Flew, leading atheist, thinks there might be a god afterall

Got email from a couple of people about the news that Anthony Flew, a renown atheist is reconsidering his views. Excerpt:

The first hint of Flew’s turn was a letter in the August-September issue of Britain’s Philosophy Now magazine. “It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism,” he wrote.

The letter commended arguments in Schroeder’s “The Hidden Face of God” and “The Wonder of the World” by Varghese, an Eastern Rite Catholic layman.

This week, Flew finished writing the first formal account of his new outlook for the introduction to a new edition of his “God and Philosophy,” scheduled for release next year by Prometheus Books.

Prometheus specializes in skeptical thought, but if his belief upsets people, well, “that’s too bad,” Flew said. “My whole life has been guided by the principle of Plato’s Socrates: Follow the evidence, wherever it leads.”

It will be interesting to see how the atheistic community reacts to Flew's re-evaluation. The journey to belief in god is not an irrational process as some atheists would claim. There are plenty of smart people who believe in god despite the common notion that religion is the opiate of the masses and anti-intellectual.

As I see it, there are four philosophical positions one can take on god: (1) atheism = there is no god (2) agnosticism = can't know if there is or isn't god (3) deism = god exists but doesn't do anything except kick start the universe (4) theism = god exists and is active.

We can have these four positions intellectually but ethically, we only have two views since positions 1-3 collapse into a view that there is no moral authority beyond self and society while position 4 leads to ethical monotheism where god cares about how we live our lives.

I'm not sure why people like to be atheists. I suppose in some cases an individual may have experienced a terrible event personally or to someone they love and they can't believe in god anymore. Some will cite science and evolution as proof that god is not necessary. Thus, in one case, it is an intellectual-emotional issue and in the latter case, an intellectual one.

Indeed, the problem of evil is probably the toughest problem for theism. The traditional formulation is (1) if god is good (2) if god is powerful (3) if evil exists then all three can't be true. Theoretically, one can say evil is an illusion but I don't know if one can really live out in that belief. If anything, the reality of evil is one of the few "certainties" around if you ask me. With evil accepted then the conclusion is that god isn't good or very powerful or both and such an entity can't be called god.

The traditional response to the problem of evil is the Free Will Defense where evil is a function of human free will which god is unwilling to tamper with. This leads to the following construction: (1) god is good (2) god is powerful (3) god grants humanity free will thus evil can co-exist with a god.

Atheists counter by attacking the existance of free will. The recent usage ideas from evolutionary psychology and neurochemistry are brought to bear in an attempt to eliminate free will.

The other attack is to cite that some evil is non-volitional like natural calamities.

The theist is forced to give ground by saying that evil not only had consequences on the "soul" of humans but also the physical world leading to death and destruction by accidents and other forces of nature or to assign disasters to non-human evil entities. Neither is entirely satisfactory to me.

Science and evolution is cited by some atheists as the reason for their atheism. However, I suspect that that path to atheism is not as well traveled as the problem of evil. And despite the claim of atheists, there are many thinking people, like Flew, who concede that a naturalistic mechanism might not be enough to account for life and that science is not the end all and be all of knowledge.

Agnosticism is perhaps more intellectually honest than atheism as it acknowledges the finitude of human reason. In the end, one may claim to not know about god one way or another but one lives life as if there is one or isn't. An agnostic is often a functional atheist. I suppose an agnostic could take up Pascal's Wager and say: well, I don't know if there is a god but I might as well live like there is one just in case there actually is!

Deism, according to one of my friends, is an unstable position. My friend says this because the deist acknowledges that god acted at least once in our world: bringing the universe into existence. The deist god may have also had a role in bringing life into existence on the earth. Thus, if god can act in these ways, what is to prevent god from acting again?

The question of the intervention of god into human affairs is a tricky one because it gets into the nature of god and the nature of god's relationship to humanity. If god is some cosmic engineer then god could conceivably make the universe and then let it run on its own without intervention after flipping the on switch.

However, engineers are always tinkering with their machines.

Or one could make the metaphor to god the artist in which case there is tinkering with the art work as it is being produced.

These metaphors are interesting but do have their limits if you sit and think about them.

I am a theist. I believe god exists and can occasionally act in human history. If one believes in the full meaning of Christmas then one has to be a theist because Christmas is about God entering history in Jesus.

I freely acknowledge that theism is not without intellectual and emotional difficulities.

But that is true of the other positions as well.

However, I believe the worldview of Christian theism seems to best fit the reality we experience in the day-to-day. At a personal level, Christian theism provides hope in life. And finally, I think Christian theism provides an ethical framework and a theological basis for the existence of morality.