Catching up with mailbox: Antony Flew

A correspondent has directed my attention to this vid, which he says should answer all doubts about whether Antony Flew was in his right mind toward the end of his life, when he decided the universe showed evidence of design. I never doubted that the late Antony Flew was in his right mind, but always think scrubbing out that kind of nonsense is worthwhile. I never doubted it, but - having dealtt with many seniors - I am well aware of the need to distinguish between words and concepts.

My father, 91 and suffering a stroke, cannot remember my name. He calls me “sheila” = “my girl”.

Yes, Dad, I am your girl, and will always be your girl, and even the invasions of time and late-life disease have not erased that.

I wonder what the usual Internet Darwinists would have to say. Maybe they want to take the opportunity to confess their atheism.

New atheists vs. the ex-atheist

Marvin Olasky muses on the recent popularity of "new atheist" books:

Atheistic authors see themselves as avant-garde, but they merely are echoing the riffs of 19th-century scoffers who predicted the imminent demise of Christianity. Gilded Age orator Robert Ingersoll, for example, said that when Christians dominate schools and media, it is hard to mount an attack on concepts of revelation and miracles, but "now that religion's monopoly has been broken, it is within the compass of any human being to see those evidences and proofs as the feeble-minded inventions that they are."

So what happened? Why are many churches in the U.S. booming? Why is Christianity expanding so rapidly in Africa and China? To begin to answer that, we should let our imaginations run wild: What if in the 20th century, in the biggest country by land area and also in the biggest country by population, leaders had required the teaching of atheism in all schools? Freed of "feeble-minded inventions," wouldn't the world be a better place?

Oh, you say we don't have to imagine? You say the Soviet Union and China did establish atheism and the results were not pretty?

He thinks it's a passing fad. I think it's a last ditch effort to sell atheism before the science evidence for meaning and purpose in the universe makes atheism as implausible as the fairies in the bottom of the garden.

At least in the Western context. You could still be an atheist in the Eastern context, but that wouldn't abolish anything that the new atheists want to get rid of. Yu'd have karma instead of God.

For example, right in the middle of the organized atheist uproar, an atheist who was far more highly respected than any of these others, Antony Flew, came to the conclusion, based on science evidence, that there IS a God. I have written about that here.

The important thing to see is that he did NOT have an old tyme religious experience and did NOT become a fundamentalist. He simply came to the conclusion that the science evidence is best explained by the idea that there is a God. That's more or less what I think too after co-writing The Spiritual Brain.

Yes, yes, I was a Christian before that, but I didn't realize how much science evidence supports theism. I had never been asked to look at my faith that way; it was all experiential. The Spiritual Brain (I am Mario Beauregard's co-author) was a chance to look at one huge line of evidence from neuroscience about the reality of the mind.

One difference between ex-atheist Flew and the new atheists may be that Flew doesn't appear to have bought into materialist ideas of the mind - that here is really no mind, no free will - what Mario calls the central dogma of modern neuroscience.

And if you think that there is a mind, there is free will, why not a Mind behind it all, idf the evidence suggests that? Not proven, but a reasonable assumption, and certainly worthy of further investigation.

Antony Flew: Is emotion really better than reason in religious matters?

Recently, I both reviewed Antony Flew's There IS a God and responded to claims that, at his advanced age and suffering a cognitive disorder(84), he either couldn't write the book or doesn't know what he thinks. I have dealt with those claims as well.

But another claim that surfaced was that Flew should have had an emotional religious experience rather than merely changing his mind for rational reasons. Those who think so might also want to look at the case of fellow philosopher (and atheist) A. J. Ayer, who actually had a near death experience (NDE) in 1988 - and see what happened. Here is a brief excerpt from The Spiritual Brain on that subject. During the experience, Ayer had encountered a painful red light that he took to be responsible for the government of the universe, and he thought it was his job to put things right. He remained an atheist until he died a year later, but according to a source close to him, he became much more interested in others (a classic outcome of a near death experience). And what of his philosophical views? Playwright William Cash, who staged a play based on Ayer’s account of his NDE at the Edinburgh Festival, was told by Ayer's doctor,

George recalls that Ayer told him, “I saw a Divine Being. I’m afraid I’m going to have to
revise all my various books and opinions.”

But he didn't. I must assume that he had reasons for not doing so that seemed good and reasonable to him, but the fact is that he didn't.

Perhaps this demonstrates that, in a person of philosophical temperament, reason is more critical than emotional experience.

Antony Flew: Author or puppet?

From Publishers' Weekly, more flames in the Flew controversy - that is, DID Antony Flew write the book that appears under his name?

(Flew is the boffo British atheist who decided that There is a God based on the intelligent design of the universe. Unsurprisingly, the claim has been made that, because Flew is in his eighties, his “with” author Roy Varghese, really wrote the book - but Flew denies that.)

I am pretty certain Flew did write the book in the sense that matters most - at his age (mid-80s) he must obviously focus on ensuring that his change of mind is accurately explained before he loses all control over the story.

After all, a dead author is owned by his readers, and we must assume that Flew knows that.

Actually, Flew’s conversion (to some sort of belief in a God) is real. And it is for good reasons - for example, the fine tuning of the universe for life. I have followed his journey with interest for several years.

