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The Strange Case of Antony Flew

 

Listen to this modern ‘parable’.

 

Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. In the clearing were growing many flowers and many weeds. One explorer says, ‘Some gardener must tend this plot.’ The other disagrees, ‘There is no gardener.’ So they pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. ‘But perhaps he is an invisible gardener.’ So they set up a barbed-wire fence. They electrify it. They patrol with bloodhounds. (For they remember how H. G. Well’s Invisible Man could be both smelt and touched though he could not be seen.) But no shrieks ever suggest that some intruder has received a shock. No movements of the wire ever betray an invisible climber. The bloodhounds never give cry. Yet still the Believer is not convinced. ‘But there is a gardener, invisible, intangible, insensible to electric shocks, a gardener who has no scent and makes no sound, a gardener who comes secretly to look after the garden which he loves.’ At last the Sceptic despairs, ‘But what remains of your original assertion? Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?’

 

This is from an essay called Theology and Falsification, published in 1968 by the philosopher, Professor Antony Flew, and it is designed to illustrate the way in which believers in God will constantly modify their position until nothing of substance remains of their original assertion. As an example, let us take the statement, ‘God loves us as a father loves his children’. It’s a typical religious statement, and could be said by a Christian, a Jew, or a Muslim. The sentiment is implicit in the Prayer of Jesus, which we say here every week. But just what does it mean? It is very easy to challenge it. ‘If God loves us like father, why does he allow us to suffer? Surely no human father would stand idly by while one of his children dies from starvation, or is mutilated in an earthquake?’ The believer might respond by saying that God has a different perspective on things from a human father, or that because we have free will we must expect problems, or that love does not mean shielding from all danger, and so on. At the end of such a debate between believer and non-believer, the original statement ‘God loves us as a father loves his children’ will be so hedged around by caveats, that it will, in Flew’s words,  have ‘died the death of a thousand qualifications’. In fact, the statement ‘God loves us as a father loves his children’ would probably be understood to mean ‘God doesn’t love us as a father loves his children’.

Antony Flew, the son of a Methodist minister, was born in London in 1923, and educated at Oxford where he obtained a first class honours degree in Classics. He went on to study philosophy, and eventually became Professor of Philosophy at the University of Keele, and, later, at Reading.

Flew was particularly concerned with the philosophy of religion, and, despite being a son of the manse, he was an avowed atheist from the beginning of his professional career. Flew was a force to be reckoned with, and I can remember that in my early explorations in the philosophy of religion, I was constantly having to consider his works and ideas. He was one of the most important atheistic thinkers and apologists – perhaps the most important – of the middle years of the twentieth century. In his book The Presumption of Atheism, Flew argued that the burden of proof must always lie with the believer; in the absence of coherent proof of God’s existence the only sensible position was one of disbelief.

This was the position expounded and defended by Flew for the whole of his professional life. However, about five years ago, he changed his mind. In 2004, he announced to the world that he had ceased to be an atheist and had come to be a believer in God. This announcement sent genuine shock-waves through the academic community. Without wishing to be too melodramatic about it, it was like the pope declaring that he had become an atheist, or Ian Paisley deciding to become a Catholic. One blog says ‘it may represent one of the seven seals of the apocalypse; soon dogs and cats will begin sleeping with each other.’

Religious people welcomed Flew’s conversion, as you can imagine, and he has been paraded ever since by Christian apologists as a vindication of their superior arguments.

However, Flew’s former atheist allies – people like our old friend Richard Dawkins – have been quick to point out that Flew is now an old man (he was eighty-one when his ‘conversion’ was announced), and so his mental faculties may not be as sharp as they once were. It has also been suggested that Flew, as he comes closer to death, is hedging his bets a little, and changing his mind just in case the vengeful God of certain strands of Christianity should exist and decide to punish him for his iconoclasm and blasphemy. A bit like Voltaire who, on his deathbed was asked by a priest to denounce Satan: ‘My good man,’ replied Voltaire, ‘this is not the time to be making enemies.’

