Re: Anthony Flew Interview

I think even a concordist can hold a view of Genesis in which they would claim that it is not scientifically verifiable. The question is whether or not certain interpretations are scientifically falsifiable, and if so, either Genesis is not inspired or the interpretation is incorrect.
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Charles Carrigan
  To: haas.john@comcast.net
  Cc: asa@calvin.edu
  Sent: Thursday, December 30, 2004 12:43 PM
  Subject: Re: Anthony Flew Interview

  Hi Jack,

  I fully agree. Revelation is not dependent upon scientific verification, as Flew appears to require. I would go further though, and say this same view is held by many Christians also, but who approach it from the reverse - Gen is revelation, therefore it must be scientifically verifiable. I have not found this (which is what the concordist view of Gen really boils down to) very palatable. But obviously there are many on this list that would disagree.

  Best,
  Charle

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

  s
>>> "Jack Haas" <haas.john@comcast.net> 12/30/2004 11:24:26 AM >>>

  Charles:

  Without trying to open up a can of worms, I find the Flew comment a bit problematic.

  If Schroeder, instead, had found the Biblical account inaccurate, would Flew have then concluded the possibility that it
  was not revelation with all the implications that might follow?

  Evangelicals and surely this list have passionately debated the concordism question into a 'no win situation.' Hopefully Flew and even others who follow this list will find the heart of the Gospel in the New Testament accounts rather than in apologetic strategies.

  Jack

  ----- Original Message -----
    From: Charles Carrigan
    To: asa@calvin.edu ; rich.blinne@gmail.com
    Sent: Thursday, December 30, 2004 10:58 AM
    Subject: 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

    <><<><<><<><<><<><<><<><<><<><<><<><
    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 17:37:25 2004