HABERMAS: Once you mentioned to me that your view might be called
Deism. Do you think that would be a fair designation?

FLEW: Yes, absolutely right. What Deists, such as the Mr. Jefferson
who drafted the American Declaration of Independence, believed was
that, while reason, mainly in the form of arguments to design, assures
us that there is a God, there is no room either for any supernatural
revelation of that God or for any transactions between that God and
individual human beings.

Dear Friends:

9 December 2004

Dear Friends:
The following is an exclusive interview that will be published in the
Winter 2005 issue of "Philosopher Christi" the journal of the
Evangelical Philosophical Society (www.biola.edu/philchristi).
"Philosophia Christi" is one of the top circulating philosophy of
religion journals in the world and we are pleased to offer up the
definitive interview on this
breaking story of global interest.

Prof. Antony Flew, 81 years old, is a legendary British philosopher
and atheist and has been an icon and champion for unbelievers for
decades. His change of mind is significant news, not only about his
personal journey, but also about the persuasive power of the arguments
modern theists have been using to challenge atheistic naturalism.

The interviewer is Dr. Gary Habermas, a prolific philosopher and
historian from Liberty University who has debated Flew several times.
They have maintained a friendship despite their years of disagreement
on the existence of God.

Sincerely,
Craig J. Hazen, Ph.D.

Professor of Comparative Religion, Biola University

Editor, "Philosophia Christi"



My Pilgrimage from Atheism to Theism



An Exclusive Interview with Former British Atheist Professor Antony
Flew

DR. ANTONY FLEW
Professor of Philosophy
Former atheist, author, and debater

DR. GARY R. HABERMAS
Professor Philosophy and Theology
Editorial Board for "Philosophia Christi"


Antony Flew and Gary Habermas met in February 1985 in Dallas, Texas.
The occasion was a series of debates between atheists and theists,
featuring many influential philosophers,scientists, and other
scholars.1

A short time later, in May 1985, Flew and Habermas debated at Liberty
University before a large audience. The topic that night was the
resurrection of Jesus.2 Although Flew was arguably the world's
foremost philosophical atheist, he had intriguingly also earned the
distinction of being one of the chief philosophical commentators on
the topic of miracles.3

Habermas specialized on the subject of Jesus' resurrection.4 Thus, the
ensuing dialogue on the historical evidence for the central Christian
claim was a natural outgrowth of their research.

Over the next twenty years, Flew and Habermas developed a friendship,
writing dozens of letters, talking often, and dialoguing twice more on
the resurrection. In April 2000 they participated in a live debate on
the Inspiration Television Network, moderated by John Ankerberg.5 In
January 2003 they again dialogued on the resurrection at California
Polytechnic
State University-San Luis Obispo.6

During a couple telephone discussions shortly after their last
dialogue, Flew explained to Habermas that he was considering becoming
a theist. While Flew did not change his position at that time, he
concluded that certain philosophical and scientific considerations
were causing him to do some serious rethinking. He characterized his
position as that of atheism standing in tension with several huge
question marks.

Then, a year later, in January 2004, Flew informed Habermas that he
had indeed become a theist. While still rejecting the concept of
special revelation, whether Christian, Jewish or Islamic, nonetheless
he had concluded that theism was true. In Flew's words, he simply "had
to go where the evidence leads."7

The following interview took place in early 2004 and was subsequently
modified by both participants throughout the year. This nontechnical
discussion sought to engage Flew over the course of several topics
that reflect his move from atheism to theism.8 The chief purpose was
not to pursue the details of any particular issue, so we bypassed many
avenues that would have presented a plethora of other intriguing
questions and responses. These were often tantalizingly ignored, left
to ripen for another discussion. Neither did we try to persuade each
another of alternate positions.

Our singular purpose was simply to explore and report Flew's new
position, allowing him to explain various aspects of his pilgrimage.
We thought that this in itself was a worthy goal.

Along the way, an additional benefit emerged, as Flew reminisced about
various moments from his childhood, graduate studies, and career.



HABERMAS: Tony, you recently told me that you have come to believe in
the existence of God. Would you comment on that?

