Author: Ophelia Benson

So Antony Flew has changed his mind. Hmm. If Hume had lived to be 81, would he have done likewise? If Nietzsche had lived that long and hung onto his marbles, would he? If Bertrand Russell had lived to be 110, would he? In twenty years, will we be reading (those of us still alive) that Richard Dawkins has?

Who knows. And by the same token, maybe any day now we’ll hear that Billy Graham has finally seen the light, that Jimmy Carter takes it all back, that Jerry Fallwell has caught on at last, that George W Bush has realized it was all a drunken mistake, that Osama bin Laden has decided the hell with it and ordered a few pallets of whiskey. You just never know.

But it’s interesting that the headline writers put Flew’s change of mind so misleadingly. ‘Atheist Philosopher, 81, Now Believes in God’. Well, no, not exactly, as the article makes clear. Flew still doesn’t believe in ‘God’ in the sense in which most people understand (and use) the word – most people including atheists. That is, when that word is used in routine conversation, most of us including non-believers understand it to refer to a particular kind of deity and not just any and every kind of deity – in fact we understand it to refer to a fairly specific deity. A personal one, a person, a man, a vast (infinite) powerful all-knowing deity, who receives prayers and makes things happen in the world. That ‘God’ is a sort of literary character, and we all have an approximate idea of what he’s like. (Not as witty as Lizzy Bennett, not as interesting as Hamlet, not as irritating as Clarissa Dalloway.) That’s not the God that Flew has decided he believes in.

A British philosophy professor who has been a leading champion of atheism for more than a half-century has changed his mind. He now believes in God — more or less — based on scientific evidence, and says so on a video released Thursday. At age 81, after decades of insisting belief is a mistake, Antony Flew has concluded that some sort of intelligence or first cause must have created the universe…Flew said he’s best labeled a deist like Thomas Jefferson, whose God was not actively involved in people’s lives. “I’m thinking of a God very different from the God of the Christian and far and away from the God of Islam, because both are depicted as omnipotent Oriental despots, cosmic Saddam Husseins,” he said. “It could be a person in the sense of a being that has intelligence and a purpose, I suppose.”

A person in the sense of a being that has intelligence and a purpose, he supposes. Not exactly the guy who pointed the admonitory finger at Eve and Adam, or the guy who told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. More like a purposeful intelligent Big Bang – like the god of the deists, as Flew points out.

Well, I don’t believe in the God of any revelatory system, although I am open to that. But it seems to me that the case for an Aristotelian God who has the characteristics of power and also intelligence, is now much stronger than it ever was before…But Aristotle himself never produced a definition of the word “God,” which is a curious fact…It seems to me, that from the existence of Aristotle’s God, you can’t infer anything about human behaviour.

And so on. But of course all the godbotherers will be jumping up and down anyway, rejoicing at another lamb gathered into the flock. Whatever.

A little more on this argument about the proposed religious hatred law.

There is for instance number 8 in the Home Office’s FAQ:

The Government is determined to protect both the rights of free speech, which have been long respected in this country, and the right to lead a life in which one can peacefully practise one’s own religion without fear.

That sounds unexceptionable, indeed benevolent, at first blush. But what about after a little thought? The difficulty is that leading ‘a life in which one can peacefully practise one’s own religion’ covers a lot of territory. Rather too much territory. Which is not (contra at least one of our commenters) to say that the government therefore ought to interfere with that right; it’s simply to say that the idea itself might not be as benign as it first looks. That’s the thing about phrases like that – phrases that sound good and kind and caring and concerned: they set us all up to read and hear them as benign and helpful when in fact they may not be, or they may be so only partly, or with a lot of further qualifications. In short, there’s rhetoric afoot. There are several hurrah-words that are meant to make us think the idea is a hurrah-idea – that’s how hurrah-words work. Right, lead a life, peacefully, one’s own, religion. They’re all gathered together there to block any impulse we might have to say ‘Wait, hang on, what about – ‘ I mean to say – how can anyone object to protecting all those things? People peacefully leading their own lives and peacefully practising their own religion – you might as well offer to burst into their living rooms and strangle their puppies.

But, as I mentioned, in reality the phrase covers a lot of ground. Practising one’s own religion may include subordinating, exploiting, and harming other people. Sad to say, one of the things religions do is erect and justify systems for, precisely, the subordination and exploitation and harming of other people. This is not a secret. So issuing blanket ukases about the peaceful practise of religion is not always as benign as it may sound. People who’ve grown up around milder forms of religion may lose track of this fact – and then phrases like the one under discussion help the process along. Religion is ‘one’s own’ – so obviously it can’t harm anyone else, right? Because it’s ‘one’s own’. My opinions don’t hurt you, yours don’t hurt me; everybody’s happy. But religious beliefs are not always inert, to say the least; they influence and justify behavior and action. Some fathers and brothers (and sometimes mothers) think it is right to murder daughters and sisters who have, say, run away from arranged marriages or married the ‘wrong’ man. From their point of view, they are indeed practising their own religion. So the phrase is misleading. Maybe that doesn’t matter; it’s just one phrase, after all; but the whole discussion all too often relies on phrases like that. I think that’s worth keeping in mind.

Speaking of [I’d better not say what, it will spoil the joke] – Richard Chappell of Philosophy Etcetera has sent me a link to a good cartoon.

For our many, many readers who read Icelandic (hey, maybe we do have a lot, I don’t know: we have one more than I was aware of), here is a little treat – you can read one entry from the B&W version of the Fashionable Dictionary in Icelandic every day at Vantrú. Vantrú is, the editor tells me, a skeptical/atheist magazine, so all the more reason for our Icelandic-reading readers to hasten right over there and start reading.