B
Bill M
Guest
Antony Flew was a philosopher - not a scientists and at the age of 84 is
probably suffering from Alzheimer's!
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> The Turning of an Atheist (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest)
>
> Via NY Transfer News Collective All the News that Doesn't Fit
>
> The New York Times Magazine - Nov 4, 2007
> http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/magazine/04Flew-t.html
>
> The Turning of an Atheist
>
> By MARK OPPENHEIMER
>
> Unless you are a professional philosopher or a committed atheist, you
> probably have not heard of Antony Flew. Eighty-four years old and long
> retired, Flew lives with his wife in Reading, a medium-size town on the
> Thames an hour west of London. Over a long career he held appointments
> at a series of decent regional universities " Aberdeen, Keele, Reading
> " and earned a strong reputation writing on an unusual range of topics,
> from Hume to immortality to Darwin. His greatest contribution remains
> his first, a short paper from 1950 called Theology and Falsification.
> Flew was a precocious 27 when he delivered the paper at a meeting of
> the Socratic Club, the Oxford salon presided over by C. S. Lewis.
> Reprinted in dozens of anthologies, Theology and Falsification has
> become a heroic tract for committed atheists. In a masterfully terse
> thousand words, Flew argues that God is too vague a concept to be
> meaningful. For if Gods greatness entails being invisible, intangible
> and inscrutable, then he cant be disproved " but nor can he be proved.
> Such powerful but simply stated arguments made Flew popular on the
> campus speaking circuit; videos from debates in the 1970s show a lanky
> man, his black hair professorially unkempt, vivisecting religious
> belief with an English public-school accent perfect for the seduction
> of American ears. Before the current crop of atheist crusader-authors "
> Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens " there was
> Antony Flew.
>
> Flews fame is about to spread beyond the atheists and philosophers.
> HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins, has just released There Is a
> God: How the Worlds Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, a book
> attributed to Flew and a co-author, the Christian apologist Roy Abraham
> Varghese. There Is a God is an intellectuals bildungsroman written
> in simple language for a mass audience. Its the first-person account
> of a preachers son who, away at Methodist boarding school, defied his
> father to become a teenage atheist, later wrote on atheism at Oxford,
> spent his life fighting for unbelief and then did an about-face in his
> old age, embracing the truth of a higher power. The book offers
> elegant, user-friendly descriptions of the arguments that persuaded
> Flew, arguments familiar to anyone who has heard evangelical
> Christians scientific proof of God. From the fine tuning argument
> that the laws of nature are too perfect to have been accidents to the
> intelligent design argument that human biology cannot be explained by
> evolution to various computations meant to show that probability favors
> a divine creator, There Is a God is perhaps the handiest primer ever
> written on the science (many would say pseudoscience) of religious
> belief.
>
> Flews 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. In late 2006, Flew was among the
> signers of a letter to Tony Blair asking that intelligent design be
> included in the British science curriculum. Flews fame has reached
> even to small-town Pennsylvania, where in 2005 Judge John E. Jones
> cited Flew in his landmark decision prohibiting the teaching of
> intelligent design in the town of Dover. Referring to a publication of
> the Dover School Board, Jones wrote that the newsletter all but admits
> that I.D. is religious by quoting Anthony [sic] Flew, described as a
> ~world famous atheist who now believes in intelligent design.
>
> But is Flews 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. In the intellectual tug of war that
> ensued, Flew himself " a continent away, his memory failing, without an
> Internet connection " had no idea how fiercely he was being fought over
> or how many of his acquaintances were calling or writing him just to
> shore up their cases. For a time, Flew hardly spoke to the media,
> leaving evangelicals and atheists to trade interpretations of his rare,
> oracular pronouncements. Was he now a believer in intelligent design?
> In Christianity? In some vague, intelligent life force? With the
> publication of his new book, Flew is once again talking, and this
> summer I traveled to England to speak with him. But as I discovered, a
> conversation with him confuses more than it clarifies. With his powers
> in decline, Antony Flew, a man who devoted his life to rational
> argument, has become a mere symbol, a trophy in a battle fought by
> people whose agendas he does not fully understand.
>
> THE STARTLING ARTICLE appeared on Dec. 9, 2004. A British philosophy
> professor who has been a leading champion of atheism for more than a
> half-century has changed his mind, Richard Ostling of The Associated
> Press wrote. He now believes in God " more or less " based on
> scientific evidence and says so on a video released Thursday. At age
> 81, after decades of insisting belief is a mistake, Antony Flew has
> concluded that some sort of intelligence or first cause must have
> created the universe. A superintelligence is the only good explanation
> for the origin of life and the complexity of nature, Flew said in a
> telephone interview from England.
>
> The video released Thursday was Has Science Discovered God? a DVD
> of a May 2004 conversation, held in a television studio at New York
> University, between Flew and two popular advocates of theism, the
> Orthodox Jewish physicist Gerald Schroeder and the Christian
> philosopher John Haldane. There are long stretches of Schroeder,
> sitting behind what looks like an anchormans desk, lecturing an
> attentive Flew on matters like the unlikelihood that an infinite number
> of monkeys typing randomly would ever produce a Shakespearean sonnet.
> (He is rebutting Stephen Hawking, who argues in A Brief History of
> Time that nature, given enough time, can perform the wondrous feats
> that credulous people attribute to God.) Schroeder also talks about the
> Cambrian explosion of animal species hundreds of millions of years ago,
> which he says happened too suddenly to lack some supernatural guidance.
> Haldane chimes in to argue that certain human capabilities, like
> language and reproduction, can be explained only by a higher
> intelligence. Meanwhile, a narrator, talking as photographs of Werner
> Heisenberg and Albert Einstein appear on screen and Vivaldi plays in
> the background, says things like, Many of the greatest scientists of
> all time believed that the intelligence of the universe, its laws,
> points to an intelligence that has no limitation.
>
> When at last Flew speaks, his diction is halting, in stark contrast to
> Schroeder and Haldane, both younger men, forceful and assured. Under
> their prodding, Flew concedes that the Big Bang could be described in
> Genesis; that the complexity of DNA strongly points to an
> intelligence; and that the existence of evil is not an insurmountable
> problem for the existence of God. In short, Flew retracts decades
> worth of conclusions on which he built his career. At one point,
> Haldane is noticeably smiling, embarrassed (or pleased) by Flews
> acquiesence. After one brief lecture from Schroeder, arguing that the
> origin of life can be seen as a form of revelation, Flew says, I dont
> see any way to meet that argument at the moment.
