An Atheist Philosopher reconsiders.

[Pure]

I'm aware of another thread (started by 'she_is'), but it seems to have taken a different turn. So I think this deserves its own thread.

A well known (hitherto) atheist philosopher, Anthony Flew, has reconsidered his position, and leans toward a kind of deism.
I cite two reports, but there are others in msn, AP, etc. There is obviously a large area of agreement (about Flew's new position)in the two cited here, though the authors have different allegiances. I am not posting this as an endorsement of Flew, or in order to promote mainstream Christianity.


Christian report:

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2004/149/51.0.html

Weblog:

Atheist No More, Flew Still Rejects Revelation


{verbatim excerpt}
Antony Flew: Science pretty much proves God's existence

Alister McGrath was more prescient than he knew when he published The Twilight of Atheism earlier this year. One of the most prominent atheists of the last century now says he believes there must be some kind of God, based on scientific evidence. But Antony Flew is careful to say that he's merely a deist, and rejects any notion of a God of revelation.

"I'm thinking of a God very different from the God of the Christian and far and away from the God of Islam, because both are depicted as omnipotent Oriental despots, cosmic Saddam Husseins," he told the Associated Press. "It could be a person in the sense of a being that has intelligence and a purpose, I suppose."

The Associated Press interview is based on a new DVD where Flew describes his change of mind. But those interested will certainly want to check out Philosophia Christi's interview between Flew and Liberty University's Gary Habermas."I don't believe in the God of any revelatory system, although I am open to that. But it seems to me that the case for an Aristotelian God who has the characteristics of power and also intelligence, is now much stronger than it ever was before," Flew says.

{end verbatim excerpt}

-------
Secularist report

R. Carrier
http://www.secweb.org/asset.asp?AssetID=369

{verbatim excerpt, from Carrier's website, regarding Flew's change of mind and some related correspondence of Carrier and Flew}

Flew has now given me permission to quote him directly. I asked him point blank what he would mean if he ever asserted that "probably God exists," to which he responded (in a letter in his own hand, dated 19 October 2004):


I do not think I will ever make that assertion, precisely because any assertion which I am prepared to make about God would not be about a God in that sense ... I think we need here a fundamental distinction between the God of Aristotle or Spinoza and the Gods of the Christian and the Islamic Revelations.

Rather, he would only have in mind "the non-interfering God of the people called Deists--such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin." Indeed, he remains adamant that "theological propositions can neither be verified nor falsified by experience," exactly as he argued in "Theology and Falsification." Regarding J. P. Moreland using Flew in support of Moreland's own belief in the supernatural, Flew says "my God is not his. His is Swinburne's. Mine is emphatically not good (or evil) or interested in human conduct" and does not perform miracles of any kind.

Furthermore, Flew took great care to emphasize repeatedly to me that:

My one and only piece of relevant evidence [for an Aristotelian God] is the apparent impossibility of providing a naturalistic theory of the origin from DNA of the first reproducing species ... [In fact] the only reason which I have for beginning to think of believing in a First Cause god is the impossibility of providing a naturalistic account of the origin of the first reproducing organisms.

{end verbatim excerpt, secular website}

 

[dr_mabeuse]

I know where he’s coming from. It’s the argument of Intelligent Design which looks at the complexity of life and sees things so apparently un-random that they’re hard to account for in terms of evolutionary theory and seem to argue for a directing intelligence operating behind the scenes.

Flew cites DNA, which personally I don’t think is complicated enough to qualify as an argument for a directing intelligence. It’s when you look at DNA in conjunction with, say, the very complex proteins and ancillary enzymes necessary for replication and gene expression that it gets kind of hard to explain this all as the result of random evolution.

There are lots of examples of this on the macro scale as well, especially in the insect world: organisms whose behavior is so complex and involves such a confluence of interdependent variables that it seems hard to see how these things could have developed randomly. Take the example of those wasps that lay their eggs on caterpillars they paralyze with a specific enzyme in their stings that keep the carterpillars alive until the eggs can hatch. It doesn’t make any sense for the wasp to develop the enzyme unless it already has the egg-laying-on-caterpillar behavior, and it’s useless to have the egg-laying behavior unless the wasp already has the enzyme. The odds of wasps randomly developing both at the same time as evolution would have us believe are simply astronomical and beyond mere chance. It seems to argue for the existence of a guiding intelligence.

