Prof. Antony Flew
Posted on 12/13/2004 2:08:55 PM PST by snarks_when_bored
In a sensationalist campaign in the internet, it is alleged that Professor Antony Flew, British philosopher, reputed rationalist, atheist and Honorary Associate of Rationalist International, has left atheism and decided that a god might exist.
The controversy revolves around some remarks of Prof. Antony Flew that seems to allow different interpretations. Has Antony Flew ever asserted that "probably God exists"? Richard Carrier, editor in chief of the Secular Web quotes Antony Flew from a letter addressed to him in his own hand (dated 19 October 2004): "I do not think I will ever make that assertion, precisely because any assertion which I am prepared to make about God would not be about a God in that sense ... I think we need here a fundamental distinction between the God of Aristotle or Spinoza and the Gods of the Christian and the Islamic Revelations."
This is not the first time that Professor Antony Flew's atheist position is attacked. In reaction to an internet campaign in 2001 that tried to brand him a "convert" to religious belief, Professor Antony Flew made the following statement. In 2003 he answered yet another campaign in this direction with the same statement. It is still now his latest official position in this regard.
Richard C. Carrier, current Editor in Chief of the Secular Web, tells me that "the internet has now become awash with rumors" that I "have converted to Christianity, or am at least no longer an atheist." Perhaps because I was born too soon to be involved in the internet world I had heard nothing of this rumour. So Mr. Carrier asks me to explain myself in cyberspace. This, with the help of the Internet Infidels, I now attempt.
Those rumours speak false. I remain still what I have been now for over fifty years, a negative atheist. By this I mean that I construe the initial letter in the word 'atheist' in the way in which everyone construes the same initial letter in such words as 'atypical' and 'amoral'. For I still believe that it is impossible either to verify or to falsify - to show to be false - what David Hume in his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion happily described as "the religious hypothesis." The more I contemplate the eschatological teachings of Christianity and Islam the more I wish I could demonstrate their falsity.
I first argued the impossibility in 'Theology and Falsification', a short paper originally published in 1950 and since reprinted over forty times in different places, including translations into German, Italian, Spanish, Danish, Welsh, Finnish and Slovak. The most recent reprint was as part of 'A Golden Jubilee Celebration' in the October/November 2001 issue of the semi-popular British journal Philosophy Now, which the editors of that periodical have graciously allowed the Internet Infidels to publish online: see "Theology & Falsification."
I can suggest only one possible source of the rumours. Several weeks ago I submitted to the Editor of Philo (The Journal of the Society of Humanist Philosophers) a short paper making two points which might well disturb atheists of the more positive kind. The point more relevant here was that it can be entirely rational for believers and negative atheists to respond in quite different ways to the same scientific developments.
We negative atheists are bound to see the Big Bang cosmology as requiring a physical explanation; and that one which, in the nature of the case, may nevertheless be forever inaccessible to human beings. But believers may, equally reasonably, welcome the Big Bang cosmology as tending to confirm their prior belief that "in the beginning" the Universe was created by God.
Again, negative atheists meeting the argument that the fundamental constants of physics would seem to have been 'fine tuned' to make the emergence of mankind possible will first object to the application of either the frequency or the propensity theory of probability 'outside' the Universe, and then go on to ask why omnipotence should have been satisfied to produce a Universe in which the origin and rise of the human race was merely possible rather than absolutely inevitable. But believers are equally bound and, on their opposite assumptions, equally justified in seeing the Fine Tuning Argument as providing impressive confirmation of a fundamental belief shared by all the three great systems of revealed theistic religion - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. For all three are agreed that we human beings are members of a special kind of creatures, made in the image of God and for a purpose intended by God.
In short, I recognize that developments in physics coming on the last twenty or thirty years can reasonably be seen as in some degree confirmatory of a previously faith-based belief in god, even though they still provide no sufficient reason for unbelievers to change their minds. They certainly have not persuaded me.
This is not Flew's current response! This post is from 2001. Flew now repudiates this.
See the following posts on this thread:
9, 10, 13, 16, 19, 23, 26, 30, 35, 37, 38, 40, 41
Interesting argument. Interesting, that is, for someone who doesn't care about what is true.
Prop(1): 'it is the case that X believes that God exists'
Prop(2): 'it is not the case that X believes that God exists'
Prop(3): 'it is the case that X believes that God does not exist'
Prop(4): 'it is not the case that X believes that God does not exist'
Note, first, that if X is completely unacquainted with the concept of 'God', then Prop(2) and Prop(4) are both (vacuously) true, but Prop(1) and Prop(3) are both false. So, in particular, Prop(4) might well be true while Prop(1) is false, that is, it could be true to say that X does not believe that God does not exist, while at the same time it could be false to say that X believes that God exists (because, by hypothesis, X lacks acquaintance with the notion of 'God' entirely). Clearly, not believing that God does not exist is not in general equivalent to believing that God exists.
