Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

Browsing through a local Barnes and Noble bookseller yesterday, I happened upon Antony Flew’s new book recounting his conversion from atheism to deism:

I had some time to kill, so I spent an hour or two reading through most of it in the store. It is, amidst strong arguments refuting atheism, a fascinating tale of philosophical transformation. Flew, as many know, was the leading light of philosophical atheism in the English-speaking world for close to five decades. The son of a prominent English Methodist minister and evangelist, Flew never had a “taste” for worship, or an intellectual interest in religious matters. He became an atheist, not out of any anger toward religion nor out of any apparent Oedipal complex. He was simply utterly indifferent to religion. Thus, when faced with theologically challenging questions – particularly the question of theodicy – he was not particularly predisposed to issuing a defense of what Laplace deprecatingly called “the God hypothesis.”

Flew, quite by accident, stumbled upon the vocation of philosophy. He became, as a student, an integral part of the philosophy scene at Oxford. He participated in Oxford’s “Socrates Club,” which was then chaired by C.S. Lewis – who was, of course, the greatest apologist of Christianity in the second half of the 20^th century. Flew became a very important analytical philosopher in his own right.

He was present at the famous debate involving Elizabeth Anscombe (herself a Catholic) and C.S. Lewis which led Lewis to revise one of the chapters of his book on miracles. Flew was invigorated by such debates. He never held an animosity toward Christianity, and, tellingly, he was not a proponent of “logical positivism.”

I say tellingly because logical positivism was infamous for excluding genuinely metaphysical and theological questions from the domain of rational investigation. Flew refuted the narrowness of logical positivism in a famous paper he wrote entitled “Theology and Falsification.” Flew, though an atheist, actually kept theological questioning alive in the English-speaking world. This helped to inspire the revival of Christian apologetics within the domain of analytic philosophy. Such luminous figures of Christian philosophy in the Anglophone world as Alvin Plantinga, John Haldane, William Alston, and Brian Leftow were inspired, in part by Flew’s atheism, to develop a sophisticated current of theism within the wider current of English philosophy.

Flew eventually came to his present deistic position because, as he tells us in the book, modern science compels us to admit that a divine intellect must be at the root of the physical processes of the world. Only a divine intellect, he argues, can give to the world its lawful structure. Moreover, it seems that Flew, though a deist, is not entirely lost to Christianity: the book includes an appendix by N.T. Wright defending Christian revelation, a defense that Flew considers to be quite intriguing.

However, for now, Flew’s thinking still has one major inconsistency: he rejects the immortality of the soul. This is inconsistent because the postulation of the soul’s immortality follows from a recognition that only the existence of a spiritual soul – not bound by the exigencies of space, time and matter – can account for man’s capacity to be a rational agent. Flew is willing to admit that there must be an eternal divine intellect to account for the intelligibility of the universe. It is inconsistent, then, not to recognize that only the existence of an immortal soul can account for the human capacity to recognize the universe’s intelligibility.

Perhaps the most interesting philosophical contribution to the book comes from Roy Abraham Varghese, a noted analytic philosopher who provides an introduction to the book and an appendix. This appendix to the book is an excellent, pithy refutation of the philosophical inanity of the new fundamentalist atheists: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet, Lewis Wolpert, Sam Harris, et al. Varghese shows that philosophical materialism cannot account for the existence of the universe, for life, for consciousness, for thought, or for the unity of the human self. He makes the interesting point that the new atheists are 50 years behind the times, philosophically speaking. They have not understood the direction of philosophy in the past 50 years and have fallen back into some of the errors of the logical positivists – who were definitively refuted long ago.

I do not know if it is true that the new atheists are utterly behind the times. Most philosophy departments in the English-speaking world presume philosophical materialism and atheism. But, at the same time, it is true that there is a burgeoning movement of Christian philosophy that presents a formidable challenge to the still- regnant materialism and atheism. Christianity – and indeed all of humanity in the Anglophone world – has Antony Flew to thank who, even when an atheist, took theological questioning seriously again in the halls of academe.