Antony Flew (1923 – 2010) was a British philosopher and atheist who is much remembered for his discovery of a principle called the “No True Scotsman Fallacy.” He used to bandy the fallacy about as if it should be the flag and anthem of all true atheists. Simply stated, the No True Scotsman fallacy consists of a claim to counter another claim that proves to be irrational. For example, suppose someone said, “No true Scotsman can be a Catholic.” Someone else says, “I know Fred is truly a Scotsman and truly a Catholic.” The second statement reveals the first one to be a fallacy. But is this always the case?
A Christian might declare that no true Christian can be a mass murderer. An atheist might counter by replying that Hitler was truly baptized a Christian. So according to the No True Scotsman fallacy the first proposition is a fallacy: that is, a truly baptized Christian can be a mass murderer. Yet, in point of fact, being a Christian requires not just being baptized as one, but also living as one. The gospel of Matthew 7:21 makes this clear enough:
Not everyone that says unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter the kingdom of heaven; but he that does the will of my Father,who is in heaven. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy by thy name, and by thy name cast out demons, and by thy name do many mighty works? And then I will profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.
In other words, only Christ is allowed to define who a Christian is. It therefore follows that it would be a fallacy to say that a true Christian can be a mass murderer. Hitler most certainly was not a true Christian; though as a baby having been baptized Christian, he certainly became one of “ye that work iniquity.”
Who Was Antony Flew?
Once described as the world’s most notorious atheist, Flew lost that title some time ago to the likes of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and others strangely dedicated to ending religion worldwide, but especially the legacy of He who preached love for God and one another.
As did Bertrand Russell and Christopher Hitchens, Flew became an atheist at the age of fifteen. Unlike the first two, he would be open minded enough to recognize, however late in life the evidence arrived, that that there was considerably more evidence for God than against. Flew did not believe in the Christian God, nor of course in the divinity of Jesus Christ. He arrived only, like Einstein, at the conviction that there is no merit in atheism and that something one might call God is behind all of Creation. But such a statement would only remind us of the adage from the movie Star Wars: “May the Force be with you.” The Force, like Einstein’s God, cannot qualify as a personal God. Yet strangely enough, Einstein said he wanted to know God’s thoughts.
Truly, Antony Flew can be described at best as a Deist, one who believes in God, but not in a personal God. Deists are a curious breed of thinkers who virtually gag at the thought of a personal God, a God who might create us in His image and likeness, as Genesis puts it. Christians believe that God made us in such a way as to be able to relate to Him, either by accepting His friendship or refusing it. The Deist thinks God did no such thing, that God simply created us, wound us up like a clock, and walked away, indifferent to our fate. Some Deists probably think this easily solves the problem of why God allows monstrous evils to befall humankind. That is, He could care less.
Why Atheism?
In 2007 Flew published There Is a God. This book is a candid account of how he began his career as an atheist. He notes that an earlier book, God and Philosophy (1984), was intended to be a thorough and convincing refutation of all evidence for God. One of the questions raised in that book is how we are to identify who or what God is if we are going to argue that God exists. It is a subject hardly ever discussed, since most arguments are designed first to prove that God exists, and after that follow the arguments for the traits that we may recognize in God. But then he acknowledges Richard Swinburne’s definition of God as a “spirit who is everywhere present, all powerful and all knowing.” Starting there, it is possible to search for whether such a Being exists.
Flew earlier in life had argued that to prove such a Being exists, it is necessary to presume first that It does not exist. In other words, the theist has to prove It exists, but the atheist does not have to disprove It does not exist. Then Flew admits another argument is possible from the writings of Alvin Plantinga: that is, that the human mind naturally knows the existence of the spirit world and God without proof, just as we know the existence of certain mathematical principles that defy proof yet are accepted as true. The universal appearance of religions of one kind or another are proof that something in the human mind reaches out for contact with such a spirit world. Moreover, Flew had earlier contended that the universe is eternal, an assumption for which he could not offer proof, thereby contradicting his own argument that the burden of proof lies on the person making an affirmation, rather than the person making a denial of the affirmation.
What Is God?
Flew, in the year 2004 and after six decades of being an atheist, switched teams, announcing that he had moved from atheism to theism. Some of the reasons provided him for doing this were derived from Gerald Schroeder’s The Science of God. In particular Flew was impressed by the argument from design, which result from refusing to concede that the origin of life, originated by chance. If there is in all things the appearance of design, there must likewise be the appearance of all thing being produced by the Designer.
Next Flew discusses his various duelings with atheist biologist Richard Dawkins, whose notion of the “selfish gene” as the mechanism which controls evolution Flew rejects. Flew insists, as common sense, that genes have no will power or ability to plot a course of evolution that keeps themselves and their species alive and progressing to higher and higher levels of complexity. The term natural selection by way of genes is, for Flew, simply a vulgar misnomer.
