Any thoughts on Anthony Flew?

[rug]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_Flew

[trotsky]

1. Well, he's been dead two years.

Any thoughts on the millions who grew up Christians but became atheists? (Like me?)

[rug]

6. Yes but he left a last will and testament.

Flew: I accept the God of Aristotle who shares all the attributes you cite. Like Lewis I believe that God is a person but not the sort of person with whom you can have a talk. It is the ultimate being, the Creator of the Universe.

Wiker: Do you plan to write a follow-up book to There is a God?

Flew: As I said in opening the book, this is my last will and testament.

http://www.tothesource.org/10_30_2007/10_30_2007.htm

[trotsky]

11. OK, and...?

[edhopper]

2. Well,

since he misquotes Einstein and his basic reasoning at the end is just a more complicated "God of the gaps". I don't think he says anything important.

[rug]

8. None of his writings are important?

A New Approach to Psychical Research (1953)
New Essays in Philosophical Theology (1955) editor with Alasdair Macintyre
Essays in Conceptual Analysis (1956)
Hume's Philosophy of Belief (1961)
Logic And Language (1961) editor
God and Philosophy (1966)
Logic & Language (Second Series) (1966) editor
Evolutionary Ethics (1967)
An Introduction to Western Philosophy – Ideas and Argument from Plato to Sartre (1971)
Body, Mind and Death (1973)
Crime or Disease (1973)
Thinking About Thinking (1975)
Sociology, Equality and Education: Philosophical Essays In Defence Of A Variety Of Differences (1976)
Thinking Straight (1977) (ISBN 978-0-87975-088-6)
A Dictionary of Philosophy (1979) editor, later edition with Stephen Priest
Philosophy, an Introduction (1979)
Libertarians versus Egalitarians (c.1980) pamphlet
The Politics of Procrustes: contradictions of enforced equality (1981)
Darwinian Evolution (1984)
* The Presumption of Atheism (1976). reprinted as God, Freedom and Immortality: A Critical Analysis. (1984)
Examination not Attempted in Right Ahead, newspaper of the Conservative Monday Club, Conservative Party Conference edition, October 1985.
God: A Critical Inquiry (1986) – reprint of God and Philosophy (1966) with new introduction
David Hume: Philosopher of Moral Science (1986) Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Agency and Necessity (Great Debates in Philosophy) (1987) with Godfrey Norman Agmondis Vesey
Did Jesus Rise From the Dead? The Resurrection Debate (1987) with Gary Habermas
Power to the Parents: Reversing Educational Decline (1987)
Prophesy or Philosophy? Historicism or History? in Marx Refuted, edited by Ronald Duncan and Colin Wilson, Bath, (UK), 1987, ISBN 0-906798-71-X
Readings in the Philosophical Problems of Parapsychology (1987) editor
God, A Critical Inquiry (1988)
Does God Exist?: A Believer and an Atheist Debate (1991) with Terry L. Miethe
A Future for Anti-Racism? (Social Affairs Unit 1992) pamphlet
Atheistic Humanism (1993) (ISBN 978-0-87975-847-9)
Thinking About Social Thinking (1995)
Education for Citizenship (Studies in Education No. 10) (Institute of Economic Affairs, 2000)
Merely Mortal? (2000)
Equality in Liberty and Justice (2001) Transaction Publishers.
Does God Exist: The Craig-Flew Debate (2003) with William Lane Craig (ISBN 978-0-7546-3190-3)
Social Life and Moral Judgment (2003)
God and Philosophy (2005) – another reprint of God and Philosophy (1966) with another new introduction
There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind (2007) with Roy Abraham Varghese (ISBN 978-0-06-133529-7)

Or is there a certain point in his career at which you do not consider what he says to be important?

[dmallind]

9. Is there that certain point for you?

Or do you agree with everything? Would your valued percentage of that list be lower than the person's above?

My opinion is that he's obviously considered the issue deeply and, in ripe old age changed his mind for a reason I consider rather beneath his ability. It's not that he should not be allowed to change his mind, or that I think he changed it for reasons that didn't make sense to him, but it's rather like an octagenarian Archbishop becoming an atheist because of the scientific errors in Genesis - nothing he can possibly have avoided contemplating before, and an argument that is at best tangential and inconclusive. Complexity is to atheism as Biblical inaccuracies are to Christians - not worth bothering about and tells us nothing unless you approach things from a cartoonishly simple naive perception ("science can explain all phenomena in infinite detail and if not then a specific iron age Middle Eastern mythology must be absolutely true" is just as silly as "The Bible is the literal perfect word of a literal perfect God and cannot be wrong in the tiniest dtail without making God false&quot .

[rug]

12. No. I find the path as intriguing as the destination.

I respect his choices.

[dmallind]

17. Did you 10 yrs ago?

Do you respect his reasons? Why?

[rug]

18. I didn't know of him 10 years ago.

I do, however, find Dawkins's journey from the son of an imperial civil servant in Malawi as intriguing as the rest of him.

[dmallind]

20. And again do you think Flew's reasoning was sound? Why or why not

Strange that you'd list a 50 yr publishing history as if you were familiar with it when you'd never heard of him less than 20% of that time ago. How many have you read?