The first charge – that his mental faculties are declining with age – is something of a cheap shot. On the videos of his recent public appearances, he seems a little slower than a man in the prime of his life might be, but there is no real evidence of serious mental decline. Those suspicious of his ‘conversion’ point out that on one occasion he forgot the names of three scientists whose works he had used to form his conclusions, but lapses of memory like this are no evidence of senility. Those of you who are interested might like to Google Antony Flew and have a look at how he conducts himself in debate these days, and come to your own conclusions about his mental state. Evidence of mental decline is also suggested by the fact that Flew’s book describing his ‘conversion’ was co-authored by an American Christian writer called Roy Abraham Varghese, and parts of it bear the imprint of Varghese’s style more than that of Flew. For example, the book contains a number of Americanisms – words such as ‘cookies’ and expressions such as ‘gotten out’ which no Oxford educated Brit would ever use. It also seems rather strange to me that an Antony Flew at the top of his game would allow this book to contain a lengthy appendix in which N. T. Wright, the Bishop of Durham and a noted evangelical, makes a case for the resurrection of Jesus. It’s billed as a ‘dialogue’, but it consists of twenty-six pages by Wright, and two paragraphs by Flew. So, maybe there has been some manipulation by the publishers which the ageing Flew has allowed to go unchecked.

The second charge – that he is hedging his bets – is easy to refute. He has publicly declared that he has no belief whatsoever in life after death. He considers it as much a logical absurdity as he did when he was an atheist. In one interview he says that he fervently hopes there is no life after death. So, the idea that he might be ingratiating himself with God as his end approaches has no real substance to it. 

Flew has not become a Christian; he has not become a believer in the theistic God of the Judaeo- Christian tradition. The God in which he has come to believe (and I use the word ‘which’ and not ‘whom’ deliberately) is the kind of God believed in by Thomas Jefferson, the God of the deists, i.e. an intelligence which brought the world into existence, but which does not have a continuing involvement with it. So, Flew denies the idea of revelation, Christian or otherwise, has no belief in miracles, in the divinity of Christ, the inspiration of the Bible, or any of the other doctrines which would mark him out as a conventional believer. He rejects the idea of a personal God, and considers the God of Islam and of certain strands of Christianity and Judaism, as a kind of celestial Saddam Hussein.  

  Nevertheless, his journey has been a remarkable one. What has occasioned such a volte face? Flew says that it has been brought about by recent scientific investigations. In a symposium held in New York in May 2004, he was asked whether recent work on the origin of life pointed to the activity of a creative intelligence. He replied:

 

Yes, I now think it does….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 looks to me like the work of intelligence.

 

            Flew maintains that his current convictions are simply a result of a principle he has espoused all his life, a principle enunciated by Plato through the mouth of Socrates: that one must go wherever the evidence leads. The evidence, says Flew, supports the case for ‘intelligent design’ and points away from the naturalistic, purposeless universe postulated by many contemporary atheistic thinkers. A couple of weeks ago I came across an essay which contained an anecdote about Sir Isaac Newton, the greatest scientist of all, who was also ready to change his mind should the evidence warrant it. When told that certain observations with a telescope seemed to undermine his theories, Newton is reported to have said: ‘It may be so; there is no arguing against facts and experiments.’

At about the time that Antony Flew was moving towards belief in God, the British Olympic triple jump champion Jonathan Edwards – like Flew, a son of the manse – was moving in the opposite direction. Edwards, you may remember, famously refused to participate in the world championships held in Tokyo in 1991, on the grounds that his event was to take place on Sunday. When he retired from athletics in 2003, he worked for the BBC, fronting a landmark documentary on the life of St. Paul, and presenting Songs of Praise. But he gradually came to realise that his Christianity had been ‘sports psychology’ in all but name, that believing that God was behind him gave him the impetus he needed to compete at the highest level. In an interview with Libby Purves, he says:

 

But when I retired, something happened that took me by complete surprise. I quickly realised that athletics was more important to my identity than I believed possible. I was the best in the world at what I did and suddenly that was not true anymore. With one facet of my identity stripped away, I began to question the others and, from there, there was no stopping. The foundations of my world were slowly crumbling… … …I was so preoccupied with training and competing that I did not have the time or emotional inclination to question my beliefs. Sport is simple, with simple goals and a simple lifestyle. I was quite happy in a world populated by my family and close friends, people who shared my belief system. Leaving that world to get involved with television and other projects gave me the freedom to question everything.

 

I admire both these men immensely. Of course, Antony Flew’s conversion is the more congenial to my own world view, and that is why I have spent more time discussing it, but both of them demonstrate a willingness to put their belief systems to the test, to follow wherever the evidence may lead, and to live with the consequences of any adjustments they may need to make. Defending a point-of-view simply because one has always held it is a sign of intellectual laziness. There is no virtue in consistency for its own sake. As Emerson said, ‘a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds’; those of us who claim to have larger minds, should be prepared, from time to time, to consider just how stale our professed opinions have become. I remember reading some years ago about a man who said, ‘I’ve often wanted to stop talking so that I can find out what I really think’. Maybe, this summer, you can find some time to withdraw a little and give your own assumptions and prejudices an airing; to find out what you really think.

 

August 9^th, 2009