>
> The last segment of the DVD is a short infomercial for The Wonder of
> the World, a book by Roy Abraham Varghese, who, it happens, helped pay
> for the DVDs production, and financed the participants trips to New
> York. Varghese is a 49-year-old American business consultant of Indian
> ancestry, a practitioner of the Eastern Catholic Syro-Malankara rite
> and a tireless crusader for (and financial backer of) those who believe
> that scientific research helps verify the existence of God. Through the
> Institute for MetaScientific Research, his one-man shop in Dallas, he
> sponsors conferences and debates, and it was at a Dallas conference in
> 1985 that Varghese first met Flew.
>
> Ive been involved with him for 20 years or more, Varghese told me in
> August. Since meeting Flew, Varghese had him down to Dallas several
> times, talked with him often and periodically sent him readings in
> theism. When Varghese convened the N.Y.U. discussion, he said he hoped
> that Schroeder and Haldane, both skillful advocates for belief in God,
> might carry Flew further in the direction Varghese had been leading
> him. I knew that he was in that frame of mind " that there was no
> naturalistic explanation for the world, Varghese said. But at that
> event, he went further, saying the only explanation was that there was
> a God.
>
> It was Varghese who sent the DVD to the media, for which he was
> rewarded, in early December 2004, with articles from the A.P.s Ostling
> and from Fox News, ABC News and a host of religious news wires. On Dec.
> 16, Varghese contributed an op-ed article to The Dallas Morning News
> that read, Last week, The Associated Press broke the news that the
> most famous atheist in the academic world . . . now accepts the
> existence of God. Varghese did not mention that the AP broke the
> news thanks to his own press release, which accompanied the DVD (which
> he helped pay for) of the conversation (which he paid for).
>
> Varghese was not the only Christian to befriend Flew. Weve been
> friends for 22 years, Gary Habermas told me in late July. Habermas, a
> professor at Liberty University, founded by Jerry Falwell, met Flew at
> Vargheses Dallas confab in 1985; later that year, he invited Flew to
> Liberty University to debate the Resurrection. Since then, Tony and I
> have dialogued five times, three times on the Resurrection, Habermas
> said, using Flews nickname. I dont know how many letters weve
> written back and forth " dozens. I havent talked to Tony for about two
> months now, but we talk every couple months on the phone. Habermas
> told me that in his letters, Flew tested shifting reasons for his
> newfound belief in God, sometimes saying he believed in intelligent
> design, other times saying only Aristotles notion of a prime mover
> was persuasive. Indeed, Flew has never offered a detailed explanation
> of what he believes, preferring to use terms like Aristotelian deist
> that connote both an assent to a higher intelligence and a resistance
> to the idea of a personal god.
>
> As Flews profile in the Christian world rose, he was also courted by
> Biola University, the conservative Christian school outside Los
> Angeles. On May 11, 2006, Biola awarded Flew the second Phillip E.
> Johnson Award for Liberty and Truth, named for the author of Darwin on
> Trial. At the Biola ceremony, Flew mocked the revealed religion of his
> audience and flaunted his allegiance to deism: The deist god, unlike
> the god of the Jewish, Christian or, for heavens sake, the Islamic
> revelation, is neither interested in nor concerned about either human
> beliefs or human behavior, he told the small crowd. Jim Underdown, who
> was there reporting for a skeptics think tank, said he was surprised
> that the Christians would want him. But the Christians, it turned out,
> were not concerned.
>
> THE NARRATIVE TOLD by Flews Christian friends " and in some of Flews
> own pronouncements " has a certain coherence. About 20 years ago, they
> say, intrigued by the science of the Big Bang, Flew began to pay
> respectful attention to Christian apologists (and to the Jewish
> Schroeder) who believe that science now supports a sudden creation
> story that resembles the one in Genesis. These men promised Flew that
> new scientific research, far from being the enemy of revealed religion,
> argued for a God. And, in fact, a number of esteemed scientists were,
> in the mid-80s, talking about their interest in religion. Some, for
> example, accepted evolution as a fact but asked if it might serve a
> divine purpose, or they accepted the scientific method but tried to
> apply it to theological questions. And many of these God-curious
> scientists, like the mathematician John Barrow, the physicists Paul
> Davies and John Polkinghorne and the chemist Arthur Peacocke, were
> English. (Polkinghorne and Peacocke were ordained in the Church of
> England.) This group has since grown in prominence, and its attempts to
> create a nexus of science and religion were very influential on the men
> who, in turn, influenced Flew. Mindful of even greater men, from Newton
> to Einstein, whose words can be read to endorse the possibility of a
> divine creator, Flew at last joined their ranks. Flew had always
> possessed a restless, even eccentric intellect, and this was just
> another turn in his career, albeit a surprising one.
>
> Or perhaps not so surprising, for Flew never considered himself a
> dogmatic atheist. Even when he traveled the world arguing against
> religious belief, he was never an angry polemicist; a preachers son,
> he had none of the bewildered animosity that characterizes many
> nonbelievers. Always respectful of his opponents, he exhibited an
> unusual curiosity about their beliefs. Flews first book, in 1953, was
> about the possibility (which he ultimately rejected) of paranormal
> phenomena like ESP. Flew also had a longstanding affinity for
> conservative politics " he was an adviser to Margaret Thatcher " that
> made him unusually approachable for some Christians. In the light of
> his natal comfort with religious folk and his agreeable politics,
> Flews eventual alliance with Christians doesnt seem so strange.
>
> But what is a coherent narrative from one perspective is strikingly
> incomplete from another. For while Habermas and Varghese, Schroeder and
> Haldane were urging Flew toward theism, an atheist from America was
> fighting back. They sent Flew articles " and he sent Flew articles.
> They thought they were winning " but so did he.
>
> Richard Carrier, a 37-year-old doctoral student in ancient history at
> Columbia, is a type recognizable to anyone who has spent much time at a
> chess tournament or a sci-fi convention or a skeptics conference. He
> is young, male and brilliant, with an obsessive streak both admirable
> and a little debilitating. In the time that he hasnt finished his
> dissertation, Carrier has self-published a 444-page magnum opus called
> Sense and Goodness Without God: A Defense of Metaphysical
> Naturalism. (According to its Amazon.com description, the book offers
> a complete worldview . . . covering every subject from knowledge to
> art, from metaphysics to morality, from theology to politics.) He is a
> contributor to Skeptical Inquirer magazine and the former editor of the
> online community Secular Web. And in August 2004 Carrier turned his
> formidable intellect, and sense of purpose, toward Flew.