Having accepted the likelihood of a superior Mind behind all things, including the creation of the universe, which atheists say is eternal, uncreated, Flew turns his attention to the question of why atheists are so adamantly against the existence of God. Why should they be when modern science increasingly has opened the door to the possibility? But this possibility, according to Flew, arose for him not from religious revelation, but only from the rational inquiry of the nature of the universe, and is tied to three questions:
- How did the laws of nature come to be?
- How did life originate from non-life?
- How did the universe begin to exist?
The answers to these three questions, according to Flew, put him comfortably in the same camp with Albert Einstein, who also declared he was not an atheist and spoke of God as if he had embraced the approach of natural theology. But Einstein and Flew are content to regard God as a Thing, not as a Person. Flew approves Einstein’s description of God in Einstein’s own words:
My religiosity consists in a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.
God or Multiverse?
Flew next considers the atheist’s desperate attempt to eliminate God by the assumption that trillions of universes exist, out of which we may expect to find at least one, our own, that only appears to be designed, but is actually not, because chance would allow the appearance, rather than the reality, of design. This argument Flew rejects and cites the authority of eminent scientists who also reject the idea of a Multiverse of universes. A Multiverse, like a universe, would have to have, and follow, laws of its own, and there would still be no explanation for such laws if not for a God who designed them. Moreover, the postulation of the existence of trillions of universes is not scientifically proven or even feasible. So here again, if for the atheist God is not scientifically feasible, so also the Multiverse is not scientifically feasible as a way to escape the need for a designer God for the universe in which we live with all its appearance of being designed.
How Did Life Arrive?
Flew then attacks the view held by some biologists that the first life began by the chance combination of chemical elements over a very long period of time (abiogenesis). But then he says: “… the latest work I have seen shows that the present physicists’ view of the age of the universe gives too little time for these theories of abiogenesis to get the job done.” Likewise, the coding rules for DNA defy explanation because they concern specific information required for gestation (replication) of the very first organism in order for evolution to commence. Thus, it seems that Mind, not matter, is the fundamental force in nature, designing and binding the elements together and coding them for the future of a life-filled Earth. But how does Mind exist if it has not eternally existed as the Mind of God? This cannot be a scientific question, but rather a purely philosophical one.
And believe it or not, philosophy is not dead. Bertrand Russell and others argued that if everything has a cause, God must have a cause. But God created the principle of causality as we know it, and therefore cannot be subject to it. God must be uncaused, eternal.
A Philosophical Paradox
Finally, Flew concluded: “I have followed the argument where it has led me. And it has led me to accept the existence of a self-evident, immutable, immaterial, omnipotent, and omniscient Being.” But here Flew stops. A personal God for him might be a bridge too far. Yet he concedes to being open-minded enough to get beyond the Mind and to the Person. He concludes There Is a God with the flippant sentence: “Someday I might hear a Voice that says, ‘Can you hear me now?”
So this is the dilemma. How do you find that God is a Mind, but is not a Person? You might find out by examining the religions of the world to see if one of the gods worshiped by those religions exists convincingly as Spirit and Person. Does any such god exists? Well, of course, one such God is claimed to exist in the person of Jesus Christ, who revealed not only himself as divine, but also revealed the great mystery of Three Persons in one God. This God claims to be eternal, omnipotent omniscient, and so much more. This God is a God of Justice and Mercy and Love, three qualities that for humans are paramount, and when found in humans are said to prove that God truly did create us in His own image and likeness.
The paltry religion of Deism holds no such claims. It is empty of wisdom and depth, satisfied as it is with Mind but not Person. When the Deist accepts God as Creator, it seems incredible that he should not ask himself why God should be a Mind but not a Person. On his deathbed the Deist is really in no better position than the Atheist, for both have refused the claims of biblical revelation, which God provided to the world so that He might be known in ways that cannot be known without revelation. “Let us make man in our image and likeness.” (Genesis 26) Thus we know that if we are made to be persons, God must be the Person of whom human persons are imperfect mirror reflections. And so, it sadly seems, the Atheist, the Deist, and the Agnostic as well, are courting their own doom according to the words of the Son of Man, who said, “He who is not with Me is against Me.” (Matthew 12:30)
It is one of the favorite taunts of unbelievers to ask which religion they should believe, because if they picked the wrong one it might be a devastating choice for which they might have to pay through all eternity. So finally, let us consider the personalities of other founders of other religions. Who are they? What do they offer? Which of them is divinely inspired with a personal record, such as the gospels, to document their coming and their mission in the world? None satisfy our inquiry but the One who preached love, and justice, and mercy, and forgiveness as no other has preached these holy things. Let us bend the mind and the heart and the knee to the One who preached them all and suffered and died to prove His oneness with our suffering and our dying. None of the false gods in human history have done this. When considering all the worshiped gods of history, how is it not the simplest choice to make that Jesus stands forth as the only true and convincing God of us all?
After all, what did Jesus say ,,, and then do? “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13)
Deo gratias!
