Re: Anthony Flew Interview

I find this statement by Flew to be quite revealing:
 
"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."
 
Best,
Charles

 
 
 
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Charles W. Carrigan
Olivet Nazarene University
Dept. of Geology
One University Ave.
Bourbonnais, IL 60914
PH: (815) 939-5346
FX: (815) 939-5071
 

>>> Rich Blinne <rich.blinne@gmail.com> 12/29/2004 4:17:19 PM >>>

Here's more of the Anthony Flew interview at

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 11:02:53 2004