Antony Flew's There is
a God - Refuted
Former Atheist Antony Flew in There is a God - Refuted, How the World's Most
Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, decided that a deistic God existed. Despite
the fact that this God is far from a real God and has a few superficial
resemblances to the Christian God, the Christian world used Flew's conversion as
an excuse for declaring that their belief in God is plausible. Flew's God does
not have the main trait the Christian one has - a capacity to enter into a
relationship with his creatures.
Antony Flew
Antony Flew, who had been Professor of Philosophy at the
University of Keele, was the author of the famous essay Theology and
Falsification in 1950. He published over thirty books. The most famous of his
books were God and Philosophy and The Presumption of Atheism in which he
propounded his atheism. Sadly he seems to want to undo his life's work for
atheism and philosophy by having produced another very famous book called There
is a God published by HarperOne, New York, 2007.
Flew commits himself to the words of wisdom from Socrates: "We must follow the
argument wherever it leads" (page 22). Evidently the religions of the world are
not doing that very well! Why else is every religion made up of disagreeing
factions and why does one religion contradict the others in very serious
matters? Why is Jesus a fraud according to Judaism and the God of truth
according to Christendom? The religions should be regarded with suspicion.
The preface (page xxi) dwells on atheist Bertrand Russell's sense of loneliness
and accepts the thought that this was caused by his atheism. Believers
frequently try to make it seem that atheism necessarily or usually has to be a
misery. They imply we do others harm if we help them become atheists. What about
happy atheists? What about happy believers who don't care if there is a God or
not?
God and cause and effect
Page 57 repudiates the view of Hume that you don't experience cause and effect
and can't prove them.
Hume didn't believe in God. But if you believe in God you
believe God did not create the universe in the past and stop. He has been
creating it every moment since. If he stopped, the universe would vanish and
there would be nothing. This really means that the ball does not fall to the
ground. God creates anew every moment. He creates afresh. So he creates afresh
countless times until the ball ends up on the ground. It didn't fall to the
ground at all. God made it seem to. It is the same thing as with the silent
screen movies. Film tape could be full of separate pictures of a ball being
dropped from a hand and falling to the ground. The tape goes through a projector
to make it seem that the ball is moving. It actually is not. Each moment of time
is like a separate picture and the next moment like the next picture and so on.
The God belief obliterates the idea of cause and effect that we need to function
in the world.
Free will
Flew admits on page 60, that the idea that our choices are not choices but
caused by physical forces and the idea that that they are choices so we could do
different from what we do are compatible is wrong. He rejects compatiblism which
became popular as a way of explaining how we can have free will despite being
subject to deterministic forces.
On page 60 he distinguishes between two different kinds of causes that may have
to do with what we decide to do. One is physical cause and it forces us to do
things so we are not free. It necessitates. He says if he gives me good news, I
have the choice of saying whoopee or not. He said I am free to do one or the
other. He argues that that if I say he is the cause of my saying whoopee though
it is my choice that I'm mistaken for this cause does not necessitate but merely
inclines.
The difference between necessitated and inclined is this.
If the first you feel forced. In the second you do not. But feelings
are no good for telling us if we have free will. You can take alcohol and
never feel as free.
He argues that physical causes such as insanity force us to do things. They are
irresistible forces. But he says we have desires and wants and can resist them
so they prove we have free will (page 62). This proves nothing. We might be
sorely tempted to do wrong and the reason we resist is because we are taken over
by a stronger desire than the temptation. And what about the desires that are
there that we are not aware of?
More God nonsense
He mentions Plantinga who said that people do not have
any obligation to give reasons for believing in God just as they don't have to
have reasons for believing in the world (page 70). This is nonsense for we need
to make assumptions about the world but not about God. It is people making
assumptions about God that causes all the religious trouble in the world.
Our living and acting in the word is not verbally giving reasons but it is
giving reasons!
Page 86 says that atheists who say that we should not ask for an explanation of
how it is that the world exists, it is here and that is all are being dogmatic
atheists and being narrow and bigoted. He says that atheists who say they can't
accept God as maker of life and prefer to believe the impossible which is that
life appeared by chance from matter are as bad.
But if it can't be explained then it can't be explained. The God belief explains
nothing. We say that God is non-physical and has no parts but we have no way of
testing or ensuring that this idea makes sense. Thinking your way to a God like
that does not mean you are right.
Believers say that life can't come from matter. But how
do they know if spirit can live? The believers are the ones who are arrogant. If
atheists are arrogant they can take pride in the fact that they are less
arrogant than the believers.
Page 89 says that when you examine how matter affects other parts of matter that
is science but if you ask how the matter came to be that is philosophy. But
science may be into theories and verifying them by experiments but it is a form
of philosophy and seeking for wisdom and knowledge. Philosophy is replete with
theories and experiments too. Philosophy actually has no answer at all for how
matter came to be. Nobody can explain how to make matter from nothing. To say
God made matter from nothing is to say that 0 can be turned into 1. This either
makes no sense or is beyond all comprehension. If we want to claim to be sane
then it makes no sense.
Page 92 makes the terrible error of assuming that the God of the Bible matches
the best God that philosophy can come up with a spiritual god meaning a God
without parts and components who is infinite and all-knowing and so on. The God
of Christendom is a mongrel. The characteristics of the God of Aristotle and
Plato were grafted on to the Bible God. The Bible never says its God is
immaterial or without parts. The Bible uses the same word for breath as for
spirit indicating that spirit could be a form of undetectable matter. It never
uses spirit in the sense that it means today.
