Antony Flew, Atheism, and Theism

Wednesday December 15, 2004

A lot of people have been writing about Antony Flew's apparent conversion from atheism to theism, but everyone is focusing far more on who Flew is rather than on why this change might be occurring. Being less concerned with "why" than "who" says something about a person.

Richard Carrier quotes from a private letter written by Antony Flew:

My one and only piece of relevant evidence [for an Aristotelian God] is the apparent impossibility of providing a naturalistic theory of the origin from DNA of the first reproducing species ... [In fact] the only reason which I have for beginning to think of believing in a First Cause god is the impossibility of providing a naturalistic account of the origin of the first reproducing organisms.

Flew's position, and one which has been repeated by many theists writing about this story, is that he has always been interested in following the evidence wherever it leads. What we find here, however, is that he isn't actually talking about evidence at all. This isn't a piece of evidence for "God," it's a statement that he lacks evidence for natural origins of reproducing life. Does the lack of evidence for natural origins for life logically lead us to deduce the existence of supernatural origins of life?

No. There might be some psychological or emotional force in making such a connection, but there is absolutely no logical connection or force whatsoever. This is what makes Flew's apparent "conversion" so puzzling. For a philosopher of his caliber to make such obvious errors is inexplicable. If we were to accept the "reasoning" he uses here, we would be justified in insisting that the absence of any natural explanation for his "conversion" qualifies as "evidence" for a supernatural one — like that he is possessed by a demon.

Sound silly? Well, it's just as silly as saying "I can't find any natural explanation for life, therefore Goddidit."

Julian Sanchez writes:

What's befuddling is why any of these considerations are supposed to provide any support whatever for the God hypothesis. To think that they do seems to rely on a kind of ignotum per ignotius: We have no satisfying account of complex phenomenon X, so we explain it in terms of, even more complex phenomenon Y, a mind capable of consciously producing X. Why is this supposed to be satisfying? Why, in the absence of a culture in which religion is pervasive, would anyone resort to this kind of explanation? Indeed, why would anyone count it as an explanation at all?

It seems that a lot of people have no idea what an "explanation" is in the first place, though if one person were to understand the concept I would expect it to be someone like Flew. As I describe elsewhere, a good explanation is something that provides us with new information — it's something from which we can learn.

What do we learn from saying that "God (undefined, unknown, operating via unknown mechanisms) did it"? Nothing at all. We have no more information about how "it" occurred and, even worse, are now presented with lots more things we are ignorant about: what is this god, how did it appear, what it wants, how it operates, how achieved "it," etc.

Kriston Kapps writes:

[T]he process by which universal preconditions leads to intelligence is no less insoluble with a Creator at hand. One eventually wants to come to terms with the mechanism by which the Creator Created, so there still exists a need for a scientific account of the process. Having arrived at that description, the need for a magical Creator will have been obviated, unless magic is a crucial law of the universe—which watchmaker theists reject. Problem A attenuates both the atheist and theist routes to explanation, but the latter introduces an even more intractable problem B.

Kapps is making a very interesting point here. Either the Creator Created via magic or through some intelligible, discoverable process. If the latter, then the need for postulating a Creator is weakened if not eliminated (and the place of a supernatural creator working outside of natural laws disappears). If the former, then some of the main premises of natural theology are undermined.

Postulating such a Creator is, then, completely outside the parameters of attempting a logical, rational, scientific, evidence-based description of our world — and that includes postulating a minimal Creator God like Flew may be doing. Belief in such a God is purely a faith-based move, not an evidence-based or a reality-based move. It's designed to provide comfort in the face of apparent ignorance.

Matthew Yglesias writes:

The entire apparent significance of Flew's change of heart rests on the fact that the "God" concept is, in contemporary society, deeply resonant of associations with Christian, Jewish, Islamic, etc. theology. But the stance Flew is advocating actually has nothing whatsoever in common with the world's great religions.

Yglesias is touching upon a very interesting point here that many may miss. Given that there is no logical connection whatsoever between the premise (I see no natural explanations for the origin of life) and the conclusion (Goddidit), what reason could there be for postulating "God" as the cause rather than something else (like the Tao)? Culture, quite simply — Antony Flew is part of a religious and philosophical culture in which the minimalist Creator God has a long and distinguished history as a pseudo-explanation in the face of ignorance.

This is also why people care. The fact that this God can't be found in the major religious traditions doesn’t matter — all that matters is that this God resembles, vaguely, the gods of Western religions.

Yglesias also writes:

[N]othing follows from believing that, in some mysterious way, a Higher Power created life as opposed to believing that the origins of life fit into the naturalistic scheme somehow but that how, exactly, it fits in is a bit mysterious. ... [I]ts upshot is, for all intents and purposes, the same as the upshot of atheism. If I decided that Flew was right, I wouldn't start behaving differently in any way, or even need to modify my beliefs about any other subject.

This, too, is an interesting fact that most have been missing. In part because "Goddidit" does not follow from the given premise, nothing else can follow from concluding "Goddidit." We can't justify any changes in beliefs, behavior, politics, ethics, or anything else from this conclusion. That's why it's intellectually and ethically vacuous. It's meaningless. It has no content, no structure, and no implications. We can't do anything with it, we can't use it as a basis for any scientific investigations, and we can't use it as a basis for any religion.

So, really, what's the point? Who cares and why?

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