Re: Anthony Flew Interview

As far as I understand the kalam cosmological argument, it seems to me that
his "conversion" is based on scientific support of a First Cause, so I dont
understand why he is not persuaded by this argument.

In fact, since scientific cosmology seems to validate both the scientific
and telelogical arguements, taken together they are nearly irrefutable
evidence for God's existence it would seem to me.

I found one of his statements in the middle of the interview interesting,
when asked if his theism has led him to belief in an afterlife, he
responded: "I still hope and believe there's no possiblity of an afterlife."

I find this interesting for two reasons. First, one cant claim that his
theism is a result of his getting older and fear of death.

In fact he seems to fear the afterlife more than death itself. Could this
be because he fears that the doctrines of eternal damnation that he was
taught when younger are actually true?

----- Original Message -----
From: "Rich Blinne" <rich.blinne@gmail.com>
To: <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, December 29, 2004 5:17 PM
Subject: Anthony Flew Interview

> 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 20:07:21 2004