of the realm of possibility that something happened physically.

Personally, I don't care if a prominent atheist suddenly "saw the light" or whatever you want to call his statement. That is between him and his god, as it were. As I have said before, I don't jump for joy when someone converts to agnosticism. I say good luck to him. But don't expect me to swallow an orthodox version of the story as the only version of the story. In any given situation, there are myriad reasons and causes for it have come to be. I find it curious that you, for example, would hold this up as a cause celebre for Intelligent Design when you have disagreed with this man's philosophical thought processes up to that point. Surely his reasoning was objectionable to believers when he disagreed with ID. But now he's being reasonable. Is that it?

[Icarus]

Surely his reasoning was objectionable to believers when he disagreed with ID. But now he's being reasonable. Is that it?

I think it is only natural to do so. Enigma did it as well a few posts back with the Templeton example. Is it no small victory to "turn" such a proponent? Even though it only to a deistic view? It may be a small turn, but it is a big ship.

Afterall Flew is saying:

My one and only piece of relevant evidence [for an Aristotelian God] is the apparent impossibility of providing a naturalistic theory of the origin from DNA of the first reproducing species ... [In fact] the only reason which I have for beginning to think of believing in a First Cause god is the impossibility of providing a naturalistic account of the origin of the first reproducing organisms.

[ST88]

I think it is only natural to do so. Enigma did it as well a few posts back with the Templeton example. Is it no small victory to "turn" such a proponent? Even though it only to a deistic view? It may be a small turn, but it is a big ship.

I don't necessarily agree with this interpretation, but I concede that others can make of it as they like. Flew's apparent unwillingness to believe in a naturalistic first cause begs the question of whether such an experiment could ever be done properly. If so, then the point is moot; but if not, there is still the plausible paper version.

My point about Flew -- My point -- was that reasoning can be affected by many things, and need not be a result of having found a different answer or having given up on a previous theory.

[Icarus]

that reasoning can be affected by many things, and need not be a result of having found a different answer or having given up on a previous theory.

Do you have an experiment that can be done properly on that or is it in the plausible paper version.

[potwalloper.]

Icarus wrote

Quote:
that reasoning can be affected by many things, and need not be a result of having found a different answer or having given up on a previous theory.

Do you have an experiment that can be done properly on that or is it in the plausible paper version.

There have been a number of experiments done on the alteration of reasoning within ageing adults. Some have examined the correlation between White Matter Lesions (WML) and Mild Cognitive Impairment. The experiments involved the use of MRI scanning to determine the degree of WML within patients not suffering from dementia but who had a loss of cognitive function (but not to the degree that would be required for a diagnosis under DSM)

This link shows one of the studies http://jnnp.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/71/4/441

I am not saying that Flew has MCI or AD. However cognitive function does decline with age and entrenched ideas and beliefs tend to become stronger rather than weaker with age. Such a fundamental alteration of Flew's belief systems at this age means that an alternative explanation to a simple alteration of belief through internal rationalisation should not be discounted. Of course he may have simply seen the light...but alternatively he may be suffering from a degree of cognitive disfunction.

In the end it is a rather meaningless debate - without access to Flew and the necessary diagnostic material it is impossible to determine through our debate just why this has occured...

[otseng]

In the end it is a rather meaningless debate - without access to Flew and the necessary diagnostic material it is impossible to determine through our debate just why this has occured...

The only thing I have access to are his words.

"It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism."

"I think that the most impressive arguments for God’s existence are those that are supported by recent scientific discoveries."

"It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design."

Based on the only available evidence, we have to come to the conclusion that he abandoned the atheist ship based on his ponderings into science. Any other conclusion would be baseless without additional evidence.

The fire of his youth has been spent, and maybe with it, the heat of his opposition to theism, though it is more than likely that he is still quite passionate and his mind is still clear.

Perhaps this is true. And if so, it would show to me that his turn would be indicative that now he is basing his decision more on reasoning rather than passion. So, he is now more objective in his decision rather than being unduly influenced by emotions.

[Corvus]

The fire of his youth has been spent, and maybe with it, the heat of his opposition to theism, though it is more than likely that he is still quite passionate and his mind is still clear.

Perhaps this is true. And if so, it would show to me that his turn would be indicative that now he is basing his decision more on reasoning rather than passion. So, he is now more objective in his decision rather than being unduly influenced by emotions.

Or after so many years of debating the issue, complacence to what he might see as inconsistencies or significant hurdles towards believing in a god might have led him to the acceptance of this fairly bland deism. Park a tank in a parking lot, it will draw attention. Keep it there for a year and it will barely draw a curious glance, instead becoming a familiar and welcome sight.