Christians Gain Little From Antony Flew’s Change of Mind

Antony Flew changed his mind on the God-hypothesis, which was announced in an interview published in December of 2004. To answer his critics he wrote an article for the Journal of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists, called The Open Society (Summer 2005, Volume 78, Number 4), titled What I Mean by Atheism, pp 8-9. In it we see why Christians gain little from his change of mind...

In this article Flew rambles, and what he wrote seems contradictory. In the first place, why is the article titled, “What I mean by atheism,” if he now believes? He also states that “I am myself delighted to be assured by biological-scientist friends that protobiologists are now well able to produce theories of the evolution of the first living matter and that several of these theories are consistent with all the so-far confirmed scientific evidence.” Why would he say that if he has accepted the Intelligent Design hypothesis? And why would he answer the question of whether we need a God to explain the origin of life by writing, “the work in this area which I have now read and on which I am presently relying for my conclusion on this matter is Victor J. Stenger's Has Science Found God?: The Latest Results in the Search for Purpose in the Universe? Stenger’s answer to that question," Flew writes, "is, of course, an emphatic ‘No’."

But Flew does say this: “Probably I should always have called myself an agnostic.”

In an earlier article Raymond Bradley asked, “You say that you have abandoned atheism for belief in God. But the God of which religion? Pantheism? Deism? Or of some non-Mosaic version of theism?” Flew’s answers by writing “My answer is clear and confident. It is the non-interfering Aristotelean God of Deism and, most emphatically not the God of any revealed religion.” How much clearer can Flew be?

To emphasize this point, Flew wrote: “Albert Einstein was once asked – ‘to settle an argument’ – whether he believed in God. He replied that he believed in Spinoza’s God…No doubt many orthodox Christian and Jewish readers were reassured to think the great physicist was at one with them on this most fundamental matter.’ But of course, in Spinoza’s usage ‘God’ and ‘Nature’ were synonyms. Of course there is…a quite fundamental difference between an Aristotelian God who is the First Cause and Einstein’s Spinozistic ‘God or Nature’. But I don’t see why anyone else should be much interested in that question just so long as any God who is believed to exist is not Himself interested in human behaviour.”

Here’s my problem. In this essay we see Flew rambling and even making what seems to be contradictory claims in 2005. That should surely be an indicator that two years later he probably has other lapses in thinking and writing. It is not the clear and well written stuff he used to do. Nonetheless, in it he distances himself from any revealed religion. Why are Christians getting so much reassurance out of this? I don’t see it.

I think soft-agnoticism ("I don't know") is the default religious position. In this article Flew even says as much by saying he should've always affirmed agnosticism. Anyone leaving the default position must offer arguments in doing so. That's why I argue that moving from that initial position to a full-blown fundamentalist Christianity is as hard to do as flying a plane to the moon. That's why Christians of the fundamentalist type, gain little from his "conversion."

Flew’s viepoint is a very small step off that initial position. He affirms very little. Since the smaller the claim is, the easier it is to defend, his view is a much more reasonable position than fundamentalism, and harder to debunk. I too make a small move off the default position, but in the opposite direction, to atheism. However, his Deistic view offers him nothing...no hope...no morality...no helping God. A distant God like that is no different than none at all. Once I grasped this I became an atheist, for even if there is a God, it makes no difference to believe he exists.

I think all attempts to figure this existence out end in practical absurdities. Some people embrace those absurdities and punt to mysticism and mystery as pointers to the ultimate. Existentialists do so. Pantheists simply claim all is maya, an illusion.

But when I reflect on what best explains this absurd existence, then I offer a meta-explanation. Since no explanation is rational, I offer a meta-explanation for why this is so. It's because chance events, by their very nature, cannot be figured out. Our number came up in a Monte Carlo game. The universe is a brute fact, and this best explains why we cannot figure out why we exist.