There Is a God

Antony Flew, Roy Abraham Varghese

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061758171
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Filosofía de la religión

In one of the biggest religion news stories of the new millennium, the Associated Press announced that Professor Antony Flew, the world's leading atheist, now believes in God.

Flew is a pioneer for modern atheism. His famous paper, Theology and Falsification, was first presented at a meeting of the Oxford Socratic Club chaired by C. S. Lewis and went on to become the most widely reprinted philosophical publication of the last five decades. Flew earned his fame by arguing that one should presuppose atheism until evidence of a God surfaces. He now believes that such evidence exists, and There Is a God chronicles his journey from staunch atheism to believer.

For the first time, this book will present a detailed and fascinating account of Flew's riveting decision to revoke his previous beliefs and argue for the existence of God. Ever since Flew's announcement, there has been great debate among atheists and believers alike about what exactly this "conversion" means. There Is a God will finally put this debate to rest.

This is a story of a brilliant mind and reasoned thinker, and where his lifelong intellectual pursuit eventually led him: belief in God as designer.

PART I

MY DENIAL OF THE DIVINE

1

THE CREATION OF AN ATHEIST

I was not always an atheist. I began life quite religiously. I was raised in a Christian home and attended a private Christian school. In fact, I am the son of a preacher.

My father was a product of Merton College, Oxford, and a minister of religion in the Wesleyan Methodist rather than the established church, the Church of England. Although his heart remained always in evangelism and, as Anglicans would say, in parish work, my own earliest memories of him are as tutor in New Testament studies at the Methodist theological college in Cambridge. Later he succeeded the head of that college and was to eventually retire and die in Cambridge. In addition to the basic scholarly and teaching duties of these offices, my father undertook a great deal of work as a Methodist representative in various interchurch organizations. He also served one-year terms as president of both the Methodist Conference and the Free Church Federal Council.

I would be hard-pressed to isolate or identify any signs in my boyhood of my later atheist convictions. In my youth, I attended Kingswood School in Bath, known informally as K.S. It was, and happily still remains, a public boarding school (an institution of a kind that everywhere else in the English-speaking world would be described, paradoxically, as a private boarding school). It had been founded by John Wesley, founder of the Methodist Church, for the education of the sons of his preachers. (A century or more after the foundation of Kingswood School, Queenswood School was founded in order to accommodate the daughters of Methodist preachers in the appropriately egalitarian way.)

I entered Kingswood as a committed and conscientious, if unenthusiastic, Christian. I could never see the point of worship and have always been far too unmusical to enjoy or even participate in hymn singing. I never approached any religious literature with the same unrestrained eagerness with which I consumed books on politics, history, science, or almost any other topic. Going to chapel or church, saying prayers, and all other religious practices were for me matters of more or less weary duty. Never did I feel the slightest desire to commune with God.

Why I should be—from my earliest memory—generally uninterested in the religious practices and issues that so shaped my father’s world I cannot say. I simply don’t recall feeling any interest or enthusiasm for such observances. Nor do I think I ever felt my mind enchanted or “my heart strangely warmed,” to use Wesley’s famous phrase, in Christian study or worship. Whether my youthful lack of enthusiasm for religion was a cause or effect—or both—who can say? But I can say that whatever faith I had when I entered K.S. was gone by the time I finished.

A THEORY OF DEVOLUTION

I am told that the Barna Group, a prominent Christian demographic polling organization, concluded from its surveys that in essence what you believe by the time you are thirteen is what you will die believing. Whether or not this finding is correct, I do know that the beliefs I formed in my early teenage years stayed with me for most of my adult life.

Just how and when the change began, I cannot remember precisely. But certainly, as with any thinking person, multiple factors combined in the creation of my convictions. Not the least among these factors was what Immanuel Kant called “an eagerness of mind not unbecoming to scholarship,” which I believe I shared with my father. Both he and I were disposed to follow the path of “wisdom” as Kant described it: “It is wisdom that has the merit of selecting, from among innumerable problems that present themselves, those whose solution is important to humankind.” My father’s Christian convictions persuaded him that there could be nothing more “important to humankind” than the elucidation, propagation, and implementation of whatever is in truth the teaching of the New Testament. My intellectual journey took me in a different direction, of course, but one that was no less marked by the eagerness of mind I shared with him.

I also recall being most beneficially reminded by my father on more than one occasion that when biblical scholars want to become familiar with some peculiar Old Testament concept, they do not try to find an answer simply by thinking it through on their own. Instead, they collect and examine, with as much context as they can find, all available contemporary examples of the employment of the relevant Hebrew word. This scholarly approach in many ways formed the basis of my earliest intellectual explorations—and one I have yet to abandon—of collecting and examining, in context, all relevant information on a given subject. It is ironic, perhaps, that the household in which I grew up very likely instilled in me the enthusiasm for critical investigation that would eventually lead me to reject my father’s faith.