>
> Carrier first wrote to Flew in 2001, when an early, unfounded rumor on
> the Web claimed that Flew had become a believer. This time, however,
> Carrier was hearing louder rumblings: a positive review that Flew wrote
> of Vargheses book promoting theism; kind words Flew supposedly had for
> Gerald Schroeder; an e-mail message from the Christian apologist
> William Lane Craig, stating that Flew told a third party that he had
> seen sound arguments for the existence of God. Carrier did not yet know
> about the N.Y.U. meeting or the forthcoming DVD, but he already had
> cause for concern. In a long letter, Carrier asked Flew to confirm or
> deny what he hoped were calumnies on Flews good name, and he provided
> a Web address for his own article refuting Schroeder.
>
> On Sept. 3, in his small, sufficiently legible hand, Flew replied.
> (Carrier posted short excerpts from Flews letters online, but he has
> sent me computer scans of the entire correspondence.)
>
> Thank you for your letter, which reached me today, Flew wrote. I
> have for a long time been inclined to believe in an Aristotelian God
> who (or which) does not intervene in the Universe. . . . I am still
> thinking about the implications of, in particular, Schroeders books,
> which Varghese had sent him. If I ever become competent to read
> anything off the Internet . . . I will be eager to read your objections
> to Schroeder. I have met him, and I was much impressed.
>
> Carrier was not satisfied. He replied immediately, helpfully enclosing
> a lot of reading material for your benefit, including his Web article
> on Schroeder, a more scholarly article that he wrote for the journal
> Biology & Philosophy and " the pice de chutzpah " a four-page
> questionnaire for Flew to fill out. The questions ranged from the
> relevant, if barbed (Should we believe claims open to scientific
> evaluation that are not accepted by the vast majority of the scientific
> community?) to the invasive and rather trivial (Have you attended
> Quaker meetings, and is there anything about Quaker religious doctrine
> that you find attractive?).
>
> On Oct. 19, Flew sent back the completed questionnaire. In his answers,
> he wrote that he agreed with Schroeder that Genesis anticipated later
> scientific findings, but he retained his distaste for the Old Testament
> God, who makes threats of eternal torture. That God should not, Flew
> wrote, be confused with the noninterfering God of the people called
> Deists " such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.
>
> Carrier replied with a letter of 2,000 words that moves from
> solicitousness (I am writing this time to convey the concern of myself
> and numerous colleagues) to brute candor (There is absolutely no
> scientific basis for your position) to self-regard (I have also
> enclosed an excerpt from my forthcoming book summarizing the current
> science on this subject). Above all, though, the tone is one of
> exasperation. Flew, he sees, has been taken to dinner by the theists,
> has been fed questionable science and swallowed it with pleasure.
> Carrier is fighting a rear-guard action, via snail mail, from a
> continent away.
>
> But to understand this, Carrier pleads, you must examine the most
> current science on this subject, not what theists tell you and not what
> scientists were saying 20 years ago. Everything has changed. Dont you
> agree it is your intellectual responsibility to get up to date on this,
> before making any decisions regarding what to believe? It worries us
> that you may be shirking this responsibility.
>
> Amazingly, this epistolary pummeling worked. When Flew wrote back on
> Dec. 24, two weeks after the Associated Press story, he had changed his
> mind. I simply but apparently mistakenly believed that Schroeder " a
> man whom I was told had taught at M.I.T. and was now working at the
> Weizmann Institute in Jerusalem " would be up to date. Clearly he was
> not. As if in payment for Carriers multiple enclosures, Flew sent an
> enclosure of his own: an order form for an anti-European Union book
> called England Our England.
>
> Further letters brought further backpedaling. In his letter of Jan. 2,
> 2005, Flew says that if the so confident, atheist polemicist Richard
> Dawkins tells him that Schroeder is wrong, he will admit that
> Schroeder is wrong. But he assumes that Dawkins accepts Schroeders
> arguments, since Dawkins made no reference to your article. Its
> truly odd: Flew says he believes that since Dawkins failed to cite the
> graduate student Richard Carrier attacking Schroeder, then Schroeders
> scholarship is likely sound. In other words, if Flew was misled, he can
> blame Dawkins, who holds an Oxford professorship in the public
> understanding of science yet failed to inform his public that
> Schroeder was a crank. Nonetheless, Flew promises Carrier, he is
> prepared to reject Schroeder. Flew once believed that Genesis might be
> scientifically accurate, but as it is not, thats that. I am rather
> sorry.
>
> Flews second thoughts did not stop at Schroeder. At about the same
> time, according to Paul Kurtz, whose freethinking Prometheus Books
> published several of Flews works, Flew expressed doubts about Roy
> Varghese. Hes told us that hes sorry that he trusted Roy, Kurtz
> told me. He placed his confidence in him, thought he was a leading
> scientist. Flews misgivings also prompted him to revise an essay that
> he was writing for Kurtz, an introduction to Prometheuss new 2005
> edition of his 1966 book God and Philosophy. In an early draft of the
> introduction, which Flew shared with Carrier, and Carrier with me, Flew
> identifies himself as a deist, but in the published version, that
> passage has been deleted. In his letter to Carrier of Feb. 13, 2005,
> Flew gives the American credit for stopping him at the brink of belief:
> Thanks above all to your advice, I have been able to stop the press at
> Prometheus, and they will be incorporating a radically rewritten new
> Introduction.
>
> Flew sent three further letters to Carrier. In the first, dated Feb.
> 19, he again thanks Carrier for his help with the introduction, then
> adds, I am since yesterday resolved to make no more statements about
> religion for publication. And in the last, on June 22, Flew retracts,
> rather poignantly, praise he had offered for one of Gary Habermass
> books: The statement which I most regret making during the last few
> months was the one about Habermass book on the alleged resurrection of
> Jesus bar Joseph. I completely forgot Humes to my mind decisive
> argument against all evidence for the miraculous. A sign of physical
> decline.
>
> TWO YEARS LATER, Flews doubts have disappeared, and the philosopher
> has a reinvigorated faith in his theistic friends. In his new book, he
> freely cites Schroeder, Haldane and Varghese. And the author who two
> years ago was forgetting his Hume is, in the forthcoming volume, deeply
> read in many philosophers " John Leslie, John Foster, Thomas Tracy,
> Brian Leftow " rarely if ever mentioned in his letters, articles or
> books. Its as if hes a new man.
