Book review: There Is a God
On Sunday I finished reading There Is a God - How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind by Antony Flew. Flew was a highly regarded philosopher of religion and taught in many academies in England and North America. He was one of very few philosophers in the past century that could intelligently make a case for atheism and produced works that are considered classic. After over half his life as an atheist, on December 9, 2004 an Associated Press article ran the headline that Flew was now no longer an atheist but a deist (believes that God exists, that He is Creator of the universe; but he does not interfere in the affairs of man, does not perform miracles, etc.). What made him change his mind after all these years? There Is a God chronicles his life’s journey as an atheist and the various evidences that point to a Divine Being.
After the Preface and Introduction, Flew begins mentioning his childhood. His father was a Methodist minister and as the young Flew grew older; he had no connection to God and frankly, just didn’t care much for his Christian faith. There was a benefit to his father’s religious influence and intelligence that Flew would carry into his adult life: to think critically and examine evidence in all important matters. Of course while his father’s faith would be affirmed, that same kind of thinking is what drove Flew away from his faith. During his childhood summers, his father would take him and his mother to Germany and France for Methodist conferences. Before World War II, he would observe the growing anti-Semitism and totalitarianism in Germany and the rise of Nazi soldiers marching the streets. He couldn’t measure how much of an impact it had on him but it certainly hurt his belief that there exists an all-loving God. When he reached 15 years old, he also rejected the belief of a God who was the Creator of the universe. He never talked to his father about his unbelief or challenged him on his beliefs for the sake of keeping the peace. He would hide his atheism and his mortalist position (a person who doesn’t believe in an afterlife) until his parents found out in January 1946 at near the age of 23. He attended Oxford and joined the Royal Air Force while World War II was in progress. He began teaching Philosophy at Christ Church, Oxford and was a graduate student of Gilbert Ryle. Both of them were colleagues and Ryle had a pretty big impact on the up-and-comer Flew. The Socratic Club was a meeting of Oxford’s atheists and Christians engaging into interesting debates and its first president from 1942 to 1954 was famous Christian author and apologist C.S. Lewis. Lewis followed Socrates’ ideal to “follow the argument wherever it leads” which Flew took to heart. There was a famous debate in February 1948 between Lewis and Elizabeth Anscombe on naturalism. Looking back at Lewis after his conversion to deism half a century later, Flew began to appreciate Lewis’ writings and arguments (though he always respected him). Flew presented his first and only paper to the Socratic Club called “Theology and Falsification”, his first major atheistic work in the summer 1950. It elected responses from philosophers through the years and Flew summarizes what some of them wrote.
During his years at Oxford he met and fell in love with Annis Donnison. They were married June 28, 1952, and had two daughters together. He began teaching at different universities including six years at the University of Toronto and three years at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He began racking up an impressive list of books and papers that he wrote during his career. His next major work was God and Philosophy in 1966 (and reissued again in 1984 and once more in 2005) which was more of an argument against Christian theism. A decade later he published The Presumption of Atheism (God, Freedom, and Immortality in the US). Because of all the books he was publishing and his critics responding to them, Flew engaged in public debates on various philosophical and religious topics. His two most largest attended debates was in 1976 with Thomas Warren in Denton, Texas of about 5000-7000 people and the 1998 debate with William Lane Craig (one of my favourite Christian philosophers and debaters) in Madison, Wisconsin with about 4000 people. The debate with Craig also marked the 50th Anniversary of the BBC debate on the existence of God between Bertrand Russell and Frederick Copleston. One person he debated and eventually became friends with was Christian philosopher Gary Habermas of Lynchburg College in Virginia (an expert in studies on the Resurrection of Jesus) in which there have been two published books on their debates.