THE FACE OF EVIL

I have said in some of my later atheist writings that I reached the conclusion about the nonexistence of God much too quickly, much too easily, and for what later seemed to me the wrong reasons. I reconsidered this negative conclusion at length and often, but for nearly seventy years thereafter I never found grounds sufficient to warrant any fundamental reversal. One of those early reasons for my conversion to atheism was the problem of evil.

My father took my mother and me on annual summer holidays abroad. Although these would not have been affordable on a minister’s salary, they were made possible because my father often spent the early part of summer examining for the Higher School Certificate Examinations Board (now called A-level examinations) and had been paid for that work. We were also able to travel abroad cheaply since my father was fluent in German after two years of theological study in the University of Marburg before World War I. He was thus able to take us on holiday in Germany, and once or twice in France, without having to spend money on a travel agent. My father was also appointed to serve as the representative of Methodism at several international theological conferences. To these he took me, an only child, and my mother as nonparticipating guests.

I was greatly influenced by these early travels abroad during the years before World War II. I vividly recall the banners and signs outside small towns proclaiming, “Jews not wanted here.” I remember signs outside the entrance to a public library proclaiming, “The regulations of this institution forbid the issuing of any books to Jewish borrowers.” I observed a march of ten thousand brown-shirted storm troopers through a Bavarian summer night. Our family travels exposed me to squads of the Waffen-SS in their black uniforms with skull-and-crossbones caps.

Such experiences sketched the background of my youthful life and for me, as for many others, presented an inescapable challenge to the existence of an all-powerful God of love. The degree to which they influenced my thinking I cannot measure. If nothing else, these experiences awoke in me a lifelong awareness of the twin evils of anti-Semitism and totalitarianism.

AN ENORMOUSLY LIVELY PLACE

To grow up during the 1930s and the 1940s in such a household as ours—aligned as it was to the Methodist denomination—was to be in Cambridge, but not of it. For a start, theology was not then and there accepted as the “queen of the sciences,” as it had been in other institutions. Nor was a ministerial training college any sort of mainstream university. As a result, I never identified with Cambridge, although my father felt quite at home there. In any case, from 1936, when I started boarding school, I was almost never in Cambridge during term time.

Nevertheless, Kingswood was in my day an enormously lively place, presided over by a man who surely deserved to be rated one of the great headmasters. In the year before I arrived, it had won more open awards at Oxford and Cambridge than any other Headmasters’ Conference school. Nor was our liveliness confined to the classroom and the laboratory.

No one should be surprised that, placed in this stirring environment, I began to question the firm faith of my fathers, a faith to which I had never felt any strong emotional attachment. By the time I was in the upper sixth form at K.S. (the lower sixth, incidentally, is equivalent to the eleventh grade in America and the upper sixth to the twelfth grade), I was regularly arguing with fellow sixth formers that the idea of a God who is both omnipotent and perfectly good is incompatible with the manifest evils and imperfections of the world. In my time at K.S., the regular Sunday sermon never contained any reference to a future life in either heaven or hell. When the headmaster, A. B. Sackett, was the preacher, which was infrequent, his message always concerned the wonders and glories of nature. At any rate, by the time I reached my fifteenth birthday, I rejected the thesis that the universe was created by an all-good, all-powerful God.

One might well ask if I never thought to consult my clergyman father about my doubts regarding the existence of God. I never did. For the sake of domestic peace and, in particular, in order to spare my father, I tried for as long as I could to conceal from everyone at home my irreligious conversion. I succeeded in this, as far as I know, for a good many years.

But by January 1946, when I was nearly twenty-three, the word had gotten out—and back to my parents—that I was both an atheist and a mortalist (a disbeliever in life after death) and that it was unlikely there would be any going back. So total and firm was my change, that it was thought futile to engage in any discussion on the matter at home. However, today, well over half a century later, I can say that my father would be hugely delighted by my present view on the existence of a God—not least because he would consider this a great help to the cause of the Christian church.

A DIFFERENT OXFORD

From Kingswood, I went on to Oxford University. I arrived at Oxford in the Hilary (January to March) term of 1942. World War II was in progress, and on one of my first days as an eighteen-year-old undergraduate, I was medically examined and then officially recruited into the Royal Air Force. During those wartime days, almost all physically fit male undergraduates spent one day of every term-time week in the appropriate service organization. In my case, this was the Oxford University Air Squadron.

