Every Thought Captive

On the occasion of Antony Flew’s new book, There is (no) a God, there has been a small flood of comment from both sides of the aisles: Christians seem very pleased that one of the most respected philosophical atheists of the past century has come to a form of deism, and atheists are not so pleased. When Flew originally produced his transition for an interview with Philosophia Christi, the Christian reaction was quite excited. But now with the publication of this new book, the atheists are having their say.

First of all, I heard about this NYTimes piece on Flew through the CU graduate philosophy e-mail list. The message said that this article is about “Flew’s conversion to Christianity.” The author of the e-mail clearly did not read to the third paragraph where the author noted, “Flew still rejects Christianity.” The e-mail got it wrong for reasons inherent in most of the atheistic reaction to the whole matter: they would rather label and personally attack him than deal with any of the argumentation behind his change of mind.

Before discussing certain portions of the NYTimes article by Oppenheimer, I think it is useful to mention that it appears that Flew did not have as much to say in his own book at it might seem. Through Oppenheimer’s research, he seems to have discovered that much of the book was ghostwritten for and edited through Flew, instead of the other way around. It also does seem that Flew suffers from a certain kind of memory disorder that keeps him from remembering names and dates. Although that is a little disappointing to me (I am currently reading the book), a couple of other things should be noted. Many more books than we are aware of are ghost written and very little is made of it. If the author has the final editing say about what is published, we tend to not be too upset. Secondly, if the philosophical tables were turned, I am not so sure memory lapses about names and dates would matter all that much. And thirdly, by the time Oppenheimer reaches that point in the article, his severe personal distaste for what Flew has done is transparent. The article he writes is the worst form of sophomoric ad hominum bludgery possible.

Oppenheimer attacks the academic qualifications of Flew’s coauthor, Varghese by noting he has none in particular. Oppenheimer’s qualification to asses the arguments involved, according to his byline, is that he, “is [the] coordinator of the Yale Journalism Initiative and editor of The New Haven Review. He last wrote for the magazine about the Hollywood acting coach Milton Katselas.” Not exactly who I would pick to asses the facts if Alvin Plantinga converted from Christian Theism to deism.

Throughout the article (and the book cites several other similar examples of this kind of behavior on the part of leading “new atheists”), Oppenheimer treats Flew like a doddering old fool. These excerpts are only a taste of what Oppenheimer’s journalistic training has taught him about assessing a situation:

Flew himself — a continent away, his memory failing, without an Internet connection — had no idea how fiercely he was being fought over…

With his powers in decline, Antony Flew, a man who devoted his life to rational argument, has become a mere symbol, a trophy in a battle fought by people whose agendas he does not fully understand.

When at last Flew speaks, his diction is halting,…

This is all in contrast to the one brave atheist who tried to keep Flew in the fold:

Richard Carrier, a 37-year-old doctoral student in ancient history at Columbia, is a type recognizable to anyone who has spent much time at a chess tournament or a sci-fi convention or a skeptics’ conference. He is young, male and brilliant, with an obsessive streak both admirable and a little debilitating.

According to Oppenheimer’s account, Carrier is the genius who is on top of things, and Flew is the puppet who has been coerced into belief in his old age. In fact, Oppenheimer is quite clear about Flew being coerced:

But it seems somewhat more likely that Flew, having been intellectually chaperoned by Roy Varghese for 20 years, simply trusted him to write something responsible.

Intellectuals, even more than the rest of us, like to believe that they reach conclusions solely through study and reflection. But like the rest of us, they sometimes choose their opinions to suit their friends rather than the other way around. Which means that Flew is likely to remain a theist, for just as the Christians drew him close, the atheists gave him up for lost.

Seriously? Flew was blindly lead by the hand for 20 years like a diminutive German attracted to a crazy woman’s candy house in the middle of the forest?

And then there is this gem of cultural projection:

Flew also had a longstanding affinity for conservative politics — he was an adviser to Margaret Thatcher — that made him unusually approachable for some Christians. In the light of his natal comfort with religious folk and his agreeable politics, Flew’s eventual alliance with Christians doesn’t seem so strange.

So apparently, we should not be surprised that an old man, barely able to speak or think clearly should wind up in the hands of Christians because he has a “longstanding affinity” for conservative politics. Not only is that the kind of childish assertion I would disallow in my college-level philosophy papers, it is factually false. For the first several years of his adult life, Flew was a card-carrying member of the Communist party.

So the article was a farce.

So far, the book has at least been enlightening. The first few chapters and sections are dedicated to the various steps in his philosophical atheism, his core arguments, and the reactions he received from all sides. For me, the book has been far more educational than this ridiculous article. I am actually getting a clearer grasp of his atheism than I had before.

The core principle Flew asserts in the beginning of this book is that we all have a duty to follow the evidence where it leads. He may have done exactly that for very real and meaningful philosophical and scientific reasons. If you are to believe Oppenheimer, however, we should follow evidence until it points us toward a God. Then we should start flinging mud.