Personally, I use Occam’s razor on this issue and believe that it’s our understanding of evolution that’s at fault, rather than believe that God’s a wasp engineer. I believe that we’re already seeing signs that the world of life is a lot more sloppy and interdependent than we imagine. They’re finding that all sorts of organisms are exchanging genetic material all the time. The ocean, soil, and even the air are filled with bits of cast-off DNA known as plasmids, and no one knows why. It looks more and more now that we’re all in communication with each other: bugs to man, plants to animals, bacteria to elephants. The wasps’s enzyme might be no more than a modified strand of DNA it got from the caterpillar in the first place.

And if you think that’s something, there’s also some fascinating work being done on the role of clays in the evolution of early life. It seems that clays are actually pretty complex substances whose surfaces can act as templates for the assembly of proteins and other complex biomolecules. So it looks like the Bible story about God making Adam from clay might not be that far off the mark.

---dr.M.

 

[English Lady]

This is really interesting (Thank you Pure and DrM) I think that the problem alot of people have with God is the religions built up around God Doesn't fit the bill to them.

fair dinkum say I. Faith is a personal thing and anyone discovering God is a beautiful thing



Anyhow I am terribly scientifically inept so I'll just sit back and read what those who do know something about it say

 

[dr_mabeuse]

My one and only piece of relevant evidence [for an Aristotelian God] is the apparent impossibility of providing a naturalistic theory of the origin from DNA of the first reproducing species ... [In fact] the only reason which I have for beginning to think of believing in a First Cause god is the impossibility of providing a naturalistic account of the origin of the first reproducing organisms.

{end verbatim excerpt, secular website}

Well I don’t know about that. (Sorry to be tedious, but I love this stuff)

It’s pretty straightforward to go from DNA to viruses, which are nothing more than a bunch of DNA enclosed in a protein shell, and we know that simple proteins can come about from the action of heat and light on soups of amino acids, and amino acids seem to be pretty common. Some have even been found in meteors from space. So that’s not a very big step at all.

Getting from viruses to eucaryotic cells (cells with nuclei) takes a bigger step, but it looks now that our cells are collections of little organelles that were once free-living organisms who kind of infiltrated our cells and struck up a symbiotic bargain with us. Certainly that’s true of the mitrochondria we have in every cell of our body, which are known to have been free-living organisms (to this day they have their own, separate DNA and reproduce on their own, separate from the cell. They makes their way into the new cell when the cell splits. All our mitochondrial DNA comes only from our mothers, which is why they talk about tracing life back to a primordial ‘Eve’)

In any case, it looks like our cells are more like busy little hives composed of friendly strangers then they are like stand-alone, independent machines made in one fell swoop. Symbiosis, where two or more organisms kind of fuse together to help each other out, is at least as common in biology as competition, a fact we’re just getting around to realizing. Life in earth is a big gemisch.

In any case, if this guy thinks life is too complicated to be explained without positing the existence of God, where does he think God came from?

That’s the main problem with invoking God to explain the existence of the universe: it just basically begs the question.

---dr.M.

 

[English Lady]

Re: Re: An Atheist Philosopher reconsiders.

In any case, if this guy thinks life is too complicated to be explained without positing the existence of God, where does he think God came from?

That’s the main problem with invoking God to explain the existence of the universe: it just basically begs the question.

---dr.M.

But surely thats the point. The guy's come to a point where the only way to sort it out in his head is to say there is a good chance there is a God. It's like "well I'll be blowed if I can see any other way of explaining it!" and God is added in because nothing more seems to be explainable.

Or something like that I think*L*

 

[Joe Wordsworth]

Prime Cause, Unmoved Mover, etc. works.

 

[cantdog]

Montreal artist.

 

[group4570]

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[cantdog]

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[Pure]

Dr M: //In any case, if this guy thinks life is too complicated to be explained without positing the existence of God, where does he think God came from?

That's the main problem with invoking God to explain the existence of the universe: it just basically begs the question.//

Good point.

Iirc, Aristotle had several prime movers, ten or so. Intuitively I see sort of how the reasoning goes. There can't be 'infinite regress. It has to start somewhere. But as dr m says, how to explain that first day when God got up and betook himself to create the universe 5 billion years ago-- or was it 4000BC or thereabout as some fundamentalists think, and some orthodox Jews.

Another version: Even if there is an infinite chain of causes, what's the cause or ground of the whole chain?

OTOH, moving to another dimension as it were, opens a large door one may not want opened. Sort of like saying: "OK, my hat wasn't lost, it was stolen by elves." Well, next time my keys aren't found, I 'know' that cause, and my mom adds that fairies once stole her shoes. etc.

