Re: Anthony Flew Interview

Rich Blinne wrote:

"Note particularly how Flew differs from ID and how his views are
closer to Gerald Schroeder and the strong anthropic principle...."

Still, along with the strong anthropic principle there's "...[Flew's] comment that
naturalistic efforts have never succeeded in producing 'a plausible
conjecture as to how any of these complex molecules might have evolved
from simple entities.'" And, "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."

So while Flew may not endorse ID in the form that its current chief proponents have made it take, he nevertheless seems to think a designer was necessary to get from inorganic molecules to DNA and hence to a living cell. My impression from the interview is that this has no less weight for him (and perhaps even more weight) than the strong anthropic principle. I.e., the universe not only has properties that make life possible, but a designer was needed to put the molecules together in such a way as to cause life.

Don

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Rich Blinne<mailto:rich.blinne@gmail.com>
  To: asa@calvin.edu<mailto:asa@calvin.edu>
  Sent: Wednesday, December 29, 2004 2:17 PM
  Subject: Anthony Flew Interview

  Here's more of the Anthony Flew interview at

  http://www.biola.edu/antonyflew/flew-interview.pdf<http://www.biola.edu/antonyflew/flew-interview.pdf>

  Note particularly how Flew differs from ID and how his views are
  closer to Gerald Schroeder and the strong anthropic principle (Flew
  labels this as scientific teleology). It appears Flew's biggest
  hang-up is the so-called problem of evil. The more a religion makes
  God the author of evil, the more repulsed Flew is. Thus, Flew will
  entertain Christianity but have nothing to do Islam. Flew rejects the
  Ontological proof not because of logical inconsistencies within the
  argument but because of its association with Leibnitz' theodicy which
  for Flew puts God as the author of evil.

  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 Rawls) 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.

  HABERMAS: Then, would you comment on your "openness" to the notion of
  theistic revelation?

  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.

  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 in producing "a plausible
  conjecture as to how any of these complex molecules might have evolved
  from simple entities." Then in your recently rewritten introduction to
  the forthcoming edition of your classic volume God and Philosophy, you
  say that the original version of that book is now obsolete. You
  mention a number of trends in theistic argumentation that you find
  convincing, like big bang cosmology, fine tuning and Intelligent
  Design arguments. Which arguments for God's existence did you find
  most persuasive?

  FLEW: I think that the most impressive arguments for God's existence
  are those that are supported by recent scientific discoveries. I've
  never been much impressed by the kalam cosmological argument, and I
  don't think it has gotten any stronger recently. However, I think the
  argument to Intelligent Design is enormously stronger than it was when
  I first met it.

  HABERMAS: So you like arguments such as those that proceed from big
  bang cosmology and fine tuning arguments?

  FLEW: Yes.

  HABERMAS: You also recently told me that you do not find the moral
  argument to be very persuasive. Is that right?

  FLEW: That's correct. It seems to me that for a strong moral argument,
  you've got to have God as the justification of morality. To do this
  makes doing the morally good a purely prudential matter rather than,
  as the moral philosophers of my youth used to call it, a good in
  itself. (Compare the classic discussion in Plato's Euthyphro.)

  HABERMAS: So, take C. S. Lewis's argument for morality as presented in
  Mere Christianity. You didn't find that to be very impressive?

  FLEW: No, I didn't. Perhaps I should mention that, when I was in
  college, I attended fairly regularly the weekly meetings of C. S.
  Lewis's Socratic Club. In all my time at Oxford these meetings were
  chaired by Lewis. I think he was by far the most powerful of Christian
  apologists for the sixty or more years following his founding of that
  club. As late as the 1970s, I used to find that, in the USA, in at
  least half of the campus bookstores of the universities and liberal
  art colleges which I visited, there was at least one long shelf
  devoted to his very various published works.

  HABERMAS: Although you disagreed with him, did you find him to be a
  very reasonable sort of fellow?

  FLEW: Oh yes, very much so, an eminently reasonable man.

  HABERMAS: And what do you think about the ontological argument for the
  existence of God?

  FLEW: All my later thinking and writing about philosophy was greatly
  influenced by my year of postgraduate study under the supervision of
  Gilbert Ryle, the then Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy in the
  University of Oxford, as well as the Editor of Mind. It was the very
  year in which his enormously influential work on The Concept of Mind
  was first published. I was told that, in the years between the wars,
  whenever another version of the ontological argument raised its head,
  Gilbert forthwith set himself to refute it. My own initial lack of
  enthusiasm for the ontological argument developed into strong
  repulsion when I realized from reading the Theodicy of Leibniz that it
  was the identification of the concept of Being with the concept of
  Goodness (which ultimately derives from Plato's identification in The
  Republic of the Form or Idea of the Good with the Form or the Idea of
  the Real) which enabled Leibniz in his Theodicy validly to conclude
  that an universe in which most human beings are predestined to an
  eternity of torture is the "best of all possible worlds."

  HABERMAS: So of the major theistic arguments, such as the
  cosmological, teleological, moral, and ontological, the only really
  impressive ones that you take to be decisive are the scientific forms
  of teleology?

  FLEW: Absolutely. It seems to me that Richard Dawkins constantly
  overlooks the fact that Darwin himself, in the fourteenth chapter of
  The Origin of Species, pointed out that his whole argument began with
  a being which already possessed reproductive powers. This is the
  creature the evolution of which a truly comprehensive theory of
  evolution must give some account. Darwin himself was well aware that
  he had not produced such an account. 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.
Received on Thu Dec 30 05:43:05 2004