FLEW: 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. And it was
from Aristotle that Aquinas drew the materials for producing his five
ways of, hopefully, proving the
existence of his God. Aquinas took them, reasonably enough, to prove,
if they proved anything, the existence of the God of the Christian
revelation. But Aristotle himself never produced a definition of the
word "God," which is a curious fact. But this concept still led to the
basic outline of the five ways. It seems to me, that from the
existence of Aristotle's God, you can't
infer anything about human behaviour. So what Aristotle had to say
about justice (justice, of course, as conceived by the Founding
Fathers of the American republic as opposed to the "social" justice of
John Rawls9) was very much a human idea, and he thought that this idea
of justice was what ought to govern the behaviour of individual human
beings in their relations with others.

HABERMAS: Once you mentioned to me that your view might be called
Deism. Do you think that would be a fair designation?

FLEW: Yes, absolutely right. What Deists, such as the Mr. Jefferson
who drafted the American Declaration of Independence, believed was
that, while reason, mainly in the form of arguments to design, assures
us that there is a God, there is no room either for any supernatural
revelation of that God or for any transactions between that God and
individual human beings.

HABERMAS: Then, would you comment on your "openness" to the notion of
theistic revelation?

FLEW: Yes. I am open to it, but not enthusiastic about potential
revelation from God. On the positive side, for example, I am very much
impressed with physicist Gerald Schroeder's comments on Genesis 1.10
That this biblical account might be scientifically accurate raises the
possibility that it is revelation.

HABERMAS: You very kindly noted that our debates and discussions had
influenced your move in the direction of theism.11 You mentioned that
this initial influence contributed in part to your comment that
naturalistic efforts have never succeeded in producing "a plausible
conjecture as to how any of these complex molecules might have evolved
from simple entities."12 Then in your recently rewritten introduction
to the forthcoming edition of your classic volume God and Philosophy,
you say that the original version of that book is now obsolete. You
mention a number of trends in theistic argumentation that you find
convincing, like big bang cosmology, fine tuning and Intelligent
Design arguments. Which arguments for God's existence did you find
most persuasive?

FLEW: I think that the most impressive arguments for God's existence
are those that are supported by recent scientific discoveries. I've
never been much impressed by the kalam cosmological argument, and I
don't think it has gotten any stronger recently. However, I think the
argument to Intelligent Design is enormously stronger than it was when
I first met it.

HABERMAS: So you like arguments such as those that proceed from big
bang cosmology and fine tuning arguments?

FLEW: Yes.

HABERMAS: You also recently told me that you do not find the moral
argument to be very persuasive. Is that right?

FLEW: That's correct. It seems to me that for a strong moral argument,
you've got to have God as the justification of morality. To do this
makes doing the morally good a purely prudential matter rather than,
as the moral philosophers of my youth used to call it, a good in
itself. (Compare the classic discussion in Plato's Euthyphro.)

HABERMAS: So, take C. S. Lewis's argument for morality as presented in
Mere Christianity.13 You didn't find that to be very impressive?

FLEW: No, I didn't. Perhaps I should mention that, when I was in
college, I attended fairly regularly the weekly meetings of C. S.
Lewis's Socratic Club. In all my time at Oxford these meetings were
chaired by Lewis. I think he was by far the most powerful of Christian
apologists for the sixty or more years following his founding of that
club. As late as the 1970s, I used to find that, in the USA, in at
least half of the campus bookstores of the universities and liberal
art colleges which I visited, there was at least one long shelf
devoted to his very various published works.

HABERMAS: Although you disagreed with him, did you find him to be a
very reasonable sort of fellow?

FLEW: Oh yes, very much so, an eminently reasonable man.

HABERMAS: And what do you think about the ontological argument for the
existence of God?