I have been making my way through Dsouza’s book, What’s So Great About Christianity, and thoroughly enjoying his kind of defense of the Christian faith and worldview. Essentially, he (and others as well) argues that the Christian worldview is the necessary intellectual underpinning for the values and institutions we believe advance the human condition. In clear opposition to this view is the “new atheist” line that, as Hitchens puts it, “religion poisons everything.”

In a recent column, Dsouza remarks on a recent debate he had with Hitchens. He says that at one point in the Q&A, an enlightening question came from the crowd:

One of the most interesting questions in the debate was posed to Hitchens by a man from Tonga. Before the Christians came to Tonga, he said, the place was a mess. Even cannibalism was widespread. The Christians stopped this practice and brought to Tonga the notion that each person has a soul and God loves everyone equally. The man from Tonga asked Hitchens, "So what do you have to offer us?" Hitchens was taken aback, and responded with a learned disquisition on cannibalism in various cultures. But he clearly missed the intellectual and moral force of the man's question. The man was asking why the Tongans, who had gained so much from Christianity, should reject it in favor of atheism.

I think this is a powerful confluence of events. Dsouza is defending the humanizing worldview and intellectual rigor of the Christian faith, Hitchens is taking the opposite view, and a clear example of Dsouza’s position appears in person from the developing world. In his book, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, Phillip Jenkins takes a sociological survey of the spread of Christianity and concludes that contrary to what we tend to hear “on the street,” Christianity is growing by leaps and bounds beyond the growth of other world religions. And, to add insult to injury, the forms of Christianity most popular around the world are of the charismatic/supernaturalist sort.

As Jenkins notes specifically, and as came out implicitly in the Dsouza debate, there is a powerful ethno-centrism among western liberal atheists. Hitchens and others clearly believe they are more intellectually and culturally advanced than religious believers, not to mention religious believers in backwards nations.

That ethno-centrism has lead to a serious information gap: the new atheists are totally unaware of how the Christian faith and worldview is advancing the cause of humanity across the globe. They apparently do not want to recognize the lifting effects of Christianity, either in another culture or in our own.

A new book chronicling the correspondence and interior life of Mother Teresa, Come by My Light, has spurred an article in Time magazine in which her doubts about the faith are highlighted. I did not expect it, but the article does a pretty good job of at least surveying the opinions of those who realize her doubts are an inevitable part of growth in the Christian faith. As soon as Christians began commenting on their walks with God, they openly and faithfully described those seasons in life in which God felt distant. Commonly referred to as the “dark night of the soul,” it is a universal experience among those who seek a deeper and stronger personal walk with Christ.

What may not be explicitly stated in the article is that more often than not, the faithful pilgrim comes out of the dark night into a deeper and almost inexpressible relationship with God. Instead of being some kind of deep realization that God does not exist, it is a passage into an intimacy with the Creator that many have a hard time describing once they get there.

The Christian reading about Mother Teresa’s doubts should not be discouraged—far from it. They should be encouraged that another follower of Christ went through their own season of doubt and questioning. We are not alone when we struggle and question, and the way to the other side—a deeper relationship with Christ—is through the issues we face, not around them.

In addition, Christians should take comfort in the fact that there is a great cloud of witnesses about us who testify to this reality of faith, and of God’s existence, grace, and love.

Predictably, however, is the quote from one of our village atheists, Christopher Hitchens. His position is that her doubts are proof that religion is a fabricated illusion. Time notes:

Says Christopher Hitchens, author of The Missionary Position, a scathing polemic on Teresa, and more recently of the atheist manifesto God Is Not Great: "She was no more exempt from the realization that religion is a human fabrication than any other person, and that her attempted cure was more and more professions of faith could only have deepened the pit that she had dug for herself."

In his gift for impaling himself on his own arguments, Hitchens seems to posit that doubts about a belief belie their falsehood. I wonder how he would handle the actual change of position for Anthony Flew, the rigorous and philosophically respectable former standard bearer for atheism? His doubts about the coherence of atheism in the face of the argument for Intelligent Design lead him to openly move away from his former position to a form of theism. The professing atheist can only write more and more books professing their faith and deepening the pit they have dug for themselves (to paraphrase a bit).

It is my contention that Christianity, when it is full-blooded, is simultaneously reflexive, reasonable and faithful. The tools of reason and analysis are actually built into and intended to be used by the faith system of Christianity. If God has given us intellectual tools such as reason, and if all truth is God’s truth, the Christian has nothing to fear by examining all things in pursuit of their faith.