This military service, which was part-time for one year and full-time thereafter, was entirely noncombatant. It involved learning some Japanese at the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University and thereafter translating intercepted and deciphered Japanese army air force signals at Bletchley Park. After Japan surrendered (and while awaiting my turn for demobilization), I worked at translating intercepted signals from the newly constructed French army of occupation in what was then West Germany.

When I returned to full-time studies at the University of Oxford early in January 1946 and was due to take my final examination in the summer of 1947, the Oxford to which I returned was a very different place. It seemed a much more exciting institution than the one I had left nearly three years earlier. There was also a greater variety of both peacetime careers and actual military careers now safely completed than there had been after World War I. I was myself reading for a degree in the final Honors School of Literae Humaniores, and some of my lectures on the history of classical Greece were given by veterans who had been active in assisting the Greek resistance either in Crete or on the Greek mainland, making the lectures more romantic and stimulating to an undergraduate audience.

I took my final examinations in the summer term of 1947. To my surprise and delight, I was awarded a First (the U.K. expression for passing your undergraduate examinations with first-class honors). On receiving this, I went back to John Mabbott, my personal tutor at St. John’s College. I told him that I had abandoned my previous goal of working for a second undergraduate degree in the then newly established School of Philosophy and Psychology. I now intended to start working for a higher degree in philosophy.

WAXING PHILOSOPHIC

Mabbott arranged for me to engage in postgraduate philosophical studies under the supervision of Gilbert Ryle, who was then the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at the University of Oxford. Ryle, in the second term of the academic year 1947–48, was the senior of Oxford’s three philosophy chairs.

It was only many years later that I learned from Mabbott’s captivating book Oxford Memories that Mabbott and Ryle had been friends since they first met at Oxford. Had I been at a different college and had I been asked by a different college tutor which of the three possible professional supervisors I would have preferred, I would certainly have chosen Henry Price, because of our shared interest in what is now known as parapsychology but was then still called psychical research. As it was, my first book was entitled A New Approach to Psychical Research, and Price and I became speakers at conferences concerned with psychical research. But I am sure I would not have won the university prize in philosophy in an exceptionally strong year, had my graduate studies been supervised by Henry Price. We would have spent too much of our time talking about our common interests.

After devoting the academic year 1948 to reading for a higher degree in philosophy under Ryle’s supervision, I won the aforementioned university prize, the John Locke Scholarship in Mental Philosophy. I was then appointed to what in any other Oxford college but Christ Church would have been called a (probationary) fellowship—that is to say, a full-time teaching job. In the vocabulary of Christ Church, however, I was said to have become a (probationary) student.

During the year I taught at Oxford, the teachings of the noted philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose approach to philosophy would influence my own, entered Oxford. However, these teachings, later published as his Blue Book, Brown Book, and Lectures on Mathematics, came in the form of typescripts of single lectures—and they were accompanied by letters from Wittgenstein indicating to whom the particular lectures might or might not be shown. A colleague and I contrived to produce, without breaking any promise to Wittgenstein, copies of all the Wittgenstein lectures then available in Oxford, so that anyone who wished could read these lectures.

This good end—I write here in the vocabulary of the moral philosophers of that period—was attained by first asking everyone we knew to be actively philosophizing at Oxford at that time whether they possessed any typescripts of Wittgenstein lectures, and if so, which ones. Then, since that was long before photocopiers, we found and hired a typist to produce enough copies to satisfy the demand. (Little did we know that circulating these seminal typescripts only to members of an in-group and then only under vows of secrecy would provoke outsiders to comment that Wittgenstein, who was undoubtedly a philosopher of genius, often behaved like a charlatan pretending to be man of genius!)

Ryle had gotten to know Wittgenstein when the Austrian philosopher had visited Cambridge. Subsequently, Ryle developed a friendship with him, persuading Wittgenstein to join him on a walking tour in the English Lake District in 1930 or 1931. Ryle never published any account of this tour or of what during it he had learned from and about Wittgenstein. But after that tour, and ever after, Ryle acted as a mediator between Wittgenstein and what philosophers call “the external world.”

How necessary that mediation sometimes was may be revealed by the record of a conversation between Wittgenstein, who was Jewish, and his sisters immediately after Hitler’s soldiers had seized control of Austria. Wittgenstein assured his sisters that, because of their close connections with the “main people and families” of the former regime, neither he nor they were in any danger. When later I became a professional teacher of philosophy, I was reluctant to reveal to my pupils that Wittgenstein, whom I and many of my colleagues considered to be a philosophical genius, had been so deluded in practical matters.

I personally witnessed Wittgenstein in action at least once. This was during my time as an undergraduate when Wittgenstein visi...