FLEW: All my later thinking and writing about philosophy was greatly
influenced by my year of postgraduate study under the supervision of
Gilbert Ryle, the then Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy in the
University of Oxford, as well as the Editor of Mind. It was the very
year in which his enormously influential work on The Concept of Mind14
was first
published. I was told that, in the years between the wars, whenever
another version of the ontological argument raised its head, Gilbert
forthwith set himself to refute it.
My own initial lack of enthusiasm for the ontological argument
developed into strong repulsion when I realized from reading the
Theodicy15 of Leibniz that it was the identification of the concept of
Being with the concept of Goodness (which ultimately derives from
Plato's identification in The Republic of the Form or Idea of the Good
with the Form or the Idea of the
Real) which enabled Leibniz in his Theodicy validly to conclude that
an universe in which most human beings are predestined to an eternity
of torture is the "best of all possible worlds."

HABERMAS: So of the major theistic arguments, such as the
cosmological, teleological, moral, and ontological, the only really
impressive ones that you take to be decisive are the scientific forms
of teleology?

FLEW: Absolutely. It seems to me that Richard Dawkins constantly
overlooks the fact that Darwin himself, in the fourteenth chapter of
The Origin of Species, pointed out that his whole argument began with
a being which already possessed reproductive powers. This is the
creature the evolution of which a truly comprehensive theory of
evolution must give some account.
Darwin himself was well aware that he had not produced such an
account. It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years
of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously
powerful argument to design.

HABERMAS: As I recall, you also refer to this in the new introduction
to your God and Philosophy.

FLEW: Yes, I do; or, since the book has not yet been published, I
will!

HABERMAS: Since you affirm Aristotle's concept of God, do you think we
can also affirm Aristotle's implications that the First Cause hence
knows all things?

FLEW: I suppose we should say this. I'm not at all sure what one
should think concerning some of these very fundamental issues. There
does seem to be a reason for a First Cause, but I'm not at all sure
how much we have to explain here. What idea of God is necessary to
provide an explanation of the existence of the universe and all which
is in it?

HABERMAS: If God is the First Cause, what about omniscience, or
omnipotence?

FLEW: Well, the First Cause, if there was a First Cause, has very
clearly produced everything that is going on. I suppose that does
imply creation "in the beginning."

HABERMAS: In the same introduction, you also make a comparison between
Aristotle's God and Spinoza's God. Are you implying, with some
interpreters of Spinoza, that God is pantheistic?

FLEW: I'm noting there that God and Philosophy has become out of date
and should now be seen as an historical document rather than as a
direct contribution to current discussions. I'm sympathetic to Spinoza
because he makes some statements which seem to me correctly to
describe the human situation. But for me the most important thing
about Spinoza is not what he
says but what he does not say. He does not say that God has any
preferences either about or any intentions concerning human behaviour
or about the eternal destinies of human beings.

HABERMAS: What role might your love for the writings of David Hume
play in a
discussion about the existence of God? Do you have any new insights on
Hume, given your new belief in God?

FLEW: No, not really.

HABERMAS: Do you think Hume ever answers the question of God?

FLEW: I think of him as, shall we say, an unbeliever. But it's
interesting to note that he himself was perfectly willing to accept
one of the conditions of his appointment, if he had been appointed to
a chair of philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. That condition
was, roughly speaking, to provide some sort of support and
encouragement for people performing prayers and executing other acts
of worship. I believe that Hume thought that the institution of
religious belief could be, and in his day and place was, socially
beneficial.16
I, too, having been brought up as a Methodist, have always been aware
of this possible and in many times and places actual benefit of
objective religious instruction. It is now several decades since I
first tried to draw attention to the danger of relying on a modest
amount of compulsory religious instruction in schools to meet the need
for moral education, especially in a period of relentlessly declining
religious belief. But all such warnings by individuals were, of
course, ignored. So we now have in the UK a situation in which any
mandatory requirements to instruct pupils in state funded schools in
the teachings of the established or any other religion are widely
ignored. The only official attempt to construct a secular substitute
was vitiated by the inability of the moral philosopher on the relevant
government committee to recognize the fundamental difference between
justice without prefix or suffix and the "social" justice of John
Rawls's A Theory of Justice.
I must some time send you a copy of the final chapter of my latest and
presumably last book, in which I offer a syllabus and a program for
moral education in secular schools.17 This is relevant and important
for both the US and the UK. To the US because the Supreme Court has
utterly misinterpreted the clause in the Constitution about not
establishing a religion: misunderstanding it as imposing a ban on all
official reference to religion. In the UK any effective program of
moral education has to be secular because unbelief is now very
widespread.