In a recent column, Dinesh D'Souza cites Stanley Fish (whose NT Times blog requires subscription) and some recent comments of his critiquing the recent spate of atheist anti-Christian literature. A significant part of what they both have to say question the unflinching dogmatism of these popular authors as compared to the constant reflection of Christianity. Fish, while discussing their analysis of Bunyon’s Pilgrim’s Progress, notes that their indictments of inscrutability and intransigence upon Christianity fail. The text itself, and Christianity in general, contain the kind of reflection and even skepticism they say it doesn’t. D’Souza notes:

Fish comments, "What this shows is that the objections Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens make to religious thinking are themselves part of religious thinking. Rather than being swept under the rug of a seamless discourse, they are the very motor of that discourse."

And,

Fish observes that while religious people over the centuries have dug deeply into the questions of life, along come our shallow atheists who present arguments as if they first thought of them, arguments that Christians have long examined with a seriousness and care that is missing in contemporary atheist discourse.

What seems to be lost on most critics of Christianity is that it contains a long and powerful tradition of theological and philosophical development. The dogma of Christianity necessarily includes the tools of self-analysis and reflection – if we are noetically broken creatures, our faith requires constant attention. The reigning dogma of popular atheism is apparently marked by self-satisfaction, inflexibility and myopia. I would not be surprised if it were true that no other tradition in human history has offered more to the advancement of the human mind than the Body of Christ.

I did not know this (but am not surprised) that there is an organized effort to “Blog Against Theocracy.” One post in particular caught my attention this morning. In it the blogger is concerned that evangelicals are making their way into schools through biblical literacy initiatives and Intelligent Design. One of the blogger’s arguments against evangelicalism in schools is their stated goal of global evangelism. He even quotes from the doctrinal statement of my denomination, the Assemblies of God.

This growing criticism of “theocracy” is an interesting one to me. First of all, I don’t think the, “they evangelize people” argument carries any weight. Any group with serious convictions is trying to gain adherents, and the more they gain, the happier they will be. No doubt, Bloggers Against Theocracy would like more people to hold their views than fewer, and they are actively evangelizing them. As a consequence of their own argument, they should be legislated out of our schools.

On a much more interesting note is the claim that Christians in the public square constitutes a breech of the “separation of the church and state” doctrine. Since there is no such thing in our Constitution, this is a political/philosophical view. What are the presuppositions that lead to this view?

One might be the fact/value distinction which holds that religion is a private value that does not make truth claims about reality, and thus cannot be considered with seriousness in the public square. On the other hand, secularism has a grip on the facts of the world (science, etc.) and is the only serious contender for the public mind. This simple sweeping away of religion has been attacked on several levels, and when we learn what it means to know things and have them correspond with reality, there is nothing that excludes religious knowledge. Science (naturalistically understood) does not have privileged access to the world.

Another presupposition might be that religion – Christianity in particular – has been proven false. But this view would just be naivety and wishful thinking.

Another would be that religion is not open to thought, reflection, or even modification. As a result, a culture “ruled” by religion would be disastrous to open thought and dangerous to dissenters. And since we value an open and thinking society, religion needs to be relegated to the margins. But this again is a mistaken notion of Christianity. No doubt there are a plethora of examples where “fundamentalism” or other forms of Christianity have denied the life of the mind, but they would be the exceptions to the rule, not the rule. For example, the University system so prized by free-thinkers was established by the Church as an institution of innovation. It was Catholic universities that taught the sun was the center of the solar system; medieval universities constantly critiqued and analyzed doctrine and refined theology. One of the reasons we know Thomas Aquinas and not his predecessors was his innovation on their work.

Christianity, where it is allowed to flourish according to its own worldview, is currently less of a threat to free-thought than secularism. After all, who is trying to exclude whom from schools?

I think that when all the reasons for the separation of church and state (as opposed to this short list) are laid on the table, they all fail for good reasons. Religious views have just as much legitimate access to the public as do secularist views.

G.K. Chesterton opened his essay, “A Defense of Humility” by stating, “The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.” So it is with the death of Jerry Falwell and those who were not fans of his. No person is perfect, and since Falwell was a person, I think we can safely say he wasn’t perfect. And being in the public eye for as long as he was meant he did things many people were not thrilled about. It is one thing to disagree with someone, but in our culture’s atmosphere, the way non-Christians “disagree” with Christians has turned, in Chesterton’s words, “exhilarating.”

The kind of vitriol being poured out against him in death is sub-human and deplorable. As one prominent example, the (basically) conservative atheist, Christopher Hitchens was interviewed on Anderson Cooper 360 yesterday. Part of the transcript reads:


Hitchens has his reasons, and I agree that Falwell’s pronouncements after 9/11 were out of place, but the point is broader than that.

All you need to do in our culture to get your head cut off is stand up for orthodox Christian values. Even in death, those who cannot countenance the idea of Truth or the existence of God are eviscerating him. And on a larger scale, one of the greatest evils in the world today, if you listen to them, is the very existence of the Christian religion.

Christ was right when he said he did not come to bring peace, but a sword (Matt 10:34). The simple truth of his existence and uniqueness will sharply divide people—even divide them over the coffins of Christ’s followers.