CHAT: Antony Flew, Part 1
HJ Hornbeck
I've got a copy of Flew's "There is A God" sitting within arm's reach.
Here's my format: post a summary of Flew's arguments, wait a few days,
post my rebuttal. Feel free to chime in at any time, pro or con!]
A name that occasionally pops up in apologetics is Antony Flew. The
preacher at a painfully boring talk I attended one snowy Saturday
invoked him as an example of a great mind that came around to theism.
PZ Myers, in contrast, characterizes him as “a sad tale of an aging,
fading scholar who has lost almost all of his acuity and is severely
memory-impaired, who is being manipulated and used as a pawn by a team
of frauds and apologists for religion and creationism.” Harsh words.
And in the end, they mean little. If Antony Flew was genuinely
convinced by the arguments, if they were as rational and sane as his
defenders claim, then they would shine through in his book on the
subject, “There Is A God: How the world's most notorious atheist
changed his mind.” So, let's delve into them!
The actual arguments don't start until page 85, Chapter 4. “Let us
begin with a parable,” Flew asks: imagine a satellite phone washing up
on the shore of a hunter-gatherer tribe. The scientists of the tribe
conclude that the device itself is producing the sounds of a human
language. A sage instead claims the voices are being transmitted from
distant humans, and suggests the scientists do some tests. They
dismiss the idea, pointing out that the voices disappear when the
device is poked at, hence it must be originating them. Flew compares
this to the atheist claims that “we should not ask for an explanation
of how it is that the world exists” or “we choose to believe the
impossible: that life arose spontaneously by chance from matter,” and
points out that these will not lead to a greater understanding of the
world.
From here, he moves on to his scientific critics. Flew flourishes a
quote of Einstein: “The man of science is a poor philosopher.” His
critics within the sciences should not use “their authority nor their
expertise as scientists” in a philosophic debate, they should use
philosophic arguments. “The competence specific to scientists gives no
advantage when it comes to considering this question, just as a star
baseball player has no special competence on the dental benefits of a
particular toothpaste.”
With that dispatched, he arrives at the “three domains of scientific
inquiry” that helped lead him to the conclusion of the existence of a
divine mind:
“How did the laws of nature come to be?”
“How did life as a phenomenon originate from nonlife?”
“How did the universe, by which we mean all that is physical, come
into existence?”
Chapter five begins by covering the first of these. He points out that
Issac Newton, Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, and Stephen Hawking
all concluded that the best answer was the actions of a divine Mind.
He takes a quick detour to dispel the charge that Einstein was a
pantheist, quoting a passage from the great scientist that begins “I'm
not an atheist, and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist.” He
continues quoting Einstein for several pages, driving the point home.
He then adds quotes from Max Planck, Erwin Schrödinger, Paul Dirac,
and Charles Darwin that indicate all those scientists agree with him.
Finally, he comes to Paul Davies and John Barrow. Both scientists
reject the assertion that the order or laws of the universe are
imposed by our minds. Davies also rejects the “common misconception”
that there is only one logically consistent universe, because it is
not logically necessary and he can imagine alternate consistent
universes. Barrow points out that Newton's Laws still work, despite
being superseded by Relativity, and so religious conceptions will also
retain partial truth in future. He rounds out the chapter by
dismissing a charge by Dawkins that God is necessarily complex, and
finishes with a flourish:
“Those scientists who point to the Mind of God do not merely advance a
series of arguments or a process of syllogistic reasoning. Rather,
they propound a vision of reality that emerges from the conceptual
heart of modern science and imposes itself on the rational mind. It is
a vision that I personally find compelling and irrefutable.”
HJ Hornbeck
Justin Wishart
Justin
> Subject: [FUC] CHAT: Antony Flew, Part 1
> From: hjhor...@shaw.ca
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