HABERMAS: In God and Philosophy, and in many other places in our
discussions, too, it seems that your primary motivation for rejecting
theistic arguments used to be the problem of evil. In terms of your
new belief in God, how do you now conceptualise God's relationship to
the reality of evil in the world?

FLEW: Well, absent revelation, why should we perceive anything as
objectively evil? The problem of evil is a problem only for
Christians. For Muslims everything which human beings perceive as
evil, just as much as everything we perceive as good, has to be
obediently accepted as produced by the will of Allah. I suppose that
the moment when, as a schoolboy of fifteen years, it first appeared to
me that the thesis that the universe was created and is sustained by a
Being of infinite power and goodness is flatly incompatible with the
occurrence of massive undeniable and undenied evils in that universe,
was the first step towards my future career as a philosopher! It was,
of course, very much later that I learned of the philosophical
identification of goodness with existence!

HABERMAS: In your view, then, God hasn't done anything about evil.

FLEW: No, not at all, other than producing a lot of it.

HABERMAS: Given your theism, what about mind-body issues?

FLEW: I think those who want to speak about an afterlife have got to
meet the difficulty of formulating a concept of an incorporeal person.
Here I have again to refer back to my year as a graduate student
supervised by Gilbert Ryle, in the year in which he published The
Concept of Mind.
At that time there was considerable comment, usually hostile, in the
serious British press, on what was called "Oxford Linguistic
Philosophy." The objection was usually that this involved a
trivialization of a very profound and important discipline.
I was by this moved to give a talk to the Philosophy Postgraduates
Club under the title "Matter which Matters." In it I argued that, so
far from ignoring what Immanuel Kant described as the three great
problems of philosophers--God, Freedom and Immortality--the linguistic
approach promised substantial progress towards their solution.
I myself always intended to make contributions in all those three
areas. Indeed my first philosophical publication was relevant to the
third.18 Indeed it was not very long after I got my first job as a
professional philosopher that I confessed to Ryle that if ever I was
asked to deliver the Gifford Lectures I would give them under the
title The Logic of Mortality.19 They were an extensive argument to the
conclusion that it is simply impossible to create a concept of an
incorporeal spirit.

HABERMAS: Is such a concept necessarily required for the notion of an
afterlife?

FLEW: Dr. Johnson's dictionary defines death as the soul leaving the
body. If the soul is to be, as Dr. Johnson and almost if perhaps not
quite everyone else in his day believed it to be, something which can
sensibly be said to leave its present residence and to take up or be
forced to take up residence elsewhere, then a soul must be, in the
philosophical sense, a substance rather than merely a characteristic
of something else.
My Gifford Lectures were published after Richard Swinburne published
his, on The Evolution of the Soul.20 So when mine were reprinted under
the title Merely Mortal? Can You Survive Your Own Death?21 I might
have been expected to respond to any criticisms which Swinburne had
made of my earlier publications in the same area. But the embarrassing
truth is that he had taken no notice of any previous relevant writings
either by me or by anyone
published since World War II. There would not have been much point in
searching for books or articles before that date since Swinburne and I
had been the only Gifford lecturers to treat the question of a future
life for the sixty years past. Even more remarkably, Swinburne in his
Gifford Lectures ignored Bishop Butler's decisive observation: "Memory
may reveal but cannot constitute personal identity."

HABERMAS: On several occasions, you and I have dialogued regarding the
subject of near death experiences, especially the specific sort where
people have reported verifiable data from a distance away from
themselves. Sometimes these reports even occur during the absence of
heartbeat or brain waves.22 After our second dialogue you wrote me a
letter and said that, "I find the materials about near death
experiences so challenging. . . . this evidence equally certainly
weakens if it does not completely refute my argument against doctrines
of a future life .
. . ."23 In light of these evidential near death cases, what do you
think about the possibility of an afterlife, especially given your
theism?

