[asa] Yet More on Antony Flew’s “Conversion”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/magazine/04Flew-t.html

New perspective of Anthony Flew's 'conversion'. Not only does Flew
seem to have a problem with his memory, he also did not write the book
"there is a God"

<quote>
In "There Is a God," Flew quotes extensively from a conversation he
had with Leftow, a professor at Oxford. So I asked Flew, "Do you know
Brian Leftow?"

"No," he said. "I don't think I do."

"Do you know the work of the philosopher John Leslie?" Leslie is
discussed extensively in the book.

Flew paused, seeming unsure. "I think he's quite good." But he said he
did not remember the specifics of Leslie's work.

"Have you ever run across the philosopher Paul Davies?" In his book,
Flew calls Paul Davies "arguably the most influential contemporary
expositor of modern science."

"I'm afraid this is a spectacle of my not remembering!"

He said this with a laugh. When we began the interview, he warned me,
with merry self-deprecation, that he suffers from "nominal aphasia,"
or the inability to reproduce names. But he forgot more than names. He
didn't remember talking with Paul Kurtz about his introduction to "God
and Philosophy" just two years ago. There were words in his book, like
"abiogenesis," that now he could not define. When I asked about Gary
Habermas, who told me that he and Flew had been friends for 22 years
and exchanged "dozens" of letters, Flew said, "He and I met at a
debate, I think." I pointed out to him that in his earlier
philosophical work he argued that the mere concept of God was
incoherent, so if he was now a theist, he must reject huge chunks of
his old philosophy. "Yes, maybe there's a major inconsistency there,"
he said, seeming grateful for my insight. And he seemed generally
uninterested in the content of his book — he spent far more time
talking about the dangers of unchecked Muslim immigration and his
embrace of the anti-E.U. United Kingdom Independence Party.

As he himself conceded, he had not written his book.

"This is really Roy's doing," he said, before I had even figured out a
polite way to ask. "He showed it to me, and I said O.K. I'm too old
for this kind of work!"
</quote>

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Received on Sun Nov 4 18:22:43 2007