---
I think Flew' clarifications elicited by Carrier, the uneasy secularist, are interesting. Flew rejects most fundamental claims of Christian theology, Jewish and Islamic religious thought. He sees no evidence of something working toward good, let alone something that can care about us or be influenced in any way.

Dr. M, I don't know if you ever read Flew, but he is famous for arguing that religious claims generally have no conditions of falsifiability, and hence are essentially meaningless or too vague to make sense of. *Flew says he still buys all those arguments.*

For instance, did God do a miracle at x time in y place? Will He do one tomorrow, and save my dying relative? Flew points out that NOTHING counts against these claims: in the former case: Can we see the hand of God in history? Did it, for instance save Reagan from dying when he was shot by Hinkley? Well, then, why wasn't Lincoln saved? In simple terms, the Christian theologian is an utter opportunist, looking for only one thing, dismissing others that don't fit.

In the latter case, I say, when a prayer fails, if devout, "I asked God to save my relative, *but he obviously had other plans, no doubt for the greater good."
In short, as Hume saw, all claims of miracles are bogus, including the supernatural account of the conception or birth of Christ, the assumption of Moses or Elijah into the heavens, etc.

 

[cantdog]

Dr M: //In any case, if this guy thinks life is too complicated to be explained without positing the existence of God, where does he think God came from?

That's the main problem with invoking God to explain the existence of the universe: it just basically begs the question.//

Good point.

Iirc, Aristotle had several prime movers, ten or so. Intuitively I see sort of how the reasoning goes. There can't be 'infinite regress. It has to start somewhere. But as dr m says, how to explain that first day when God got up and betook himself to create the universe 5 billion years ago-- or was it 4000BC or thereabout as some fundamentalists think, and some orthodox Jews.

Another version: Even if there is an infinite chain of causes, what's the cause or ground of the whole chain?

Causality is obviously poorly understood. Only human constructs of the mind do the reductio to absurdity thing. I conlude that causality, understood as a chain, at least, is not true.

The turtle holds the world supported by the four elephants. After that, it's "turtles all the way down."

You just can't buy the chain thing on it's merits, stated as a chain relationship. And we experience a lot of dimensions all the time. The explanation is faulty.

Try a new explanation, don't invent phlogiston gods to make the chain all better.

 

[Pure]

dr m, I think this essay of Carrier is quite good, on the problem of the odds against life, and the nonsense written on the topic.

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/addendaB.html

Addendum B: Are the Odds Against the Origin of Life Too Great to Accept?

 

[lewdandlicentious]

Typical bloody humans, have to analyse everything!

Just leave it!

 

[dr_mabeuse]

I think the qualifications elicited by the uneasy secularist are interesting. Flew rejects most fundamental claims of Christian theology, Jewish and Islamic religious thought. He sees no evidence of something working toward good, let alone something that can care about us or be influenced in any way.

Yeah. As I understand it, Intelligent Design theory doesn't really say anything about the designer's ethical or moral code manifesting itself in creation. It's totally non-moral. It's simply an attempt to deal with some very knotty problems in evolutionary biology. Intelligent Design advocates don't even deny that working of natural selection. They just say something intelligent had to originally put it into motion.

But I don't see how you can believe in a designer and not believe in a purpose behind the design. I mean, otherwise what's the pupose of designing something in the first place? And if there's a purpose behind the design, then that implies morality. Morality is anything that's in accord with the purpose, and immorality anything that's against it.

---dr.M.

 

[Pure]

I watch my kid build something for amusement. Then she cannibalizes it for another project. Simply change the timescale.

 

[cantdog]

All this was said brilliantly in a biting little short short in the very first Dangerous Visions collection.

"Encounter with a Hick" by Jonathan Brand. Three pages of brilliant blather.

To think the creator of the universe is necessarily morally superior to man, Brand says, is as naïve as to think that the builder of skyscrapers is greater than the carpenter because his product is larger.

Yet the "first cause" argument gets brought up over and over. Just to suck in the naïve, I suppose. An example of Christian morality. Let's lie and it'll help convert suckers. Great.

 

[Joe Wordsworth]

Originally posted by dr_mabeuse
Yeah. As I understand it, Intelligent Design theory doesn't really say anything about the designer's ethical or moral code manifesting itself in creation. It's totally non-moral.

Very true. That's it.

 

[nushu2]

I consider myself unqualified to make any decisions about a higher intelligence (sarcasm intended) but here's a little brain teaser for you. It'll take some reverse thinking.