FLEW: An incorporeal being may be hypothesized, and hypothesized to
possess a
memory. But before we could rely on its memory even of its own
experiences we should need to be able to provide an account of how
this hypothesized incorporeal being could be identified in the first
place and then--after what lawyers call an affluxion of
time--reidentified even by himself or herself as one and the same
individual spiritual being. Until we have evidence that we have been
and presumably--as Dr. Johnson and so many lesser men have
believed--are to be identified with such incorporeal spirits I do not
see why near-death experiences should be taken as evidence for the
conclusion that human beings will enjoy a future life--or more likely
if either of the two great revealed religions is true--suffer eternal
torment.

HABERMAS: I agree that near death experiences do not evidence the
doctrines of either heaven or hell. But do you think these evidential
cases increase the possibility of some sort of an afterlife, again,
given your theism?

FLEW: I still hope and believe there's no possibility of an afterlife.

HABERMAS: Even though you hope there's no afterlife, what do you think
of the evidence that there might be such, as perhaps indicated by
these evidential near death cases? And even if there is no clear
notion of what sort of body might be implied here, do you find this
evidence helpful in any way? In other words, apart from the form in
which a potential afterlife might take, do you still find these to be
evidence for something?

FLEW: It's puzzling to offer an interpretation of these experiences.
But I presume it has got to be taken as extrasensory perceiving by the
flesh and blood person who is the subject of the experiences in
question. What it cannot be is the hypothesized incorporeal spirit
which you would wish to identify with the person who nearly died, but
actually did not. For this concept of an incorporeal spirit cannot
properly be assumed to have been given sense until and unless some
means has been provided for identifying such spirits in the first
place and re-identifying them as one and the same individual
incorporeal spirits after the affluxion of time. Until and unless this
has been done we have always to remember Bishop Butler's objection:
"Memory may reveal but cannot constitute personal identity."24
Perhaps I should here point out that, long before I took my first
university course in philosophy, I was much interested in what in the
UK, where it began, is still called psychical research although the
term "parapsychology" is now usually almost everywhere else. Perhaps I
ought here to confess that my first book was brashly entitled A New
Approach to Psychical Research,25 and my interest in this subject
continued for many years thereafter.

HABERMAS: Actually you have also written to me that these near death
experiences "certainly constitute impressive evidence for the
possibility of the occurrence of human consciousness independent of
any occurrences in the human brain."26

FLEW: When I came to consider what seemed to me the most impressive of
these near death cases I asked myself what is the traditional first
question to ask about "psychic" phenomena. It is, "When, where, and by
whom were the phenomena first reported?" Some people seem to confuse
near death experiences with after death experiences. Where any such
near death experiences become relevant to the question of a future
life is when and only when they appear to show "the occurrence of
human consciousness independent of any occurrences in the human
brain."

HABERMAS: Elsewhere, you again very kindly noted my influence on your
thinking here, regarding these data being decent evidence for human
consciousness independent of "electrical activity in the brain."27 If
some near death experiences are evidenced, independently confirmed
experiences during a near death state, even in persons whose heart or
brain may not be functioning, isn't that is quite impressive evidence?
Are near death experiences, then, the best evidence for an afterlife?

FLEW: Oh, yes, certainly. They are basically the only evidence.

HABERMAS: What critical evaluation would you make of the three major
monotheisms? Are there any particular philosophical strengths or
weaknesses in Christianity, Judaism, or Islam?

FLEW: If all I knew or believed about God was what I might have
learned from Aristotle, then I should have assumed that everything in
the universe, including human conduct, was exactly as God wanted it to
be. And this is indeed the case, in so far as both Christianity and
Islam are predestinarian, a fundamental teaching of both religious
systems. What was true of
Christianity in the Middle Ages is certainly no longer equally true
after the Reformation. But Islam has neither suffered nor enjoyed
either a Reformation or an Enlightenment. In the Summa Theologiae we
may read:

As men are ordained to eternal life throughout the providence of God,
it likewise is part of that providence to permit some to fall away
from that end; this is called reprobation . .