Incidentally, I have now received a review copy of There Is a God, and will read it carefully, all the more so in view of the recent author!, author! uproar, clearly aimed at discrediting his testimony.

Antony Flew: Is he too old to believe in God?

I see where HarperOne’s Mark Tauber is defending Antony Flew - as well he should.

Flew, after 50 years of atheism, decided that there really is a God, on account of intelligent design of the universe - a very unpopular premise with the Manhattan cocktail set, I hear. Soberer souls may beg to differ.

Basically, in an attempt to discredit Flew, the New York Times’s Mark Oppenheimer implied in a recent article that Flew, 84, is senile, and the victim of fundamentalists. (Flew wrote the book “with” Roy Varghese - a practice I disapprove of but can’t stop.)

Flew himself replied, saying,

"My name is on the book and it represents exactly my opinions. I would not have a book issued in my name that I do not 100 percent agree with. I needed someone to do the actual writing because I'm 84 and that was Roy Varghese's role. The idea that someone manipulated me because I'm old is exactly wrong. I may be old but it is hard to manipulate me. This is my book and it represents my thinking."

Haarper One’s Mark Tauber commented:

"We were pretty upset and frustrated by the piece," HarperOne publisher Mark Tauber told RBL. "It's one thing to review, question and debate the arguments of a book, but Oppenheimer didn't do that—he went after the integrity of our author and our integrity. It seems like he just saw this as an opportunity to make a name for himself, and it was out of line." The 84-year-old Flew has nominal aphasia—a condition that affects his ability to remember names—said Tauber, "but Oppenheimer made the leap from that to senility and then implied that Flew didn't write the book." Tauber pointed out that ghost-writing is a ubiquitous practice in publishing, and said that Flew had thoroughly reviewed the manuscript and signed off on it as accurately representing his views.

Here’s an interesting take by Christine Rosen on what sounds convincing and what doesn’t, in today’s culture.

Note: HarperOne is also the publisher of The Spiritual Brain. For the record, Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’Leary (me) really did all the work, just as is stated at the Amazon site.

Not that any reasonable person would doubt it, of course. It certainly sounds like us. If you read carefully, you can even hear the Ontario (me) and Quebecois (him) accents, as we explain why the mind is immaterial and not the same thing as the brain. By the time you finish the book, you will need to shake yourself to remind yourself that you are not, after all, a Canadian - but we are right all the same about the mind and the brain!

New York Times spin: Elderly ex-atheist Flew is just senile.

Dinesh D’Souza, reporting on the recent attempt to minimize the significance of Antony Flew’s conversion from atheism to some sort of belief in God, based on the intelligent design of the universe, comments:

Imagine if one of the world's leading Christians--say C.S. Lewis a generation ago, or Billy Graham now--were to reject his religious beliefs and become a atheist. It would be big news! The New York Times would be all over it, for sure, and the question would be why a man who has devoted his life to God would now turn against Him? In sum, the focus would be on what were the reasons for the conversion and on what's so bad about Christianity.

Contrast this with the New York Times' approach to the conversion of philosopher Anthony Flew. Flew has been, for the past half-century, the world's leading advocate of atheism.

[ ... ]

When a major figure like Flew switches sides, the New York TImes goes into mafia-style intellectual hit mode. They selected Mark Oppenheimer of Yale, who visited Flew in England and wrote a long article in the November 4, 2007 New York Times Magazine suggesting that Flew converted because he is, well, senile. The basic idea is that Flew has lost his mind and can't remember anything, and when Christian apologists like Varghese were nice to him Flew basically surrendered to them and let them write his book.

The only evidence that Flew has lost his mind is that he's 84 years old. A man of 84 naturally loses some of his memory, especially for names, but this does not mean he has lost his marbles. Flew's own writings of the past few years are all entirely coherent and employ sophisticated philosophical vocabulary.

Well, of course, Dinesh. They had to find some way to minimize the significance. If Flew had been 48, instead of 84, they would say it was a midlife crisis. If he had been 18, they would have said ... well, you can write it yourself.

To my mind, the significance of the Times' cheap shot is that that’s ALL they can come up with. Definitely more from me later.

Why lifelong atheist Antony Flew decided there must be a God ...

In this interview with Ben Wiker, Flew, once the world's best-known academic atheist (not village atheist), says,

Anthony Flew: There were two factors in particular that were decisive. One was my growing empathy with the insight of Einstein and other noted scientists that there had to be an Intelligence behind the integrated complexity of the physical Universe. The second was my own insight that the integrated complexity of life itself – which is far more complex than the physical Universe – can only be explained in terms of an Intelligent Source. I believe that the origin of life and reproduction simply cannot be explained from a biological standpoint despite numerous efforts to do so. With every passing year, the more that was discovered about the richness and inherent intelligence of life, the less it seemed likely that a chemical soup could magically generate the genetic code. The difference between life and non-life, it became apparent to me, was ontological and not chemical. The best confirmation of this radical gulf is Richard Dawkins' comical effort to argue in The God Delusion that the origin of life can be attributed to a "lucky chance." If that's the best argument you have, then the game is over. No, I did not hear a Voice. It was the evidence itself that led me to this conclusion...

Richard Dawkins is predictablyunhappy about it.

Flew has just written a book, explaining it all, There is a God - which friends tell me is excellent.