Instead of thinking of our 4 dimensional world as linear or scalar, consider that each added dimension is another level of abstraction. What we know of the world would only our understanding of the abstraction. If we were to peel away each dimension until we reached 0 dimensions, we would be omniscient. Unfortunately, being 4 dimensional abstractions, ourselves, that isn't possible.

If that sounds weird, it is, and it's a wild leap of interpretation of a branch of mathematics called topology.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

I consider myself unqualified to make any decisions about a higher intelligence (sarcasm intended) but here's a little brain teaser for you. It'll take some reverse thinking.

Instead of thinking of our 4 dimensional world as linear or scalar, consider that each added dimension is another level of abstraction. What we know of the world would only our understanding of the abstraction. If we were to peel away each dimension until we reached 0 dimensions, we would be omniscient. Unfortunately, being 4 dimensional abstractions, ourselves, that isn't possible.

If that sounds weird, it is, and it's a wild leap of interpretation of a branch of mathematics called topology.

Hey nushu--

Have you read "Flatland" by Edwin Abbott?

---dr.M.

 

[cantdog]

dr m, I think this essay of Carrier is quite good, on the problem of the odds against life, and the nonsense written on the topic.

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/addendaB.html

Addendum B: Are the Odds Against the Origin of Life Too Great to Accept?

Holy shit, pure! This is heavy ass. Do you read this stuff all the time?

I notice that none of the break points seem to be unassailable, as far as I've gone in it. The kicker with the origin of life is how fuckin fast it goes, from the point where the cooling mass acquires a surface to the emergence of replicating amino acids and complex proteins. All theoretical, of course, since the fossil record begins with the Cambrian and the incredible variety of heterogenous phyla. The cellular record goes further back, but postulates a wide variety, too. Punctuated equilibrium teaches us that the characteristic speed of change in this area is pretty darn fast, given real challenge to the organism. But that's once you already have DNA-based life.

I never saw the hand of the watchmaker, myself, but this is a fascinating article or compendium of articles. But dayum, son. Heavy reading.

 

[nushu2]

Hey nushu--

Have you read "Flatland" by Edwin Abbott?

---dr.M.

No, I've heard about it and looked for it in a couple of bookstores but haven't found it.

 

[amicus]

Intelligent Design theory is simply another branch of "Creationism" advocates attempting to get religion in the curriculum of public schools. There are court case now ongoing in several states according to a cable news channel just this evening.

amicus...

 

[nushu2]

Intelligent design is nondenominational but I do see a problem with the separation of church and state as far as teaching it in schools. As a science, I can only see circumstantial evidence, which means that it isn't a science at all. Statistically, if an amino acid doesn't form into a cell in a lab for a billion years, we need a billion labs.

It bothers me just as much when someone takes every word of the bible literally as science teachers teaching electrons as tiny balls. Both were intended as analogies in many ways.

Faith and science are not entirely contradictory. Ask Einstein. As long as we continue to question both, I see no basis for argument. You know what I mean?

 

[amicus]

Nushus....

I tend to think that science and faith are basically contradictory, as one means to seek truth and one mean to accept dogma.

Were it not for the basic wrong assumption that a supreme being exists, religion would have no base.

 

[~hellbaby~]

This is really interesting (Thank you Pure and DrM) I think that the problem alot of people have with God is the religions built up around God Doesn't fit the bill to them.

fair dinkum say I. Faith is a personal thing and anyone discovering God is a beautiful thing

Anyhow I am terribly scientifically inept so I'll just sit back and read what those who do know something about it say

Organized religion, like every other income producing entity is designed in whatever way will be most accepted,thus bringing people into churches and putting into the offering basket.The Catholic church has reinterpreted the bible over and over to suite their needs over the centuries. God sells, and offers a safe house for men(and women)with sexual perversions where if they were lay people incarceration would be a given. Judging by the way the (Catholic)church has consistantly covered up for decades pedo. and rape of minors how can anyone say that is what "god" wants? Organized religion is not set up for the interest of god, only for the interest of those who set it up.
It is a given that we came from somewhere. Evolution is all good and fair as is the Adam and Eve theory. The bottom line is even in evolution, some one or thing had to make the elements or the space or the galaxy.You can mind fuck yourself over it to no end but there is a being or force greater than us,call it whaterver you wish, but it is there. The big question is who made that entitiy, your 'god' your higher power....Where did that come from.
{{Just my opinion,thats all and I was raised Catholic }}