>
> In August, I visited Flew in Reading. His house, sparsely furnished,
> sits on a small plot on a busy street, hard against its neighbors. It
> could belong to a retired government clerk or to a career military man
> who at last has resettled in the mother country. Inside, it seems very
> English, with the worn, muted colors of a BBC production from the
> 1970s. The house may lack an Internet connection, but it does have one
> very friendly cat, who sat beside me on the sofa. I visited on two
> consecutive days, and each day Annis, Flews wife of 55 years, served
> me a glass of water and left me in the sitting room to ask her husband
> a series of tough, indeed rather cruel, questions.
>
> In There Is a God, Flew quotes extensively from a conversation he had
> with Leftow, a professor at Oxford. So I asked Flew, Do you know Brian
> Leftow?
>
> No, he said. I dont think I do.
>
> Do you know the work of the philosopher John Leslie? Leslie is
> discussed extensively in the book.
>
> Flew paused, seeming unsure. I think hes quite good. But he said he
> did not remember the specifics of Leslies work.
>
> Have you ever run across the philosopher Paul Davies? In his book,
> Flew calls Paul Davies arguably the most influential contemporary
> expositor of modern science.
>
> Im afraid this is a spectacle of my not remembering!
>
> He said this with a laugh. 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
> didnt 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 theres 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.
>
> As he himself conceded, he had not written his book.
>
> This is really Roys doing, he said, before I had even figured out a
> polite way to ask. He showed it to me, and I said O.K. Im too old for
> this kind of work!
>
> When I asked Varghese, he freely admitted that the book was his idea
> and that he had done all the original writing for it. But he made the
> book sound like more of a joint effort " slightly more, anyway. There
> was stuff he had written before, and some of that was adapted to this,
> Varghese said. There is stuff hed written to me in correspondence,
> and I organized a lot of it. And I had interviews with him. So those
> three elements went into it. Oh, and I exposed him to certain authors
> and got his views on them. We pulled it together. And then to make it
> more reader-friendly, HarperCollins had a more popular author go
> through it.
>
> So even the ghostwriter had a ghostwriter: Bob Hostetler, an
> evangelical pastor and author from Ohio, rewrote many passages,
> especially in the section that narrates Flews childhood. With three
> authors, how much Flew was left in the book? He went through
> everything, was happy with everything, Varghese said.
>
> Cynthia DiTiberio, the editor who acquired There Is a God for
> HarperOne, told me that Hostetlers work was limited; she called him
> an extensive copy editor. He did the kind of thing I would have done
> if I had the time, DiTiberio said, but editors dont get any editing
> done in the office; we have to do that in our own time.
>
> I then asked DiTiberio if it was ethical to publish a book under Flews
> name that cites sources Flew doesnt know well enough to discuss. I
> see your struggle and confusion, she said, but she maintained that the
> book is an accurate presentation of Flews views. I dont think Tony
> would have allowed us to put in anything he was not comfortable with or
> familiar with, she said. I mean, it is hard to tell at this point how
> much is him getting older. In my communications with him, there are
> times you have to say things a couple times. Im not sure what that is.
> I wish I could tell you more. . . We were hindered by the fact that he
> is older, but it would do the world a disservice not to have the book
> out there, regardless of how it was made.
>
> MANY AUTHORS DON'T WRITE their own books. Some dont even read them:
> sports fans will remember when the basketball player Charles Barkley
> complained that he was misquoted in his own autobiography. It could be
> that two years ago, when Varghese started writing Flews book, Flew was
> a fuller partner in the process than he remembers (the section on
> Flews childhood could hardly have been written without his
> cooperation). And perhaps he was recently reading those philosophers
> whose names he now does not recognize. Two years ago, he might have had
> a fruitful conversation with Brian Leftow, a man he does not remember.
> Two years ago, he and Gary Habermas might indeed have been good friends.
>
> But it seems somewhat more likely that Flew, having been intellectually
> chaperoned by Roy Varghese for 20 years, simply trusted him to write
> something responsible. Varghese had done him so many kindnesses. He
> introduced Flew to Gerald Schroeder and John Haldane, and, I learned,
> he flew to England to chauffeur Flew to meetings with Leftow and the
> Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne (although when Leftow and
> Swinburne appear in the book, the conversations are described as if
> Varghese were not present). Varghese also gave Flew adventures, jetting
> him to Dallas and New York, putting him in a DVD documentary, getting
> his name in the papers. If at times Flew could be persuaded, by a
> letter or a phone call from an American atheist, that Varghese and his
> crew were not the eminent authorities on science they made themselves
> out to be, he was always happy to change his mind back. These
> Christians were kind and attentive, and they always seemed to have the
> latest research.
>
> To believe that Flew has been exploited is not to conclude that his
> exploiters acted with malice. If Flew in his dotage was a bit gullible,
> Varghese had a gullibility of his own. An autodidact with no academic
> credentials, Varghese was clearly thrilled to be taken seriously by an
> Oxford-trained philosopher; it may never have occurred to him that so
> educated a mind could be in decline. Habermas, too, speaks of Flew with
> a genuine reverence and seems proud of the friendship.
>
> Intellectuals, even more than the rest of us, like to believe that they
> reach conclusions solely through study and reflection. But like the
> rest of us, they sometimes choose their opinions to suit their friends
> rather than the other way around. Which means that Flew is likely to
> remain a theist, for just as the Christians drew him close, the
> atheists gave him up for lost. He once was a great philosopher,
> Richard Dawkins, the Oxford biologist and author of The God Delusion,
> told a Virginia audience last year. Its very sad. Paul Kurtz of
> Prometheus Books says he thinks Flew is being exploited. Theyre
> misusing him, Kurtz says, referring to the Christians. Theyre
> worried about atheists, and theyre trying to find an atheist to be on
> their side.
>
> They found one, and with less difficulty than atheists would have
> guessed. From the start, the believers affection for Antony Flew was
> not unrequited. When Flew met Christians who claimed to have new,
> scientific proof of the existence of God, he quickly became again the
> young graduate student who embarked on a study of the paranormal when
> all his colleagues were committed to strict rationalism. He may, too,
> have connected with the child who was raised in his parents warm,
> faithful Methodism. Flews colleagues will wonder how he could sign a
> petition to the prime minister in favor of intelligent design, but it
> becomes more understandable if the signatory never hated religious
> belief the way many philosophers do and if he never hated religious
> people in the least. At a time when belief in God is more polarizing
> than it has been in years, when all believers are being blamed for
> religions worst excesses, Antony Flew has quietly switched sides, just
> following the evidence as it has been explained to him, blissfully
> unaware of what others have at stake.
>
> [Mark Oppenheimer is coordinator of the Yale Journalism Initiative and
> editor of The New Haven Review. He last wrote for the magazine about
> the Hollywood acting coach Milton Katselas.]
>
>
>
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probably suffering from Alzheimer's!
