There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, by Antony Flew

He brought light out of darkness, not out of a lesser light; he can bring thy Summer out of Winter, though thou have no Spring; though in the ways of fortune, or understanding, or conscience, thou have been benighted till now, wintered and frozen, clouded and eclipsed, damped and benumbed, smothered and stupefied till now, now God comes to thee, not as in the dawning of the day, not as in the bud of the spring, but as the Sun at noon …
—John Donne, LXXX. Sermons (2), 1640

ONE ASPECT of Antony Flew’s work stands out above all others: his uncompromising search for that which is the case, for things which are, for the ultimate truths about the world and us. This theme is of over-riding importance in any evaluation of his written output. It also matters in relation to his lectures or even to his conversation, for those who have listened to him. His latest book is a frank account of how one of the great philosophers of modern times has made his way to God. He now suggests that contemporary cosmological arguments for God are sustainable, effectively that Aquinas and Aristotle were not wrong that a living mind of infinite power stands outside what He has willed into being. Flew is even more enthusiastic over modern versions of the argument from design. Whether he will ultimately make his way into Christianity is not clear, as he admits. He notes, however, that Christianity is incomparably the greatest of the religions, with its matchlessly charismatic founder and the intellectual genius of St Paul on hand to theorise the ministry and propagate the faith.

Perhaps humans are predisposed to believe in a Deity. Flew mentions the American Thomist Ralph McInerny, who argues that belief in God is natural in view of the “order, arrangement and law-like character of natural events”. Some philosophers do indeed hold that belief in God is implanted in us by the Deity Himself. This preoccupation with natural belief, be it noted, was the view at the core of Edmund Burke’s political and religious outlook and of the moral philosophy of his friend Adam Smith. So intelligences of the very first order have been persuaded by this line of reasoning.

This is not, however, the main orientation of this book. It is in fact developments in science, and in the philosophy of science, which most move Antony Flew. Indeed, after reading Flew’s text, with its riveting accounts of the manifest deism of many of the great scientists of modernity, and the two splendid annexes— one by Roy Abraham Varghese, on the new scientific atheists of the Richard Dawkins stripe, and the second an equally fine material defence of the Resurrection, by the Bishop of Durham—one wonders if we are entering a period of relative closure on this question, not from bigotry but from the evidence overwhelming the very grounds of atheism. By the early 1980s, Flew observes, the cosmologists were beginning to embarrass philosophical atheism by their demonstration that the universe had a beginning, a demonstration which Thomas Aquinas had specifically claimed to be impossible. Science has now changed all that.

Flew begins with some charming biography. His father was a successful Methodist biblical scholar and an active evangelist. Antony was a believing Christian as a youth but never very engaged. His parents took him on the continent in his adolescence, including a visit to 1930s Germany, where he saw the horrors of Nazism taking shape. He was from early days a communist and remained a radical socialist until the 1950s, but was saved from the mistake of joining the Communist Party by his indignation over the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. His political migration towards a defence of the market economy and limited and patriotic government under the rule of law, was accomplished much earlier than his philosophical migration to theism, but in my view is part of the same odyssey.

For most of his teaching and writing life Flew has enjoyed a vast academic reputation. He is always open to correction, indeed congenitally disposed to selfcorrection. This befits a man proud of his intellect but with little trace of personal vanity. Take his attitude to Hume, manifestly a powerful influence on the rise of modern religious scepticism. Hume was what today we would call a sceptical agnostic, who believed the existence or non-existence of God to be a question of fact, not pursuable by mere reflection, with the facts simply not available. Flew is perhaps the world’s leading Hume scholar. Despite the praise showered on his 1961 book Hume’s Philosophy of Belief, Flew now tells us that he has long wanted to revise three chapters in this book in terms of the inadequacies of Hume’s approach to causality.

Readers will remember that Hume famously denied the observations we all have of apparent cause and effect. The repeated conjunction of sequential phenomena does not mean a causal nexus, according to Hume. Flew now has radical doubts about this rejection of causation, noting that Hume himself did not stick to it outside his philosophical enquiries. Hume’s denial of regular causality was left behind when he stepped out of the house, or wrote historical narrative. An even better example, the demonstration of a causal nexus to end them all in social science, is Hume’s virtual invention of the quantity theory of money, his assertion that variations in the quantity of present money are followed by (“cause”?) subsequent variations in the level of prices, of which proposition Sam Brittan declared that in its wake Keynes and Friedman were no more than the footnotes.

Flew detects the same inconsistent disposition as Hume’s, at a hugely inferior level one would add, in the various cults of modern political correctness. According to these cults, power structures alone determine intellectual hierarchies. Such cults appeal to universal relativism, which denies any substantive superiority in the cognitive hierarchies of sex, race, culture or intellectual subject-matter. Such hierarchies reflect, says the relativist credo, not genuine excellence but various power structures: white, male, European and so on. Accompanying these strange conceits is a moralistic attack, involving absolute and unqualified condemnation of all such hierarchies. Just as in the case of Hume, the exponents of political correctness deny causality in one case and affirm it in another. They believe there are political causes of cognitive hierarchy but not cognitive ones.

