From one point of view, Professor Antony Flew’s “conversion” to theism is an unimpressive event. The god in whom he now believes is strictly Aristotle’s Primum Mobile, immensely distant from the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. In an interview that will appear in the Winter 2005 issue of Philosophia Christi, he agrees that his new stance can accurately be labeled “deism”, meaning that he holds to a philosophy that played a key role in undermining Christian belief during the Enlightenment. Indeed, it is not obvious that a universe created by the Primum Mobile is morally distinguishable from the congeries of random phenomena envisioned by robust atheists like Richard Dawkins. As Professor Flew says in response to a question about the relationship between the Primum Mobile and the reality of evil,
Well, absent revelation, why should we perceive anything as objectively evil? The problem of evil is a problem only for Christians. For Muslims everything which human beings perceive as evil, just as much as everything we perceive as good, has to be obediently accepted as produced by the will of Allah.
That is also presumably the deist’s opinion. The atheist differs only in denying that there is any will behind the palpable evils of the cosmos. Either the atheist or the deist may rebel against those evils. Their reasons for doing so and their likelihood of success (whatever that word may mean in this context) are exactly the same.
Nonetheless, we must remember that every road out of Jerusalem is a road into Jerusalem. The acknowledgment that the universe is attributable to a rational nous is an immense step forward (as Christians define “forward”) for one who previously saw only the mindless interactions of particles and forces. Many traditional apologists, St. Thomas Aquinas among them, tacitly assumed that, once that much had been accepted, the rest of Christian doctrine followed naturally. While the experience of those for whom deism was a way station on the opposite path shows that this expectation was too optimistic, deists, particularly those who discern the flaws of atheism, have a defense against the psychological inertia of modern unbelief and thus are less barricaded than most moderns against the teachings of Christ. To that extent, “conversions” of the Flew variety are significant.
The Philosophia Christi interview does not deal at length with the theistic arguments that Professor Flew finds decisive. Essentially, he has been convinced by a familiar and often naively stated argument: that a universe containing rational consciousness is more believably characterized as a creation than as an accident. Either position is in many respects incomprehensible. We cannot imagine what a Creator is like, but neither can we imagine matter and energy either popping into existence or existing from eternity (which are two different formulations of the same unimaginable). Moreover, once we take matter and energy as a given, the structure within which they interact is so intricate that it is, again, more believable as design than as chance.
We are bereft of data to prove definitively that what appears plausible about the origin and pattern of the cosmos is actual reality. In the absence of proof, one can try to ignore the question, but, if it is faced squarely, there can be no rational justification for preferring the less plausible to the more plausible opinion. The atheistic position is more a leap of faith than the theistic one. Those who accept it either overlook its difficulties or count on future discoveries for their resolution, without having any good reason to think that the advance of knowledge will not aggravate them instead.
The faith of atheism has a shibboleth with which to counter doubts raised by theistic arguments from design: “the God of the gaps”. Supposedly, believers in God have in the past argued that He must exist because science is unable to explain this phenomenon or that. Later the mystery is solved, so theists move on to the next “gap”. Arguments like Professor Flew’s are, then, just the latest instance of an old, discredited tactical ruse.
The ruse, however, is the atheist’s. Theistic philosophers, as distinguished from unphilosophical believers straining to find an argument, never contended that God must exist because science could not account for wind or rain or the solar system. The central tenet of the argument from design has always been the incomprehensibility of an uncreated universe, and that riddle science is no closer to unraveling today than it was when St. Thomas formulated his “Five Proofs”. There is not a series of small, explicable gaps, but just one vast one, which has to be filled by either God or nothing.
Professor Flew has filled it with God, but not, he emphasizes, with a God Who can reveal Himself supernaturally or have any personal relationship with human beings. He does not find the case for Christian theism persuasive, though he evinces no hostility toward Christianity, which he sees as a force for good rather than a haven of bigoted obscurantism.
But it’s interesting to note that [David Hume] was perfectly willing to accept one of the conditions of his appointment, if he had been appointed, to a chair of philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. That condition was, roughly speaking, to provide some sort of support and encouragement for people performing prayers and executing other acts of worship. I believe that Hume thought that the institution of religious belief could be, and in his day and place was, socially beneficial.
I, too, having been brought up as a Methodist [his father and grandfather were eminent Methodist clergymen; the Rev. Robert Newton Flew is in the DNB], have always been aware of this possible and in many times and places actual benefit of objective religious instruction. It is now several decades since I first tried to draw attention to the danger of relying on a modest amount of compulsory religious instruction in schools to meet the need for moral education, especially in a period of relentlessly declining religious belief. But all such warnings by individuals were, of course, ignored. So we now have in the UK a situation in which any mandatory requirements to instruct pupils in state funded schools in the teachings of the established or any other religion are widely ignored.
He does not, let me note, advocate insincere religious instruction as a method of imparting moral values. “In the UK any effective program of moral education has to be secular because unbelief is now very widespread.” He seems to regret, though, that Constitutional interpretation has also driven schools to secularism in the predominantly believing United States.
This concern for morality is, it seems to me, a flaw in Professor Flew’s principal objection to Christianity: that it does not have an adequate answer t the problem of evil. Despite what one might infer from the quotation above (“why should we perceive anything as objectively evil?”), he does not regard morality as arbitrary. That is shown by his reason for rejecting one of the arguments for the existence of God that
It seems to me that for a strong moral argument, you’ve got to have God as the justification of morality. To do this makes doing the morally good a purely prudential matter rather than, as the moral philosophers of my youth used to call it, a good in itself. (Compare the classic discussion in Plato’s Euthyphro.)
A morality “good in itself” must be accessible to all rational intellects, including the Rational Intellect that created the universe. Yet Professor Flew regards the deistic God as indifferent to evil, indeed as “producing a lot of it”.
Now, I cannot prove that a rational Primum Mobile would refrain from intentionally producing evil, but why would It not do only what It recognized as good? The concept of a First Cause susceptible to temptation and sin is fantastical, so the answer must be that evil is unavoidable in a universe whose matter and energy follow regular laws and that includes beings with free will. Yet that theodicy is no less satisfactory for the Christian than the deistic God. The difference is that, according to the Christian account, God has acted to remedy what He could not forestall.
Christmas is the celebration of what Christians believe was the advent of that remedy, the day when God entered into His greatest transaction with His creatures and took on our humanity that we might be transformed by His divinity. Starting from theistic premises, that Christian story of sin and redemption, while surprising in many respects and open to varying interpretation in its details, is not outlandish. The distance from Professor Flew’s remote deity to the God Who so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son is shorter than from atheism to deism. Is creating all things visible and invisible more or less incredible than the Atonement?
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