<NY.Transfer.News@blythe.org> wrote in message
news:1194203339.3518705828.1767662571@servebbs.org...
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>
> The Turning of an Atheist (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest)
>
> Via NY Transfer News Collective All the News that Doesn't Fit
>
> The New York Times Magazine - Nov 4, 2007
> http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/magazine/04Flew-t.html
>
> The Turning of an Atheist
>
> By MARK OPPENHEIMER
>
> Unless you are a professional philosopher or a committed atheist, you
> probably have not heard of Antony Flew. Eighty-four years old and long
> retired, Flew lives with his wife in Reading, a medium-size town on the
> Thames an hour west of London. Over a long career he held appointments
> at a series of decent regional universities " Aberdeen, Keele, Reading
> " and earned a strong reputation writing on an unusual range of topics,
> from Hume to immortality to Darwin. His greatest contribution remains
> his first, a short paper from 1950 called Theology and Falsification.
> Flew was a precocious 27 when he delivered the paper at a meeting of
> the Socratic Club, the Oxford salon presided over by C. S. Lewis.
> Reprinted in dozens of anthologies, Theology and Falsification has
> become a heroic tract for committed atheists. In a masterfully terse
> thousand words, Flew argues that God is too vague a concept to be
> meaningful. For if Gods greatness entails being invisible, intangible
> and inscrutable, then he cant be disproved " but nor can he be proved.
> Such powerful but simply stated arguments made Flew popular on the
> campus speaking circuit; videos from debates in the 1970s show a lanky
> man, his black hair professorially unkempt, vivisecting religious
> belief with an English public-school accent perfect for the seduction
> of American ears. Before the current crop of atheist crusader-authors "
> Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens " there was
> Antony Flew.
>
> Flews fame is about to spread beyond the atheists and philosophers.
> HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins, has just released There Is a
> God: How the Worlds Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, a book
> attributed to Flew and a co-author, the Christian apologist Roy Abraham
> Varghese. There Is a God is an intellectuals bildungsroman written
> in simple language for a mass audience. Its the first-person account
> of a preachers son who, away at Methodist boarding school, defied his
> father to become a teenage atheist, later wrote on atheism at Oxford,
> spent his life fighting for unbelief and then did an about-face in his
> old age, embracing the truth of a higher power. The book offers
> elegant, user-friendly descriptions of the arguments that persuaded
> Flew, arguments familiar to anyone who has heard evangelical
> Christians scientific proof of God. From the fine tuning argument
> that the laws of nature are too perfect to have been accidents to the
> intelligent design argument that human biology cannot be explained by
> evolution to various computations meant to show that probability favors
> a divine creator, There Is a God is perhaps the handiest primer ever
> written on the science (many would say pseudoscience) of religious
> belief.
>
> Flews 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. In late 2006, Flew was among the
> signers of a letter to Tony Blair asking that intelligent design be
> included in the British science curriculum. Flews fame has reached
> even to small-town Pennsylvania, where in 2005 Judge John E. Jones
> cited Flew in his landmark decision prohibiting the teaching of
> intelligent design in the town of Dover. Referring to a publication of
> the Dover School Board, Jones wrote that the newsletter all but admits
> that I.D. is religious by quoting Anthony [sic] Flew, described as a
> ~world famous atheist who now believes in intelligent design.
>
> But is Flews 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. In the intellectual tug of war that
> ensued, Flew himself " a continent away, his memory failing, without an
> Internet connection " had no idea how fiercely he was being fought over
> or how many of his acquaintances were calling or writing him just to
> shore up their cases. For a time, Flew hardly spoke to the media,
> leaving evangelicals and atheists to trade interpretations of his rare,
> oracular pronouncements. Was he now a believer in intelligent design?
> In Christianity? In some vague, intelligent life force? With the
> publication of his new book, Flew is once again talking, and this
> summer I traveled to England to speak with him. But as I discovered, a
> conversation with him confuses more than it clarifies. With his powers
> in decline, Antony Flew, a man who devoted his life to rational
> argument, has become a mere symbol, a trophy in a battle fought by
> people whose agendas he does not fully understand.
>
> THE STARTLING ARTICLE appeared on Dec. 9, 2004. A British philosophy
> professor who has been a leading champion of atheism for more than a
> half-century has changed his mind, Richard Ostling of The Associated
> Press wrote. He now believes in God " more or less " based on
> scientific evidence and says so on a video released Thursday. At age
> 81, after decades of insisting belief is a mistake, Antony Flew has
> concluded that some sort of intelligence or first cause must have
> created the universe. A superintelligence is the only good explanation
> for the origin of life and the complexity of nature, Flew said in a
> telephone interview from England.
>
> The video released Thursday was Has Science Discovered God? a DVD
> of a May 2004 conversation, held in a television studio at New York
> University, between Flew and two popular advocates of theism, the
> Orthodox Jewish physicist Gerald Schroeder and the Christian
> philosopher John Haldane. There are long stretches of Schroeder,
> sitting behind what looks like an anchormans desk, lecturing an
> attentive Flew on matters like the unlikelihood that an infinite number
> of monkeys typing randomly would ever produce a Shakespearean sonnet.
> (He is rebutting Stephen Hawking, who argues in A Brief History of
> Time that nature, given enough time, can perform the wondrous feats
> that credulous people attribute to God.) Schroeder also talks about the
> Cambrian explosion of animal species hundreds of millions of years ago,
> which he says happened too suddenly to lack some supernatural guidance.
> Haldane chimes in to argue that certain human capabilities, like
> language and reproduction, can be explained only by a higher
> intelligence. Meanwhile, a narrator, talking as photographs of Werner
> Heisenberg and Albert Einstein appear on screen and Vivaldi plays in
> the background, says things like, Many of the greatest scientists of
> all time believed that the intelligence of the universe, its laws,
> points to an intelligence that has no limitation.
>
> When at last Flew speaks, his diction is halting, in stark contrast to
> Schroeder and Haldane, both younger men, forceful and assured. Under
> their prodding, Flew concedes that the Big Bang could be described in
> Genesis; that the complexity of DNA strongly points to an
> intelligence; and that the existence of evil is not an insurmountable
> problem for the existence of God. In short, Flew retracts decades
> worth of conclusions on which he built his career. At one point,
> Haldane is noticeably smiling, embarrassed (or pleased) by Flews
> acquiesence. After one brief lecture from Schroeder, arguing that the
> origin of life can be seen as a form of revelation, Flew says, I dont
> see any way to meet that argument at the moment.