Besides public debates, Flew had discussions and interactions with others put into writing. One major figure is evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins though Flew has been critical of his popular work The Selfish Gene. Dawkins would say that, “the argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes.” Flew responds:
If any of this were true, it would be no use to go on, as Dawkins does, to preach: “Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.” No eloquence can move programmed robots. But in fact none of it is true - or even faintly sensible. Genes, as we have seen, do not and cannot necessitate our conduct. Nor are they capable of the calculation and understanding required to plot a course of either ruthless selfishness or sacrificial compassion. (p.80)
We get to the second part of the book which beings to look at the arguments that made Flew shift from atheism to a belief in God. Before he begins, he implores the reader to understand why he is qualified to talk about scientific issues:
You might ask how I, a philosopher, could speak to issues treated by scientists. The best way to answer this is with another question. Are we engaging in science or philosophy here? When you study the interaction of two physical bodies, for instance, two subatomic particles, you are engaged in science. When you ask how it is that those subatomic particles - or anything physical - could exist and why, you are engaged in philosophy. When you draw philosophical conclusions from scientific data, then you are thinking as a philosopher. (p.89)
On the issue of nature, Flew looks into the beliefs of Albert Einstein and in the past, believed that Einstein was an atheist. Richard Dawkins affirms Flew’s statement in The God Delusion but ignores a statement by Einstein denying he was an atheist or a pantheist. While Einstein didn’t believe in a personal God, he believed that the study of nature will ultimately lead to religion. Flew then provides numerous quotes in support of Einstein’s belief in some deity (p.101-103). In the next chapter, he looks at the universe. He rejects both the argument of the possibility of a multiverse and these other universes having their own cosmological laws to sustain itself from another universe that birthed it:
Three things might be said concerning the arguments about fine tuning. First, it is a hard fact that we live in a universe with certain laws and constants, and life would not have been possible if some of these laws and constants had been different. Second, the fact that the existing laws and constants allow the survival of life does not answer the question of the origin of life. This is a very different question, as I will try to show; these conditions are necessary for life to arise, but not sufficient. Third, the fact that it is logically possible that there are multiple universes with their own laws of nature does not show that such universes do exist. There is currently no evidence in support of a multiverse. It remains a speculative idea. (p.119)
The following chapter then looks into the origin of life debate and the complexity of DNA. Chapter eight then looks at the “did something come from nothing?” argument. Chapter nine looks at the arguments of the possibility of God acting in time and space as an immaterial being. The final chapter sums up some his reasons for believing in some God out there:
Science qua science cannot furnish an argument for God’s existence. But the three items of evidence we have considered in this volume - the laws of nature, life with its teleological organization, and the existence of the universe - can only be explained in the light of an Intelligence that explains both its own existence and that of the world. Such a discovery of the Divine does not come through experiments and equations, but through an understanding of the structures they unveil and map… I must say again that the journey to my discovery of the Divine has thus far been a pilgrimage of reason. I have followed the argument where it has led me. And it is has led me to accept the existence of a self-existent, immutable, immaterial, omnipotent Being. Certainly, the existence of evil and suffering must be faced. However, philosophically speaking, that is a separate issue from the question of God’s existence. From the existence of nature, we arrive at the ground of its existence. Nature may have its imperfections, but this says nothing as to whether it had an ultimate Source. Thus, the existence of God does not depend on the existence of warranted or unwarranted evil. (p.155-156)
There are two appendices included at the back of the book. Appendix A is by Roy Abraham Varghese called The “New Atheism”: A Critical Appraisal of Dawkins, Dennett, Wolpert, Harris, and Stenger. Appendix B is by Bishop of Durham and Oxford New Testament scholar, N.T. Wright called The Self-Revelation of God in Human History: A Dialogue on Jesus with N.T. Wright. Varghese’s shows that there are five phenomena in our immediate experience that can only be explained by the existence of God: rationality, life, consciousness, thought, and the self. Wright expertly presents his case for Flew on the historical Jesus, the genesis of the Christian faith arising from Second Temple Judaism, the mutations of Jewish beliefs and opinions within the early Christian movement, the meaning of “resurrection” and its uniqueness to Christianity, “resurrection” not holding the same meaning in Judaism and the pagan world, and the likelihood of the historicity of the resurrection narratives in the Gospels. At the end of it, Flew loved Wright’s response and fresh approach to an often debated topic.
Ever since Flew’s defection from atheism and the publication of There Is a God, criticism toward Flew from the atheist community was swift. It was to be expected and he has responded to some of his critics. To see a few interview videos of Flew from Christian apologist Lee Strobel, go here.
Book review score: 3.5/5
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This would be Antony Flew’s final book in his long philosophical career. Flew died April 8, 2010 in Reading, England. He was 87.
Next book: What Have They Done With Jesus? (Author: Ben Witherington III)