But it would appear that the following statements are true:
Finally, it seems to me that the distinction between a 'positive atheist' and a 'negative atheist' may be captured in the following way:
Suppose Prop(3) is true of X (that is, suppose that it is the case that X believes that God does not exist). Then:
(1) X is a 'positive atheist' if X believes that it's not possible that s(he) could be mistaken in believing that God does not exist, and therefore all attempts to argue otherwise are wrong-headed, and all attempts to educate individuals and structure society in a way that supposes that God exists are mis-guided and ought to be resisted in every way.
(2) X is a 'negative atheist' if X believes that it's possible that (s)he could be mistaken in believing that God does not exist, and therefore tolerance is the order of the day with respect to those who believe that God exists, and, as long as religious beliefs don't have pernicious and damaging effects on members of society or the society as a whole, the holders of such beliefs should be completely free to put them into practice in the manner they freely choose.
There's more analysis to be done, but I'll leave the rest for the entertainment of readers. But be careful: verbs of propositional attitude (such as 'believes') are a bit tricky to deal with.
Your descriptions of positive and negative atheist are unnecessarily elaborate, but otherwise it's a nice exposition.
Along the same lines, "agnostic" = "without knowledge" (of a god). Although a word's meaning can change with usage, its meaning is often best taken from the person who coined the term. Here's a nice explaination from AHED:
The term agnostic was fittingly coined by the 19th-century British scientist Thomas H. Huxley, who believed that only material phenomena were objects of exact knowledge. He made up the word from the prefix a-, meaning “without, not,” as in amoral, and the noun Gnostic. Gnostic is related to the Greek word gnosis, “knowledge,” which was used by early Christian writers to mean “higher, esoteric knowledge of spiritual things”; hence, Gnostic referred to those with such knowledge. In coining the term agnostic, Huxley was considering as “Gnostics” a group of his fellow intellectuals —“ists,” as he called them —who had eagerly embraced various doctrines or theories that explained the world to their satisfaction. Because he was a “man without a rag of a label to cover himself with,” Huxley coined the term agnostic for himself, its first published use being in 1870.So, agnosticism is most properly assigned to those who merely admit having no “higher, esoteric knowledge of spiritual things”. It's a weak statement (all atheists are agnostics, but not vica versa), but differs from atheism only for people who can believe in things of which they have no knowledge. Thus the distinction between atheism and agnosticism is dubious.
The distinction is really only useful when communicating with theists. One term elicits more negative emotions from theists than the other term.
Your descriptions of positive and negative atheist are unnecessarily elaborate...
Agreed. I was resisting the tendency to continue the branching process by distinguishing between 'positive militant atheists' and 'positive non-militant atheists', etc. So I simplified and extremized the portraits just a bit.
Thoughtful analysis. I was restricting my characterizations to the context of the four propositions Prop(1), ..., Prop(4). I didn't look back at Flew's terminology, and was really just engaging in a sort of logical/terminological exercise.
Actually, agnostics are correct and honest about their answer....They don't know with a certainty whether or not a god or gods exist. Neither do theists or atheists, who, instead of knowledge, may at best have extremely strong belief about the existence or non-existence of supernatural entities.
But it's not explanatory. Matter/energy cannot create itself - we can find no innate property in matter/energy that enables it to create more of itself.
Therefore, it is simplest and most explanatory to postulate a force/entity/substance that can generate itself and matter/energy.
I hadn't thought of that. If he's worm chow, he won't care if he's right.
Therefore, it is simplest and most explanatory to postulate a force/entity/substance that can generate itself and matter/energy."
I don't think anyone in the scientific community is claiming that matter/energy has created itself. What they are claiming is that it was radically transformed by the big bang, but the assumption is that the matter/energy was already there.
I'm not saying they are.
What they are claiming is that it was radically transformed by the big bang, but the assumption is that the matter/energy was already there.
Precisely. And "dude, it was just there all along" isn't an explanation. The simplest explanation is that it is there because some force/entity capable of creating stuff ex nihilo exists and created it.
Jeez, he can't even make up his mind if he is an atheist or not.
I don't know. That question is the ultimate locus of inquiry - an entity that apparently has the power, unlike matter/energy, to create itself.
The fact that anything at all exists proves it's there - how it's there is the big question.
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