[rug]

22. Not entirely but I don't find deism intellectually satisfying either.

The notion of an entity that creates all and then steps back strikes me as contradictory to the notion of a creator creating.

There's nothing odd about that list. It's fright from the link. Of those, I've read two.

[Thats my opinion]

15. Where did the quote in the last sentence come from?

Who are you quoting? Or are you fighting off an anonymous fundamentalism--which I would also fight off.

[edhopper]

21. I meant in this particular video you posted.

Does that clear thing up for you?

[Jim__]

3. I'm not clear on why he converted when he did.

The extreme complexity of life has been fairly well known for over 50 years. Surely he looked at that before. Some fairly recent discoveries make it seem even more complex now, but he ignores those discoveries in his description.

As to his statements about the complexity of life, I don't think we know enough about either the primordial environment or the origin of life to say whether or not it is inevitable, likely, unlikely, or almost impossible. I don't understand what convinced him.

[Goblinmonger]

4. Here's an another late-life conversion I don't get (that shows the power of atheism)

T. S. Eliot the atheist wrote: "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "The Hollow Men," and "Wasteland."

T. S. Eliot the Anglican wrote: the poetry that became Cats the musical

QED

(Just so nobody gets all huffy, this is just geeky English teacher tongue-in-cheek stuff)

[MineralMan]

5. Well, I think he's dead.

Beyond that, I don't have any thoughts. He's an individual, and free to believe whatever he believes, whenever he believes it. I don't know him, so I can't comment further.

[rug]

7. So is Hitchens.

Both of their writings are worth consideration or, at least, inquiry.

[MineralMan]

10. Yes, if those writings interest you.

However, individual thinking about such things is equally important. I'm familiar with both people's writings, as I am with many others. I'm more familiar, though, with my own thoughts on the matter.

[rug]

13. No one is a monad.

Thoughts are the most promiscuous things that exist.

[MineralMan]

14. But some people are Damon.

DU is all about thoughts and ideas. We all have them, and they are based on many sources of input. Hitchens was interesting, but he always seemed to me to be overweening. Flew's modest acknowledgement about deities late in his life was of little interest to me, and seemed equivocal. Neither has had much influence on my thinking, frankly.

I'm firm in my atheism, so I don't really bother reading a lot of material on the subject. I find it more interesting to read theological arguments from believers in the various religions. I can't really see the utility in trying to defend atheism. Non-belief is rather hard to defend, since proof of negatives is pretty much impossible. Such defenses are boring. It's far more entertaining to see people try to defend actual belief in supernatural phenomena and entities.

Atheism is boring. Religion is always a source of amusement.

[rug]

16. I agree atheism is boring.

But Much Ado About Nothing is a comedy.

[dmallind]

19. I agree atheism is as boring as not watching TV as a hobby

But reality shows are still for idiots and sitcoms are still derivative and unbelievable, and there's still only a small amount worth watching and only that if you're willing to suspend disbelief and be advertised to.

[laconicsax]

23. You're failing to live up to your own standards, rug.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1218&pid=12317

[rug]

24. You're maintaining yours.

[laconicsax]

25. My professional career is built on being consistent.

It's a desirable trait for musicians.

[onager]

26. My thoughts: a sad case of abusing the elderly

Long NY Times article by Mark Oppenheimer from 2007, link below.

Flew was rooked by a gaggle of evangelical hustlers who used him, and ghost-wrote his last book:

Flew’s “conversion,” first reported in late 2004, has cast him into culture wars that he contentedly avoided his whole life. Although Flew still rejects Christianity, saying only that he now believes in “an intelligence that explains both its own existence and that of the world,” evangelicals are understandably excited. For them, Flew has become very useful, very quickly...

Oppenheimer went to the UK and interviewed Flew:

When we began the interview, he warned me, with merry self-deprecation, that he suffers from “nominal aphasia,” or the inability to reproduce names. But he forgot more than names. He didn’t remember talking with Paul Kurtz about his introduction to “God and Philosophy” just two years ago. There were words in his book, like “abiogenesis,” that now he could not define.

When I asked about Gary Habermas, who told me that he and Flew had been friends for 22 years and exchanged “dozens” of letters, Flew said, “He and I met at a debate, I think.”

I pointed out to him that in his earlier philosophical work he argued that the mere concept of God was incoherent, so if he was now a theist, he must reject huge chunks of his old philosophy. “Yes, maybe there’s a major inconsistency there,” he said, seeming grateful for my insight. And he seemed generally uninterested in the content of his book — he spent far more time talking about the dangers of unchecked Muslim immigration and his embrace of the anti-E.U. United Kingdom Independence Party.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/magazine/04Flew-t.html?oref=slogin

[rug]

27. While it has a partisan use, I won't ascribe it to dementia. I'm not Sen. Frist.

"But is Flew’s conversion what it seems to be? Depending on whom you ask, Antony Flew is either a true convert whose lifelong intellectual searchings finally brought him to God or a senescent scholar possibly being exploited by his associates. The version you prefer will depend on how you interpret a story that began 20 years ago, when some evangelical Christians found an atheist who, they thought, might be persuaded to join their side."