Page 99 quotes Einstein saying he was not an atheist and that he thought he was
not a pantheist. Einstein then said he thought he was not a pantheist meaning he
could have been one but was not sure. A pantheist is pretty close to an atheist
for they consider God and nature to be the same. "I claim credit for
nothing. Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by
forces over which we have no control" - Einstein, Saturday Evening Post 1929.
Like Schopenhauer, Einstein would have made this words his own, "We can do what
we wish but wish what we must." That is as far from any God as you can
get. The miracle of free will is out and a God that allows such pain and
suffering as if there is a free will that is not there at all is not a God. I
wonder how Flew could be so stupid here.
God the designer?
Page 111 responds to Dawkins' argument against God as
designer. Dawkins said that if you look at the complicated universe and say the
explanation for it is God, the problem is that you are trying to solve the
difficulty of how the universe came to be by inventing another difficulty, a
complicated God.
Flew replies that the idea of a simple God was so easy that the religions of
Judaism and Islam and Christianity understood it. Simple means a God who is
spirit and who has no parts. We see atoms and know what atoms can do. But we do
not understand an atom as an atom. We only understand that if we do certain
things with atoms some things will happen. But we don't understand the atoms
themselves or how and why they exist. If we cannot understand something we can
see and something of which we are made how can we understand spirit? Religion
may say spirit is simple but how does it know? Is God simple? He could be
intelligent but not a conscious being. Our intelligence still exists when we are
unconscious. We don't use it then that is all. But it still exists. If you say
God is intelligent and conscious or alive that does not sound like simplicity!
If God is simple then God does not need to be conscious or alive. In fact if he
does and is conscious and/or alive then he is not simple. He is not God. But if
he is not alive is it proper to describe him as God? Supreme intelligence would
be better.
If we describe him as supreme intelligence and not as God, some believers will
be saying we have found God but we have just understood him slightly and need to
make progress. This is dishonest of them for we could be right for that is all
the being is. They are being arrogant and patronising and condescending implying
that anybody that knows what they are doing will agree with their ideas. If God
is not God but supreme intelligence then religion has an idol that it calls God.
They are in the same league as the person who thinks a mobile phone is a person
because he hears a voice coming out of it.
Page 114 says the universe according to science carries strong evidence to the
effect that it was prepared for us. Suppose we admit it looks that way. Is it
decent and right to ignore the pain of a child suffering in agony as a proof
that nothing out there cares about us and then to use science to say that
something does care? It is like saying that a doctor who saved every life on
earth but who killed one baby was a good man when he killed the baby for the
scientific evidence for his goodness is nearly proven so he must have a reason
we don't know of or can only guess at that justifies what he did. You belittle
the baby if you say that. Atheism is simpler in the sense that you don't have to
turn intellectual somersaults and justify God and come to great difficulty. When
people make such a big effort to believe in God despite suffering or because of
it and when it torments them if they reluctantly hate God for letting something
bad happen to their baby there is only one conclusion that can be taken. They
know it is evil but they condone it. The honour of God is the dishonour of
humanity.
It is clergy, preachers, Bibles, theologians and some philosophers who say God
has the right to let a baby rot in agony to death. This is people condoning evil
they see. Even if God could and does have that right, do people have the right
to make assumptions like that? Is it not worse if God can't have that right?
Many God-botherers say you should not judge another person but they are judging
that God was right to hurt the baby or at least stand by and let the baby
suffer. It is certainly disrespectful to say the least when the religious say
God was right for it is them saying it not him. Divine authority saying the evil
was justified is one thing but human authority saying it is disgraceful - who do
they think they are? Humans are not infallible. They say it by their own
authority about God. Only God should be saying it. When human authority speaks
it speaks primarily not because something is right but because the authority
wants it to be right. They want to condone. This is especially bad when they are
not the baby!
Page 182 says there are two kinds of consciousness. Consciousness. Consciousness
and thinking.
Thinking is processing information you are aware of. It is being conscious of
information and then the next moment of the same information or new information.
If you look around the room you are in "without thinking" you will see that you
are still processing as in absorbing information. So you are always thinking!
When you look around "without thinking" all you have done is be more passive
but you are still thinking.
Now we think for we live in time and have to work out our
abc's. But God is outside time and is living in something like a present
moment with no past or future so God cannot really be conscious as in thinker.
If God thinks then God is not God and has to work things out like ourselves.
CONCLUSION
Flew is entitled to become a Deist if he thinks Deism is true. But the main
points in his book are only superficially convincing. Atheism is the strongest
position and the fairest. My exposure of his delusions and errors will be
dismissed as many as atheistic fundamentalism - but it is not dogmatism to be
right about him being wrong and to give clear reasons to show that so that
people can think for themselves! It is not dogmatism so it is not
fundamentalism.
GOD, THE FAILED HYPOTHESIS, HOW SCIENCE SHOWS THAT GOD DOES NOT EXIST, Victor J
Stenger, Prometheus Books, New York, 2008
The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, Edited by Michael Martin, Cambridge
University Press, New York, 2007
THE LANGUAGE OF BELIEF, A SCIENTIST PRESENTS EVIDENCE FOR BELIEF, Francis S
Collins, Free Press, New York ,2006
