Antony Flew
From Philosopedia
Flew, Antony (Garradi Newton) (11 February 1923- 8 April 2010)
Flew, in the New Humanist (July 1993), wrote:
- My father, like his father before him, was a Methodist minister. So at age thirteen I was sent to the excellent boarding school founded by John Wesley for the education of the sons of his itinerant preachers. But Kingswood's religion was no longer premised, as was that of its founder, upon the belief that the unredeemed are destined for eternal torture. So what, to the distress of all concerned, I rejected in my middle teens as manifestly incompatible with innumerable familiar facts was belief in the existence of a God both omnipotent and good. It was only later, and with particular reference to Islam, that I came to appreciate the appropriateness of the characteristically Hobbist observation that " . . . in the attributes which we give to God we are not to consider the signification of pious intention, to do him the greatest honour we are able." For although every surah (chapter) of the Qur'an begins "In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate." it proceeds to present Allah as a sort of cosmic Saddam Hussein, forever torturing all those who fail to believe, worship, and obey. I joined the Rationalist Press Association in the early fifties, contributing to the old Literary Guide fairly regularly. My first book, entitled with the brash confidence of youth A New Approach to Psychical Research, was published by C. A. Watts in 1953. Most of its successors have been similarly concerned to promote rationality. David Hume, the subject of two, was treated as the first major thinker of the modern period whose philosophy was through and through secular, this-worldly and human-centred. The titles of others indicate the same concern: Thinking about Thinking; A Rational Animal: Philosophical Essays on the Nature of Man; Darwinian Evolution; The Logic of Mortality; and Thinking about Social Thinking (1995). My final fling, "the first set of Prometheus Lectures plus other essays in atheist humanism," is due out from Prometheus in the fall.
That volume is entitled Atheistic Humanism (1993), in which Flew supports the pragmatic implications of scientific naturalism.
A professor emeritus of philosophy at Reading University in England, Flew was a member of the Secretariat of the Council for Secular Humanism's International Academy of Humanism. In 1976, he was elected an honorary associate of the British Rationalist Press Association, and he was an honorary associate of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists. He signed Humanist Manifesto II. The Presumption of Atheism (1976), a collection of his philosophical essays, has been reissued as God, Freedom and Immortality.
Flew was a contributing editor of Philo. David Berman in New Humanist (October, 1988) remarked in a review of Logic of Mortality (1984),
- Of course, Flew's style and standpoint will come as no surprise. For (with the exception of A. J. Ayer) he is surely the best-known living philosophical unbeliever in the English-speaking world.
Flew, who also does not believe in any survival after death, is a contributing editor of Free Inquiry. In Immortality, Paul Edwards writes of him:
- Flew in many places makes it clear that he is not a radical materialist, admitting that mental processes are irreducible to bodily phenomena. At the same time he insists that human beings are "creatures of flesh and blood,"� and these creatures of flesh and blood are the subjects of sensations, feelings, and thoughts.
In 1987, with Gary Habermas, Flew wrote Did Jesus Rise From the Dead? The Resurrection Debate. In 1994 his essay, "The Terrors of Islam,"� was published in Challenges to the Enlightenment, Essays in Defense of Reason and Science. In it, he suggests that Islam and its weaknesses need to be studied much as Christianity has been, and inasmuch as Islam is intolerant of all such critical dissent it will be up to rationalists and humanists to do the job.
As for the supernatural, Flew declared,
- Stuff is all there is; while everything which is not stuff is nonsense.
In Birmingham, England, at the centenary conference of the Rationalist Press Association in 1999, his lecture was entitled "Against the New Irrationalism."�
God and Philosophy
Following is a review by Andrew Lugg in Philosophy in Review (2005).
- Antony Flew, God and Philosophy. Amherst: Prometheus Books 2005. Pp. 210. $18
- After decades campaigning for atheism, Antony Flew now seems to have become a deist. While continuing to criticize established religion, he is reported (in items easily accessible on the web) to be flirting with the idea that the universe was created by an intelligent being, one blameless for the misery and mayhem that has occurred since the job was done. While Flew has not explicitly admitted shifting his ground, it is difficult to shake the impression that shift it he has.
- Before the appearance of the reprint of God and Philosophy now before us, Flew responded to questions regarding his religious beliefs with a promise to set the record straight in a new Introduction to the book. Unfortunately, however, he hasn't come through. In a brief (7 page) discussion he mainly devotes himself to listing considerations 'any intending successor to God and Philosophy would need to take into account'. Such a book would, he avers, have to address a couple of points sometimes thought to give aid and comfort to the religiously inclined, specifically the claim that the universe is only part of what there is and the argument that human life would not have been possible had the fundamental constants of physics been ever so slightly different. (Flew professes himself 'delighted' that a third point "that there is no negotiating the gap between animate and inanimate matter" seems to have been taken care of by 'protobiologists'). Moreover he suggests that a successor work would have to examine Varghese's 'extremely extensive presentation of the inductive argument from the order of nature to God as its Intelligent Designer', Conway's revival of the classical philosophical conception of the universe as 'the creation of a supreme omnipotent and omniscient intelligence' and Swinburne's 'radically new and extremely comprehensive case [in Is There a God?] for the existence of the Christian God'.