>
> The last segment of the DVD is a short infomercial for The Wonder of
> the World, a book by Roy Abraham Varghese, who, it happens, helped pay
> for the DVDs production, and financed the participants trips to New
> York. Varghese is a 49-year-old American business consultant of Indian
> ancestry, a practitioner of the Eastern Catholic Syro-Malankara rite
> and a tireless crusader for (and financial backer of) those who believe
> that scientific research helps verify the existence of God. Through the
> Institute for MetaScientific Research, his one-man shop in Dallas, he
> sponsors conferences and debates, and it was at a Dallas conference in
> 1985 that Varghese first met Flew.
>
> Ive been involved with him for 20 years or more, Varghese told me in
> August. Since meeting Flew, Varghese had him down to Dallas several
> times, talked with him often and periodically sent him readings in
> theism. When Varghese convened the N.Y.U. discussion, he said he hoped
> that Schroeder and Haldane, both skillful advocates for belief in God,
> might carry Flew further in the direction Varghese had been leading
> him. I knew that he was in that frame of mind " that there was no
> naturalistic explanation for the world, Varghese said. But at that
> event, he went further, saying the only explanation was that there was
> a God.
>
> It was Varghese who sent the DVD to the media, for which he was
> rewarded, in early December 2004, with articles from the A.P.s Ostling
> and from Fox News, ABC News and a host of religious news wires. On Dec.
> 16, Varghese contributed an op-ed article to The Dallas Morning News
> that read, Last week, The Associated Press broke the news that the
> most famous atheist in the academic world . . . now accepts the
> existence of God. Varghese did not mention that the AP broke the
> news thanks to his own press release, which accompanied the DVD (which
> he helped pay for) of the conversation (which he paid for).
>
> Varghese was not the only Christian to befriend Flew. Weve been
> friends for 22 years, Gary Habermas told me in late July. Habermas, a
> professor at Liberty University, founded by Jerry Falwell, met Flew at
> Vargheses Dallas confab in 1985; later that year, he invited Flew to
> Liberty University to debate the Resurrection. Since then, Tony and I
> have dialogued five times, three times on the Resurrection, Habermas
> said, using Flews nickname. I dont know how many letters weve
> written back and forth " dozens. I havent talked to Tony for about two
> months now, but we talk every couple months on the phone. Habermas
> told me that in his letters, Flew tested shifting reasons for his
> newfound belief in God, sometimes saying he believed in intelligent
> design, other times saying only Aristotles notion of a prime mover
> was persuasive. Indeed, Flew has never offered a detailed explanation
> of what he believes, preferring to use terms like Aristotelian deist
> that connote both an assent to a higher intelligence and a resistance
> to the idea of a personal god.
>
> As Flews profile in the Christian world rose, he was also courted by
> Biola University, the conservative Christian school outside Los
> Angeles. On May 11, 2006, Biola awarded Flew the second Phillip E.
> Johnson Award for Liberty and Truth, named for the author of Darwin on
> Trial. At the Biola ceremony, Flew mocked the revealed religion of his
> audience and flaunted his allegiance to deism: The deist god, unlike
> the god of the Jewish, Christian or, for heavens sake, the Islamic
> revelation, is neither interested in nor concerned about either human
> beliefs or human behavior, he told the small crowd. Jim Underdown, who
> was there reporting for a skeptics think tank, said he was surprised
> that the Christians would want him. But the Christians, it turned out,
> were not concerned.
>
> THE NARRATIVE TOLD by Flews Christian friends " and in some of Flews
> own pronouncements " has a certain coherence. About 20 years ago, they
> say, intrigued by the science of the Big Bang, Flew began to pay
> respectful attention to Christian apologists (and to the Jewish
> Schroeder) who believe that science now supports a sudden creation
> story that resembles the one in Genesis. These men promised Flew that
> new scientific research, far from being the enemy of revealed religion,
> argued for a God. And, in fact, a number of esteemed scientists were,
> in the mid-80s, talking about their interest in religion. Some, for
> example, accepted evolution as a fact but asked if it might serve a
> divine purpose, or they accepted the scientific method but tried to
> apply it to theological questions. And many of these God-curious
> scientists, like the mathematician John Barrow, the physicists Paul
> Davies and John Polkinghorne and the chemist Arthur Peacocke, were
> English. (Polkinghorne and Peacocke were ordained in the Church of
> England.) This group has since grown in prominence, and its attempts to
> create a nexus of science and religion were very influential on the men
> who, in turn, influenced Flew. Mindful of even greater men, from Newton
> to Einstein, whose words can be read to endorse the possibility of a
> divine creator, Flew at last joined their ranks. Flew had always
> possessed a restless, even eccentric intellect, and this was just
> another turn in his career, albeit a surprising one.
>
> Or perhaps not so surprising, for Flew never considered himself a
> dogmatic atheist. Even when he traveled the world arguing against
> religious belief, he was never an angry polemicist; a preachers son,
> he had none of the bewildered animosity that characterizes many
> nonbelievers. Always respectful of his opponents, he exhibited an
> unusual curiosity about their beliefs. Flews first book, in 1953, was
> about the possibility (which he ultimately rejected) of paranormal
> phenomena like ESP. Flew also had a longstanding affinity for
> conservative politics " he was an adviser to Margaret Thatcher " that
> made him unusually approachable for some Christians. In the light of
> his natal comfort with religious folk and his agreeable politics,
> Flews eventual alliance with Christians doesnt seem so strange.
>
> But what is a coherent narrative from one perspective is strikingly
> incomplete from another. For while Habermas and Varghese, Schroeder and
> Haldane were urging Flew toward theism, an atheist from America was
> fighting back. They sent Flew articles " and he sent Flew articles.
> They thought they were winning " but so did he.
>
> Richard Carrier, a 37-year-old doctoral student in ancient history at
> Columbia, is a type recognizable to anyone who has spent much time at a
> chess tournament or a sci-fi convention or a skeptics conference. He
> is young, male and brilliant, with an obsessive streak both admirable
> and a little debilitating. In the time that he hasnt finished his
> dissertation, Carrier has self-published a 444-page magnum opus called
> Sense and Goodness Without God: A Defense of Metaphysical
> Naturalism. (According to its Amazon.com description, the book offers
> a complete worldview . . . covering every subject from knowledge to
> art, from metaphysics to morality, from theology to politics.) He is a
> contributor to Skeptical Inquirer magazine and the former editor of the
> online community Secular Web. And in August 2004 Carrier turned his
> formidable intellect, and sense of purpose, toward Flew.
