The exploitation of Antony Flew

The New York Times Magazine carries a long and saddening article, entitled "The Turning of An Atheist", about the English philosopher Antony Flew. It's a fascinating read and I encourage you to stick with it. (I was sent the article by an old friend, Werner Cohn, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. Werner was a Jewish Berliner in the 1930s, and is an indefatigable analyst and opponent of political extremism; he has lately started an interesting blog on that subject.)

Flew, now well into his 80s, was in the last century one of the leading academic proponents of atheism. The author of the NYT profile, Mark Oppenheimer, writes:

[Flew's] greatest contribution remains his first, a short paper from 1950 called “Theology and Falsification.” Flew was a precocious 27 when he delivered the paper at a meeting of the Socratic Club, the Oxford salon presided over by C. S. Lewis. Reprinted in dozens of anthologies, “Theology and Falsification” has become a heroic tract for committed atheists. In a masterfully terse thousand words, Flew argues that “God” is too vague a concept to be meaningful. For if God’s greatness entails being invisible, intangible and inscrutable, then he can’t be disproved — but nor can he be proved. Such powerful but simply stated arguments made Flew popular on the campus speaking circuit; videos from debates in the 1970s show a lanky man, his black hair professorially unkempt, vivisecting religious belief with an English public-school accent perfect for the seduction of American ears. Before the current crop of atheist crusader-authors — Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens — there was Antony Flew.

I recall seeing one of those BBC television interviews in the 1970s. Flew was arguing against the notion of God as Designer. He gave the example of the liver fluke, and asked rhetorically whether the theist regarded the parasite as an instance of divine handiwork. I recall this partly because I was and remain flummoxed by the question, and also because I've never come across anyone else refer to a liver fluke in public debate. (I much later read Flew's book on Darwinian Evolution, which makes the same point.)

But the NYT profile continues:

Flew’s fame is about to spread beyond the atheists and philosophers. HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins, has just released “There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind,” a book attributed to Flew and a co-author, the Christian apologist Roy Abraham Varghese. “There Is a God” is an intellectual’s bildungsroman written in simple language for a mass audience. It’s the first-person account of a preacher’s son who, away at Methodist boarding school, defied his father to become a teenage atheist, later wrote on atheism at Oxford, spent his life fighting for unbelief and then did an about-face in his old age, embracing the truth of a higher power. The book offers elegant, user-friendly descriptions of the arguments that persuaded Flew, arguments familiar to anyone who has heard evangelical Christians’ “scientific proof” of God. From the “fine tuning” argument that the laws of nature are too perfect to have been accidents to the “intelligent design” argument that human biology cannot be explained by evolution to various computations meant to show that probability favors a divine creator, “There Is a God” is perhaps the handiest primer ever written on the science (many would say pseudoscience) of religious belief.

I had previously read of Flew's apparent acceptance, not of formal religion, but of the notion that the Universe evinces an intelligence. He is a deist rather than a theist. Oppenheimer's account gives a background to that intellectual shift that I had not known. Flew is clearly of declining mental powers. Interviewed by Oppenheimer, he is unable to give an account of the book that names him as co-author. Oppenheimer writes a slightly feeble concluding paragraph, but the rest of the article is a model of journalistic inquiry. I would add three points.

Oppenheimer reveals that Flew - on his own admission - didn't write the book. Oppenheimer allows nonetheless that "the section on Flew’s childhood could hardly have been written without his cooperation". Well, it could have been. I haven't read this latest book attributed to Flew as co-author, and perhaps it does indeed contain previously unpublished recollections; but Flew has before now written an elegant autobiographical account of his intellectual development. It's called "A Philosopher's Apology"; it was written in 1996 and it forms an afterword (pp. 183-208) to Flew's Philosophical Essays, 1998. In it, Flew writes at length of his childhood in the 1930s and 1940s, his schooldays, and his teenage thoughts that first led him to atheist and "mortalist" conclusions.

Secondly, the article refers briefly to Flew's right-wing politics. I have never held any brief for these, but I'm particularly sorry to read that Flew has now embraced the xenophobia of the UK Independence Party. In the 1996 essay that I've referred to, he comments that he joined the Conservative Party after Mrs Thatcher became leader (i.e. sometime in the mid-1970s) but "shall certainly not continue a member unless the leadership takes an uncompromising stand against the project of making the UK one of the future United States of Europe". So it has clearly proved. As a political activist, Flew was always liable to overstate even when he had a point. (In the same essay, for example, he describes the historian E.P. Thompson - with whom he'd been at school - as "labour[ing] for the pro-Soviet 'peace' movement". Thompson was wrong on the issue of nuclear disarmament, and the neutralist course he urged was certainly in the strategic interests of the Soviet Union, but it's unfair and inaccurate to say he worked for the pro-Soviet wing of the peace movement.) But as a political philosopher, Flew had important things to say. (See, for example, a short essay on "Communism: The Philosophical Foundations", in his 1993 book Atheistic Humanism.) There is pathos in the spectacle of a noted scholar whose mental gifts are now severely impaired and who spends his declining years railing against immigration and Europe.

Thirdly, there is a dispiriting parallel with an earlier and very great thinker, whom Flew has written much about. In his last decade, Bertrand Russell devoted himself to the anti-war and anti-nuclear cause, with disastrous effects on the quality of his prose. As A.C. Grayling put it in a critical review of the second volume of Ray Monk's biography of Russell a few years ago:

To readers who remember Russell's last years it will come as no surprise to have it confirmed that his apparent nonagenarian metamorphosis into a revolutionary follower of Che Guevera was the result of his name being misused by his egregious "secretary" Ralph Schoenman, an intemperate supporter of fiery causes. Russell was bitterly opposed to the Vietnam war, but the crude propaganda about it that Schoenman had him sign was certainly not his.

I corresponded with Ray Monk at some length while he was writing this book - I couldn't and don't claim any expertise about Russell, but I gave some political background to the issues of international relations of that time - and was privy to one or two of the remarkable discoveries he made about this aspect of Russell's life as a public intellectual. I think the book is outstanding, and confirms what had long been believed about the Russell-Schoenman relationship. In his memoirs (Out of Step, 1987, p. 380), the late pragmatist philosopher and socialist Sidney Hook, a friend of both Flew and Russell, quotes a revealing story as recounted by the writer Ronald Clark:

Russell intervened in the Cuban crisis [of 1962] which threatened to bring America and Russia to the brink of nuclear war. As an American blockade of the island appeared imminent a statement was issued to the press from [Russell's home] Plas Penrhyn. As typed it began, "Mankind is faced tonight with a grave crisis." This was altered in Schoenman's hand to: "It seems likely that within a week you will all be dead to please American madmen." On Russell's suggestion, "a week" was altered to "a week or two", but otherwise the statement was issued as Schoenman had altered it.

At least one could say that Russell's intentions, if not his words and thoughts, were vaguely discernible in all this. The parallel is that Antony Flew's name appears to have been appropriated for the intellectually crude sentiments of others - but in his case, in the service of views that make a mockery of his life as a thinker and public intellectual. It's a crying shame.