- Presumably Flew mentions these 'developments' because he thinks they spell trouble for the atheism of the original text. But he keep his cards so close to his chest it is hard to know where he stands, still less whether he is, as has been alleged, attracted to the argument from design (and Varghese's argument for an Intelligent Designer). He is even cagey about Swinburne's argument for the existence of a Christian God, referring to it as one a believer 'may very reasonably see as further and very strong confirmation of [his or her theistic] conclusions'. This is all very puzzling. Flew has never been one to hedge his bets, and I can only conjecture that he tempered his views in response to the 'peer review (pro and con)' to which his remarks were submitted (in his 'Publisher's Foreword' Paul Kurtz states that the Introduction went through four drafts). In any event the final result is surprisingly bland and unhelpful.
- In the original text (reprinted here without modification), there is none of the reticence of the new Introduction. Flew questions the coherence of the Christian concept of God, stresses the problem of evil, pillories the ontological, design and cosmological arguments, discounts the idea that there would be no meaning or morality were there no God, pooh-poohs arguments for the existence of God based on religious experience, miracles and faith, and dismisses attempts by Pascal and others to inveigle us into believing in God. The only snag is that these topics have been thoroughly discussed many times, before and since, and much less laboriously. Flew rounds up the usual suspects and sends them packing mostly for the usual reasons. Worse – as critics of the original edition were quick to point out – he does not select the strongest opponents, rarely considers what the theist might say in response and has little to say to religious thinkers who discount 'rationalistic' arguments for the existence of God. Indeed even died-in-the-wool atheists are likely to find themselves wanting to defend the other side. There are, nonetheless, some nice paragraphs, for instance one on the shibboleth that 'science tells us how, never why' (108).
- Whether or not Flew has become a deist, he doubtless remains committed to much of what he wrote in God and Philosophy some forty years ago. He is, I suppose, as antipathetic as ever to "the Christian God and 'the God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel' (21) " and just as unconvinced by the alleged deliverances of revelation and religious experience. But if he now believes that features of the universe are inexplicable in the absence of a deity, he can no longer repudiate the concept of God as incoherent and accept all his criticisms of natural theology, especially not everything he says about order and design. Beyond this, however, one can only guess that he would want to bring the original text into line with the new Introduction and, among other things, iron out the conflict between his description of Einstein as espousing 'atheism ... decked out in theist clothes' (79) and his present view of the great scientist as an Aristotelian deist (13). Nor, I might add, is it clear that a book expressing Flew's new position would find many takers. It is easy to poke holes in the theory of Intelligent Design and one can well imagine the mincemeat that Flew in an earlier incarnation would have made of the notion of a God beyond good and evil.
- God and Philosophy is reasonably priced and well-produced (though lacking an index). Whether it warrants reprinting, however, is another matter (it has already been reprinted once). The original text is too academic for a polemic, too opinionated for a work of scholarship, and the additional material only muddies the water. (And why, I ask myself, the snide swipe at Rawls's 'apostles' in footnote 11 of the new Introduction?) It would be different if Flew had a new or special angle and the thinkers from the 1950s and 1960s he targets continued to be seriously discussed, but he doesn't and they aren't. If one is looking for 'a classic in the philosophy of religion' (6), there are much better books, Hume or Russell for example.
- Andrew Lugg
- Montreal
Flew's 1968 article in Reason and Responsibility is entitled "Theology and Falsification".
Oppenheimer on Flew
Mark Oppenheimer in "The Turning of an Atheist"� (New York Times Magazine, 4 November 2007) has a thorough article about Antony Flew's past well-known views about atheism and how, in his present dotage has been influenced by Roy Abraham Varghese, "autodidact with no academic credentials."�
Oppenheimer interviews Flew, asking if he knows Oxford Professor Brian Leftow. "No, I don't think I do,"� Flew responds (although in his There Is a God Flew quotes extensively from a conversation he had with him).
"Do you know the work of the philosopher John Leslie?"� Flew thought he was quite good but did not remember any specifics of Leslie' work.
"Have you ever run across the philosopher Paul Davies?"� In his book Flew calls him "arguably the most influential contemporary expositor of modern science."� No, Flew says with a laugh, "I'm afraid this is a spectacle of my not remembering."�
Flew told Oppenheimer that he suffers from �nominal aphasia, or the inability to reproduce names. He didn't remember having talked two years ago with Paul Kurtz, for example. He used abiogenesis� in his book, but now cannot define it.
Oppenheimer credits Columbia doctoral student in ancient history Richard Carrier as having written Flew and pointing out the many irrational statements he has been making in his old age.
On 11 May 2006, Flew received the second Phillip E. Johnson Award for Liberty and Truth from Biola University, a private Christian evangelical university located near Los Angeles, California. Biola in a newsletter reported that Flew "advocated the intellectual freedom of scholars of all stripes to challenge reigning orthodoxies and to ask forbidden questions."
Obituaries
(See entry for Paul Edwards - before his death, he denied that Flew was an atheist any longer. Flew is an honorary member of the Bertrand Russell Society.)