The intellectual superiority of Western culture, however, needs no sinister powers to uphold it. A basic knowledge of the comparative facts suffices, as Flew has often opined. The assertion of Western superiority can appeal to its causes. To employ another vocabulary, such superiority resides in achievements. In any event, with regard to Flew’s central theme, his restored belief in God, some distancing from Hume is clearly called for on his part, since causation is at the very heart of the contemporary theist case.

Flew confesses himself powerfully influenced by the writings of David Conway, a Deist philosopher in the tradition of Aristotle and Spinoza, who maintains the deep similarity of the philosophical theologies of Greece and the Judeo-Christian tradition. In both traditions God is conceived as omnipotent, all-knowing and all-powerful, a being of perfect goodness and necessary existence. Flew also recognises his great debt to Richard Swinburne, his professorial successor at Keele and later Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at Oxford. Swinburne has made war against those philosophers who uphold against the idea of the universe, the concept of a multiverse, that is to say an infinity of universes which must by definition include all possible universes, including one or ones like ours, with the otherwise inexplicable feature of matter generating mind. Swinburne has insisted on the excellence in terms of intellectual economy of our resorting to the idea of a single rationally ordered universe, created by God, a God whose will summons into existence matter with the potential for mind.

Flew is generally indebted to the major developments in modern science, crucially the study of genetics. He says that the staggering complexity and subtlety of the workings of DNA overwhelmingly suggest an infinite intelligence at work. It has always seemed weird to me to suggest that matter can evolve mind without a prior mind doing the programming. This claim that the stuff of the universe is mind-stuff is not of course new. I associate it with Arthur Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers, which I read in 1959. I did not read Jeans and Eddington independently, but I remember clearly Koestler’s recourse to these authorities. Flew sums up the current argument through the words of George Wald, who notes the disposition of some thinkers to choose the “impossible” belief “that life arose spontaneously by chance”. We are witnessing what is surely an ironic reversal of the time when the atheistic tide seemed destined to drown the creaking ship of deism. Now it is atheism which is increasingly on the defensive.

IT CAME AS A SURPRISE to me, given my preoccupation with social science, that so much theistic writing has been happening in the hard sciences. It may be that the softer and less exacting realm of sociology has become one of the last retreats of atheism. This is not so much because the subject matter of sociology is straightforward. It is probably the most complicated stuff in the universe; it is because of the wretched inadequacy of the sociology itself. Even if sociology were to shed its postmodernism and its antinomian disposition and its careless addiction to fashion, its improved condition would not necessarily much enhance its explanatory power.

For years a Catholic social scientist like me merely soldiered on, perplexed at times by the tendency of my fellow sociologists to deny the existence of God with the same furious certainty with which they promulgated what they ingenuously took to be the urgent case for multiculturalism. Another of their monstrous errors was the contention that the historical dealings of Britain and the United States, domestic and overseas, deserve only relentless censure. All this reflects the deplorable influence of sub-Marxism. As a breed, social scientists are vastly more hostile to religion than scientists proper. One had known that there was a deplorable intolerance in Marx. Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, by contrast, were mild sceptics, with no contempt for religion, indeed, far from it. But they could not themselves hear the music of the spheres, and they lived long before the scientific advances which today seem so like celebrations of the power of divinity.

Despite the huge differences in their authors’ personalities, the works of Antony Flew have always put me in mind of those of Albert Camus. True, Camus was a libertine while Flew admits quite frankly, in his latest book, to having always practised a strict Christian-style sexual code. Both as young men were involved, however, in the monstrosities of Marxism, just as both soon rejected these youthful excesses. Their political views are very close, especially at the psychological level, the core similarity witnessed in their uncompromising hatred of cruelty and bullying.

Most of all they overlap both in their emotional commitments and in their pursuit of false reckoning. Camus remarks in the opening sentence of his fiery masterpiece, The Rebel, that “there are crimes of passion and crimes of logic”. The apparent banality of these words is soon dissolved in his brilliant dissection of the wickedness, at once fanatical and feebly intellectualised, with which the French socialist intellectuals of his day were promoting the Soviet tyranny, whose menace hung so disconcertingly over Europe and much of Asia in the middle decades of the twentieth century.

The resistance to communism has been a major preoccupation for Flew. His pursuit of a politics appropriate to human dignity is an integral aspect of his search for the ultimate truth of things. He finds the political dignity of the British threatened at its heart by the disgraceful handing over of our politics to the new socialist leviathan in Europe. He has been an uncompromising opponent of all totalitarian politics, including the microversion which is ruining our schools and universities. My point is that the virtuous pursuit of truth can be both passionate and guided by the most scrupulous intellection. Indeed, nowhere is that combination more admirably in evidence than in the work of Antony Flew.

There is one minor conundrum on which I should like to consult Antony Flew. A British Benedictine, a schoolmaster, was heard to proclaim, on being given the news of the fall of Margaret Thatcher, “There is a God after all.” I have tried on a number of occasions to work out just how many improprieties this sentence, uttered in the hearing of his much disconcerted schoolboy listeners, actually contains. I do not know anyone who would find more than Flew would.