Antony Flew’s spiritual journey, Part II

The Gardener Parable is silent about how much either the Believer or the Sceptic actually knows about gardening.

Antony Flew was a philosopher, not a scientist. He could evaluate the impact of empirical evidence upon a philosophical argument, assuming that the findings were true, up-to-date, and well-accepted. Flew wasn’t specially qualified, however, to evaluate those qualities.

Lack of special qualifications didn’t much delay his “following the evidence wherever it led,” at any age. He corrected himself when specialists brought technical lapses to his attention, but didn’t necessarily await permission to proceed nor necessarily abandon a line of inquiry because its factual foundation wasn’t well-accepted.

Scientific arguments may be robust against isolated contrary facts, even well-established facts. In contrast, philosophical arguments may be vulnerable to mere serious possibilities that reveal gaps in reasoning, reliance on insufficiently examined assumptions, or other flaws in construction. False alarms may guide the search for better grounded facts that impeach an argument soundly.

A rational philosopher, then, would be liable to “follow” evidence and argument that a scientist or other specialist might avoid. That was Antony Flew’s style, at all ages of his life.

Antony Flew’s spiritual journey, Part I

Philosopher Antony Flew died on April 8, 2010. He was 87. During the last decade of his life, he had moved from a long-held religious agnosticism, which he called “negative atheism,” to deism. Flew believed in a creator god, but not the God of any revelation, not an object of ritual worship, nor the host of an afterlife. Flew’s relatively tiny shift of irreligious identifcation generated enormous and heated discussion, much of it about the elderly Flew’s mental acuity.

These essays assess the rationality of Flew’s belief changes, from a broadly and approximate Bayesian perspective. First up, we’ll consider whether empirical observations might possibly increase rational believers’ confidence in their religious beliefs, despite the general incompatibility of natural and supernatural reasoning. Flew changed his mind about that issue first, before he later changed his mind about the question of God.