>
> Carrier first wrote to Flew in 2001, when an early, unfounded rumor on
> the Web claimed that Flew had become a believer. This time, however,
> Carrier was hearing louder rumblings: a positive review that Flew wrote
> of Vargheses book promoting theism; kind words Flew supposedly had for
> Gerald Schroeder; an e-mail message from the Christian apologist
> William Lane Craig, stating that Flew told a third party that he had
> seen sound arguments for the existence of God. Carrier did not yet know
> about the N.Y.U. meeting or the forthcoming DVD, but he already had
> cause for concern. In a long letter, Carrier asked Flew to confirm or
> deny what he hoped were calumnies on Flews good name, and he provided
> a Web address for his own article refuting Schroeder.
>
> On Sept. 3, in his small, sufficiently legible hand, Flew replied.
> (Carrier posted short excerpts from Flews letters online, but he has
> sent me computer scans of the entire correspondence.)
>
> Thank you for your letter, which reached me today, Flew wrote. I
> have for a long time been inclined to believe in an Aristotelian God
> who (or which) does not intervene in the Universe. . . . I am still
> thinking about the implications of, in particular, Schroeders books,
> which Varghese had sent him. If I ever become competent to read
> anything off the Internet . . . I will be eager to read your objections
> to Schroeder. I have met him, and I was much impressed.
>
> Carrier was not satisfied. He replied immediately, helpfully enclosing
> a lot of reading material for your benefit, including his Web article
> on Schroeder, a more scholarly article that he wrote for the journal
> Biology & Philosophy and " the pice de chutzpah " a four-page
> questionnaire for Flew to fill out. The questions ranged from the
> relevant, if barbed (Should we believe claims open to scientific
> evaluation that are not accepted by the vast majority of the scientific
> community?) to the invasive and rather trivial (Have you attended
> Quaker meetings, and is there anything about Quaker religious doctrine
> that you find attractive?).
>
> On Oct. 19, Flew sent back the completed questionnaire. In his answers,
> he wrote that he agreed with Schroeder that Genesis anticipated later
> scientific findings, but he retained his distaste for the Old Testament
> God, who makes threats of eternal torture. That God should not, Flew
> wrote, be confused with the noninterfering God of the people called
> Deists " such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.
>
> Carrier replied with a letter of 2,000 words that moves from
> solicitousness (I am writing this time to convey the concern of myself
> and numerous colleagues) to brute candor (There is absolutely no
> scientific basis for your position) to self-regard (I have also
> enclosed an excerpt from my forthcoming book summarizing the current
> science on this subject). Above all, though, the tone is one of
> exasperation. Flew, he sees, has been taken to dinner by the theists,
> has been fed questionable science and swallowed it with pleasure.
> Carrier is fighting a rear-guard action, via snail mail, from a
> continent away.
>
> But to understand this, Carrier pleads, you must examine the most
> current science on this subject, not what theists tell you and not what
> scientists were saying 20 years ago. Everything has changed. Dont you
> agree it is your intellectual responsibility to get up to date on this,
> before making any decisions regarding what to believe? It worries us
> that you may be shirking this responsibility.
>
> Amazingly, this epistolary pummeling worked. When Flew wrote back on
> Dec. 24, two weeks after the Associated Press story, he had changed his
> mind. I simply but apparently mistakenly believed that Schroeder " a
> man whom I was told had taught at M.I.T. and was now working at the
> Weizmann Institute in Jerusalem " would be up to date. Clearly he was
> not. As if in payment for Carriers multiple enclosures, Flew sent an
> enclosure of his own: an order form for an anti-European Union book
> called England Our England.
>
> Further letters brought further backpedaling. In his letter of Jan. 2,
> 2005, Flew says that if the so confident, atheist polemicist Richard
> Dawkins tells him that Schroeder is wrong, he will admit that
> Schroeder is wrong. But he assumes that Dawkins accepts Schroeders
> arguments, since Dawkins made no reference to your article. Its
> truly odd: Flew says he believes that since Dawkins failed to cite the
> graduate student Richard Carrier attacking Schroeder, then Schroeders
> scholarship is likely sound. In other words, if Flew was misled, he can
> blame Dawkins, who holds an Oxford professorship in the public
> understanding of science yet failed to inform his public that
> Schroeder was a crank. Nonetheless, Flew promises Carrier, he is
> prepared to reject Schroeder. Flew once believed that Genesis might be
> scientifically accurate, but as it is not, thats that. I am rather
> sorry.
>
> Flews second thoughts did not stop at Schroeder. At about the same
> time, according to Paul Kurtz, whose freethinking Prometheus Books
> published several of Flews works, Flew expressed doubts about Roy
> Varghese. Hes told us that hes sorry that he trusted Roy, Kurtz
> told me. He placed his confidence in him, thought he was a leading
> scientist. Flews misgivings also prompted him to revise an essay that
> he was writing for Kurtz, an introduction to Prometheuss new 2005
> edition of his 1966 book God and Philosophy. In an early draft of the
> introduction, which Flew shared with Carrier, and Carrier with me, Flew
> identifies himself as a deist, but in the published version, that
> passage has been deleted. In his letter to Carrier of Feb. 13, 2005,
> Flew gives the American credit for stopping him at the brink of belief:
> Thanks above all to your advice, I have been able to stop the press at
> Prometheus, and they will be incorporating a radically rewritten new
> Introduction.
>
> Flew sent three further letters to Carrier. In the first, dated Feb.
> 19, he again thanks Carrier for his help with the introduction, then
> adds, I am since yesterday resolved to make no more statements about
> religion for publication. And in the last, on June 22, Flew retracts,
> rather poignantly, praise he had offered for one of Gary Habermass
> books: The statement which I most regret making during the last few
> months was the one about Habermass book on the alleged resurrection of
> Jesus bar Joseph. I completely forgot Humes to my mind decisive
> argument against all evidence for the miraculous. A sign of physical
> decline.
>
> TWO YEARS LATER, Flews doubts have disappeared, and the philosopher
> has a reinvigorated faith in his theistic friends. In his new book, he
> freely cites Schroeder, Haldane and Varghese. And the author who two
> years ago was forgetting his Hume is, in the forthcoming volume, deeply
> read in many philosophers " John Leslie, John Foster, Thomas Tracy,
> Brian Leftow " rarely if ever mentioned in his letters, articles or
> books. Its as if hes a new man.
