You may or may not have heard of Antony Flew. He's a philosopher and well known atheist, who has recently had a very public recantation, and apparently embraced a form of deism. Deism is usually taken to mean a belief in God through personal experience of the divine, rather than through revealed scripture. The term also embraces people like Einstein, who was in the habit of making vague and frankly rather pointless remarks about God being in the beauty of the physical universe, without necessarily being a conscious being.
This last argument is surely one of the feeblest ever offered in the field, being analagous to the claim that one's football team has won if they've played elegantly and entertainingly, even if the other side scored more actual goals. The most straightforward refutation of it is the argument by expostulation, which in its most concise form can be stated as Why don't you just fuck off? I remain unclear as to which part of Einstein's position survives that simple rebuttal.
Flew now appears to believe that God really does exist, but that He doesn't speak through the Bible, the Koran or any of humanity's other millstones. This conversion happened some time after his 80th birthday. To be honest, his change of opinion makes little difference either way, as people move from one side of the argument to the other all the time. It's a shame, but not a tragedy.
What is tragic is the way Flew is being used. A book has been published under his name, 'with' one Roy Abraham Varghese, called There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind. It has since emerged that Varghese actually wrote most of the book himself, and his evangelical ally Bob Hosteteler wrote the rest. All Flew did was approve the proofs. This would be normal practice for a celebrity biography, but for a distinguished philosopher with many published books under his belt it's a little odd, to say the least.
More seriously, it has been alleged by Richard Carrier that the book itself contains evidence of Flew's mental deterioration with advancing age, especially when combined with an interview by Mark Oppenheimer for the New York Times, and that many of the arguments it contains have previously been refuted by Flew himself. In other words, not only have Varghese and Hosteteler taken advantage of an increasingly confused old man to stick his name on the cover of their book, it may well be that the book is of such poor quality as to seriously undermine Flew's academic standing among philosophers, whichever side of the debate they may be on.
Since I first started sounding off about the God squad in here, I've actually been a little shocked by some of the things they've been prepared to do. Quite apart from my own relatively trivial experience of censored debate, Christians have spliced together video footage of Richard Dawkins from different sources and rearranged it to make him appear unable to answer simple questions, Islamic clerics faked some of the cartoons which started that whole Danish farrago, and statements made in the course of debate are routinely misused in ways that must be understood to be deceitful by any even vaguely intelligent person. And that's before we get onto the hotels, the cocaine and the rent boys. Although to be fair, and to paraphrase Dylan Moran slightly, if you do find yourself in a hotel with some rent boys, what else are you supposed to offer them?
Still, there are limits. I'm no saint myself. I'm often snide for the purposes of entertainment, I like a drink, I get a bit tetchy from time to time. But I wouldn't ever do the things they do. Obviously I've never had cocaine and rent boys in a hotel room - I go camping - but also I've never indulged in any of the intellectual chicanery mentioned above. I suppose opportunities to misrepresent bewildered elderly philosophers are rare, and I can't point to any evidence of temptation resisted, but I still feel reasonably confident that in the event I'd rise above it. And so would you. These are no high claims that I make, they're the everyday stuff of ordinary decent folk like us. These other people though, these holy rollers - how do they live with themselves?
