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- There is a God: How the world's most notorious atheist changed his mind
- Antony Flew
This review is part of the Every Book Shii Reads project.
Contents |
Review
This is a short and pitiful book by an eighty-year-old philosopher who has a poor understanding of science. Many of his arguments are scientific and demonstrate his total lack of knowledge of evolutionary science and astrophysics. His other arguments date back to Augustine. I'm not sure why he wrote this book, except maybe to waste two hours of my time.
The New York Times suggests that Roy Abraham Varghese, the co-author of this book, actually played a major part in its authorship, which may explain its lack of rigorousness.
Chapter summaries and things to look out for
Preface
Recent trend of "new atheists" rightfully put in their place as philosophically shallow and contributing nothing new to a centuries-old discussion. They aim to disprove popular misconceptions about religion, not whether God exists or what it means if He does. A good, hard look at religion should let us rethink what a good religion should be.
Introduction
Flew tells us that he has moved from Marxism to economic liberalism, and from atheism to deism. Sounds like he's getting old.
Chapter 1
Flew's biography: the son of a Christian, never felt warm fuzzies and lost faith at 13. He witnessed C.S. Lewis losing a debate at the Socratic Club in Oxford.
Chapter 2
Flews describes how he got himself free of various silly forms of philosophical skepticism. His reasons for embracing atheism at 15 are typical: the problem of evil, and the failings of the "free will" defense against the problem of evil. He develops this into a more coherent analysis of religious claims by 1950. His main argument revolved around the need to qualify philosophical statements such as "The earth is round" or "God loves us" to bring them into harmony with everyday perception. The idea is that the former statement needs only a logical number of qualifiers, but the former is out of whack with reality entirely and needs too many. To me this argument is rather weak: all statements, factual or not, can be explained to someone with a different perception using qualifications. So, he got some obvious responses to this idea, including that people can believe illogical things and qualify them all they want, or that such statements are unfalsifiable.
Since he could not find any consistently accepted logical case for Christianity, Flew compiled his own case and then debunked it: the straw man in action. He finds the Christian God to be a somewhat elusive philosophical concept to prove or disprove based on observation, which is really not surprising at all.
Next he writes a book where he puts the burden of proof on theists. Unfortunately this was taken down by the again obvious point that his idea of rationality was not in tune with the 80% of all people who consider themselves both theists and rational. Belief in God can be compared to other things taken mostly on faith but not useful to dispute, such as belief in the material world, or belief in one's own memory.
Finally he describes how belief in free will makes it necessary to believe that minds exist.
Chapter 3
The argument from first cause as posed at a debate Flew participated in: "The first Cause must be infinite, necessary, eternal and one." None of which seems especially provable to me.
On page 75, Flew finally reveals the reason for his belief in God: DNA, that is to say, irreducible complexity. He then talks about monkeys and typewriters. Sigh. He then says that Richard Dawkins attacks free will, which is absurd, since Dawkins does not dispute that the mind exists.
Chapter 4
Flew compares the question of the existence of God to a person hearing another person literally talking to them on a telephone and wondering whether it is a real person or just random noises on a circuit board. I wonder if Flew hears voices in his head?
Flew's Deist God is given to have the following properties, after David Conway:
- immutability
- immateriality
- omnipotence
- omniscience
- oneness / indivisibility
- perfect goodness
- existence
Finally, Flew asserts that he is a perfectly reasonable person and has reached deism without any leaps of faith, a remarkable claim given the above detailed philosophical conclusions that God is very difficult to prove.
Chapter 5
Flew says that Nature has rational Laws. He then talks about Einstein and Planck for a while. Finally, we come back to the pondering of the title: "Who wrote the laws of nature?" Flew seems to have taken it on faith that laws are a "voice of rationality" which require a lawmaker. There is no proof of this in the text.
The atheist claim is laid out like so, from Paul Davies:
- Natural laws exist "reasonlessly." (This implies a bad judgement.)
- The universe is "ultimately absurd." (This too.)
The theist claim is laid out like so:
- Natural laws are simple. (Really? Even Planck's Constant?)
- Simple things are more rational than reasonless things. (This is not a logical argument since it only applies to observation of phenomena on Earth. There's a whole lot of randomness out in the cosmos.)
- Therefore, natural laws are rational. (Even if we accept the previous argument, this assumes that physical laws are determined in the same way as philosophical rules, laws of justice, and so forth, which is not true: the only rationality you'll find in physical laws was discovered by human minds in order to explain the physical world in a way which can be described in textbooks. If you asked a second-century Roman augur, he'd tell you the physical world is irrational, or subject to the influences of multiple very powerful beings, not material rules. He'd then ask you for a chicken gizzard so he could tell you how the weather would be tomorrow.)
- Rational things require a rational mind behind them.
- Therefore, an immutable, immaterial, omnipotent, omniscient, unified, perfectly good being exists. (?!)
This is tiresome.
Chapter 6
Watchmaker argument. Additionally, Voltaire's "glasses fit perfectly on the nose" argument (the Solar System fits us so well), which is transparently fallacious: natural selection adapted life to thrive on Earth, not the other way around.
Chapter 7
Irreducible complexity, concluding that the "only satisfactory explanation" for self-replication is an intelligent designer. We have not yet got around to explaining the immutable, immaterial, etc. bits.
Chapter 8
The first cause argument dressed up in philosophical language. If Flew had any brains he would devote his entire book to the first cause argument and expound on what kind of "cause" is necessary to create the universe, whether we need to worship it, etc.
Chapter 9
Flew proves to himself that there's nothing wrong with an invisible being acting on the material universe from the outside. He makes a lot of assumptions, such as God having to be someone acting outside of the barriers of time, and so forth. Why he has to do this is not clear. Also he is mainly just quoting people.
Chapter 10
Flew returns to his interstellar telephone parable. He admits he still doesn't have warm fuzzies but insists the possibility should always be open to us. We should listen to the voices inside our heads. Q.E.D.