Antony Flew, the well-known philosopher and atheist who wrote God and Philosophy, seems to have reconsidered theism. Theists have been holding him up as a poster child for conversion. "His change of mind is significant news, not only about his personal journey, but also about the persuasive power of the arguments modern theists have been using to challenge atheistic naturalism," says Craig Hazen, Editor of Philosophia Christi, the journal of the Evangelical Philosophical Society that published an interview with Flew recently. And in the AmericanSpectator S. T. Karnick concludes

From a philosophical perspective, that is all that the theists need: to have the argument back on level ground. It is indeed the correct philosophical position and the right scientific one, and Flew is to be commended for his willingness to "go where the evidence leads." The conclusion is a simple one: Atheists have no greater claim to scientific truth or rationality than theists do. If theists are allowed to argue on the same footing as atheists, it will be better for science and philosophy alike. That makes Antony Flew's recent change of thinking very important indeed.

But does Flew's conversion really help the cause of Theism? Does adding Flew's name to the list of theists make the position any more likely to be true? No doubt some theists think so--it's all about marketing over the truth for some. But a number of interviews reveal Flew to be rather unsure of the specifics or strength of his new-found conviction. And on closer inspection his rationale for accepting Theism seems incredibly weak for a thinker of his stature.

Flew's Theism is really a form of Deism, modeled after Aristotle's conception of a powerful and intelligent prime mover (or even Spinoza's god as impersonal nature itself). His is not the god of a Christianity or Islam. This god is not involved in human affairs and is responsible, according to Flew, for both the good and evil in the world. An AP report quotes Flew:

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... It could be a person in the sense of a being that has intelligence and a purpose, I suppose.

When asked by Habermas, during the Philosophia Christi interview, whether it's true that, on his view, "God hasn?t done anything about evil," he responds, "No, not at all, other than producing a lot of it." He also continues to reject the ideas of immortality and the immaterial soul.

So Flew's conception of god might not be what the theists were hoping for (and certainly not what they're feeding to the flock), but apart from unintentionally lending his name to the cause, has he got any good reasons to support a belief in the existence of a god (some reason for some god)?

According to the story in the Sunday Times (UK)

His doubts began when he read the last chapter of Darwin?s Origin of Species, which suggests all organic beings on Earth had descended from one ?primordial? form. ?Darwin saw that there was a problem with the origin of life,? he says. ?It had to begin with a creature capable of producing creatures that are not always identical to their parents. It is simply out of the question that the first living matter evolved out of dead matter and then developed into an extraordinary, complicated creature of which we have no examples. There must have been some intelligence.?

But Flew never acknowledges the research that has taken place since 1859, or that Darwin was admittedly engaged in spectulation on this point precisely because there was no scientific explanation for abiogenisis at the time. But that was then. What about now?

He remains unimpressed with traditional arguments for the existence of God. But in the Philosophia Christi interview he says,

I think that the most impressive arguments for God?s existence are those that are supported by recent scientific discoveries. I?ve never been much impressed by the kalam cosmological argument, and I don?t think it has gotten any stronger recently. However, I think the argument to Intelligent Design is enormously stronger than it was when I first met it.

Flew's take on the scientific arguments are much weaker than the already insufficient arguments from Intelligent Design. He's impressed with Gerald Schroeder's efforts to reconcile biblical accounts of creation with scientific theories (like those referring to a big bang). But Schroeder's arguments have been examined and refuted here and here and here. Flew also reports, in a letter to Philosophy Now, that "[i]t has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism." He has acknowledged, however, that he is not keeping up with the literature. Richard Carrier reports,

In a letter to me dated 29 December 2004, Flew concedes:

I now realize that I have made a fool of myself by believing that there were no presentable theories of the development of inanimate matter up to the first living creature capable of reproduction.

He blames his error on being "misled" by Richard Dawkins because Dawkins "has never been reported as referring to any promising work on the production of a theory of the development of living matter," even though this is false (e.g., Richard Dawkins and L. D. Hurst, "Evolutionary Chemistry: Life in a Test Tube," Nature 357: pp. 198-199, 21 May 1992) and hardly relevant: it was Flew's responsibility to check the state of the field (there are several books by actual protobiologists published in just the last five years), rather than wait for the chance possibility that one particular evolutionist would write on the subject. Now that he has done what he was supposed to do in the first place, he has retracted his false statement about the current state of protobiological science.

So it is unclear why anyone is taking Flew's Theism seriously. Lacking any grounding in current scientific research in biogenisis, Flew's conversion amounts to no more than the classic response to the question, "How could intelligent mind (or animate matter) arise from unintelligent (and inanimate) matter?" We now know that intelligent systems can arise from natural processes (even if we don't know precisely how it first happened on earth). But our ignorance on this matter is far less than the ignorance with which we confront the question, "How could matter arise from mind?"

Update 3.29.05: See the interesting piece on abiogenesis at evogen

BBC radio interview with former athiest Antony Flew.
Atheist Becomes Theist: Exclusive interview with former Theist Anthony Flew
Philosophy Now: Letter from Antony Flew on Darwinism and Theology
Antony Flew Considers God...Sort Of
Sunday Times Review: In the beginning there was something
ABC News: FAmous Atheist Now Believes in God

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