>
> In August, I visited Flew in Reading. His house, sparsely furnished,
> sits on a small plot on a busy street, hard against its neighbors. It
> could belong to a retired government clerk or to a career military man
> who at last has resettled in the mother country. Inside, it seems very
> English, with the worn, muted colors of a BBC production from the
> 1970s. The house may lack an Internet connection, but it does have one
> very friendly cat, who sat beside me on the sofa. I visited on two
> consecutive days, and each day Annis, Flews wife of 55 years, served
> me a glass of water and left me in the sitting room to ask her husband
> a series of tough, indeed rather cruel, questions.
>
> In There Is a God, Flew quotes extensively from a conversation he had
> with Leftow, a professor at Oxford. So I asked Flew, Do you know Brian
> Leftow?
>
> No, he said. I dont think I do.
>
> Do you know the work of the philosopher John Leslie? Leslie is
> discussed extensively in the book.
>
> Flew paused, seeming unsure. I think hes quite good. But he said he
> did not remember the specifics of Leslies work.
>
> Have you ever run across the philosopher Paul Davies? In his book,
> Flew calls Paul Davies arguably the most influential contemporary
> expositor of modern science.
>
> Im afraid this is a spectacle of my not remembering!
>
> He said this with a laugh. 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
> didnt 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 theres 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.
>
> As he himself conceded, he had not written his book.
>
> This is really Roys doing, he said, before I had even figured out a
> polite way to ask. He showed it to me, and I said O.K. Im too old for
> this kind of work!
>
> When I asked Varghese, he freely admitted that the book was his idea
> and that he had done all the original writing for it. But he made the
> book sound like more of a joint effort " slightly more, anyway. There
> was stuff he had written before, and some of that was adapted to this,
> Varghese said. There is stuff hed written to me in correspondence,
> and I organized a lot of it. And I had interviews with him. So those
> three elements went into it. Oh, and I exposed him to certain authors
> and got his views on them. We pulled it together. And then to make it
> more reader-friendly, HarperCollins had a more popular author go
> through it.
>
> So even the ghostwriter had a ghostwriter: Bob Hostetler, an
> evangelical pastor and author from Ohio, rewrote many passages,
> especially in the section that narrates Flews childhood. With three
> authors, how much Flew was left in the book? He went through
> everything, was happy with everything, Varghese said.
>
> Cynthia DiTiberio, the editor who acquired There Is a God for
> HarperOne, told me that Hostetlers work was limited; she called him
> an extensive copy editor. He did the kind of thing I would have done
> if I had the time, DiTiberio said, but editors dont get any editing
> done in the office; we have to do that in our own time.
>
> I then asked DiTiberio if it was ethical to publish a book under Flews
> name that cites sources Flew doesnt know well enough to discuss. I
> see your struggle and confusion, she said, but she maintained that the
> book is an accurate presentation of Flews views. I dont think Tony
> would have allowed us to put in anything he was not comfortable with or
> familiar with, she said. I mean, it is hard to tell at this point how
> much is him getting older. In my communications with him, there are
> times you have to say things a couple times. Im not sure what that is.
> I wish I could tell you more. . . We were hindered by the fact that he
> is older, but it would do the world a disservice not to have the book
> out there, regardless of how it was made.
>
> MANY AUTHORS DON'T WRITE their own books. Some dont even read them:
> sports fans will remember when the basketball player Charles Barkley
> complained that he was misquoted in his own autobiography. It could be
> that two years ago, when Varghese started writing Flews book, Flew was
> a fuller partner in the process than he remembers (the section on
> Flews childhood could hardly have been written without his
> cooperation). And perhaps he was recently reading those philosophers
> whose names he now does not recognize. Two years ago, he might have had
> a fruitful conversation with Brian Leftow, a man he does not remember.
> Two years ago, he and Gary Habermas might indeed have been good friends.
>
> But it seems somewhat more likely that Flew, having been intellectually
> chaperoned by Roy Varghese for 20 years, simply trusted him to write
> something responsible. Varghese had done him so many kindnesses. He
> introduced Flew to Gerald Schroeder and John Haldane, and, I learned,
> he flew to England to chauffeur Flew to meetings with Leftow and the
> Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne (although when Leftow and
> Swinburne appear in the book, the conversations are described as if
> Varghese were not present). Varghese also gave Flew adventures, jetting
> him to Dallas and New York, putting him in a DVD documentary, getting
> his name in the papers. If at times Flew could be persuaded, by a
> letter or a phone call from an American atheist, that Varghese and his
> crew were not the eminent authorities on science they made themselves
> out to be, he was always happy to change his mind back. These
> Christians were kind and attentive, and they always seemed to have the
> latest research.
>
> To believe that Flew has been exploited is not to conclude that his
> exploiters acted with malice. If Flew in his dotage was a bit gullible,
> Varghese had a gullibility of his own. An autodidact with no academic
> credentials, Varghese was clearly thrilled to be taken seriously by an
> Oxford-trained philosopher; it may never have occurred to him that so
> educated a mind could be in decline. Habermas, too, speaks of Flew with
> a genuine reverence and seems proud of the friendship.
>
> Intellectuals, even more than the rest of us, like to believe that they
> reach conclusions solely through study and reflection. But like the
> rest of us, they sometimes choose their opinions to suit their friends
> rather than the other way around. Which means that Flew is likely to
> remain a theist, for just as the Christians drew him close, the
> atheists gave him up for lost. He once was a great philosopher,
> Richard Dawkins, the Oxford biologist and author of The God Delusion,
> told a Virginia audience last year. Its very sad. Paul Kurtz of
> Prometheus Books says he thinks Flew is being exploited. Theyre
> misusing him, Kurtz says, referring to the Christians. Theyre
> worried about atheists, and theyre trying to find an atheist to be on
> their side.
>
> They found one, and with less difficulty than atheists would have
> guessed. From the start, the believers affection for Antony Flew was
> not unrequited. When Flew met Christians who claimed to have new,
> scientific proof of the existence of God, he quickly became again the
> young graduate student who embarked on a study of the paranormal when
> all his colleagues were committed to strict rationalism. He may, too,
> have connected with the child who was raised in his parents warm,
> faithful Methodism. Flews colleagues will wonder how he could sign a
> petition to the prime minister in favor of intelligent design, but it
> becomes more understandable if the signatory never hated religious
> belief the way many philosophers do and if he never hated religious
> people in the least. At a time when belief in God is more polarizing
> than it has been in years, when all believers are being blamed for
> religions worst excesses, Antony Flew has quietly switched sides, just
> following the evidence as it has been explained to him, blissfully
> unaware of what others have at stake.
>
> [Mark Oppenheimer is coordinator of the Yale Journalism Initiative and
> editor of The New Haven Review. He last wrote for the magazine about
> the Hollywood acting coach Milton Katselas.]
>
>
>
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