. . Reprobation implies not only foreknowledge but also is something
more. . .28

What and how much that something more is the Summa contra Gentiles
makes clear:

. . . just as God not only gave being to things when they first began,
but is also--as the conserving cause of being--the cause of their
being as long as they last . . . . Every operation, therefore, of
anything is traced back to Him as its cause.29

The Angelic Doctor, however, is always the devotedly complacent
apparatchik. He sees no problem about the justice of either the
inflicting of infinite and everlasting penalties for finite and
temporal offences, or of their affliction upon creatures for offences
which their Creator makes them freely choose to commit. Thus, the
Angelic Doctor assures us:

In order that the happiness of the saints may be more delightful to
them and that they may render more copious thanks to God . . . they
are allowed to see perfectly the sufferings of the damned . . . Divine
justice and their own deliverance will be the direct cause of the joy
of the blessed, while the pains of the damned will cause it indirectly
. . . the blessed in glory will have no pity for the damned.30

The statements of predestinarianism in the Qur'an are much more
aggressive and unequivocal than even the strongest in the Bible.
Compare the followingfrom the Qur'an with that from Romans 9.

As for the unbelievers, alike it is to them
Whether thou hast warned them or hast not warned them
They do not believe.31
God has set a seal on their hearts and on the hearing
And on the eyes is a covering
And there awaits them a mighty chastisement.32

In the UK the doctrine of Hell has for the last century or more been
progressively deemphasised, until in 1995 it was explicitly and
categorically abandoned by the Church of England. It would appear that
the Roman Catholic Church has not abandoned either the doctrine of
Hell nor predestination.
Thomas Hobbes spent a very large part of the forty years between the
first publication of the King James Bible and the first publication of
his own Leviathan engaged in biblical criticism, one very relevant
finding of which I now quote:

And it is said besides in many places [that the wicked] shall go into
everlasting fire; and that the worm of conscience never dieth; and all
this is comprehended in the word everlasting death, which is
ordinarily interpreted everlasting life in torments. And yet I can
find nowhere that any man shall live in torments everlastingly. Also,
it seemeth hard to say that God who is the father of mercies; that
doth in heaven and earth all that he will, that hath the hearts of all
men in his disposing; that worketh in men both to do, and to will; and
without whose free gift a man hath neither inclination to good, nor
repentance of evil, should punish men's transgressions without any end
of time, and with all the extremity of torture, that men can imagine
and more.33

As for Islam, it is, I think, best described in a Marxian way as the
uniting and justifying ideology of Arab imperialism. Between the New
Testament and the Qur'an there is (as it is customary to say when
making such comparisons) no comparison. Whereas markets can be found
for books on reading the Bible as literature, to read the Qur'an is a
penance rather than a pleasure. There is no order or development in
its subject matter. All the chapters (the suras) are arranged in order
of their length, with the longest at the beginning. However, since the
Qur'an consists in a collection of bits and pieces of putative
revelation delivered to the prophet Mohammad by the Archangel Gabriel
in classical Arab on many separate but unknown occasions, it is
difficult to suggest any superior principle of organization.
One point about the editing of the Qur'an is rarely made although it
would appear to be of very substantial theological significance. For
every sura is prefaced by the words "In the Name of God, the Merciful,
the Compassionate." Yet there are references to Hell on at least 255
of the 669 pages of Arberry's rendering of the Qur'an34 and quite
often pages have two such
references.
Whereas St. Paul, who was the chief contributor to the New Testament,
knew all the three relevant languages and obviously possessed a first
class philosophical mind, the Prophet, though gifted in the arts of
persuasion and clearly a considerable military leader, was both
doubtfully literate and certainly ill-informed about the contents of
the Old Testament and about
several matters of which God, if not even the least informed of the
Prophet's contemporaries, must have been cognizant.
This raises the possibility of what my philosophical contemporaries in
the heyday of Gilbert Ryle would have described as a knock-down
falsification of Islam: something which is most certainly not possible
in the case of Christianity. If I do eventually produce such a paper
it will obviously have to be published anonymously.

HABERMAS: What do you think about the Bible?

FLEW: The Bible is a work which someone who had not the slightest
concern about the question of the truth or falsity of the Christian
religion could read as people read the novels of the best novelists.
It is an eminently readable book.

HABERMAS: You and I have had three dialogues on the resurrection of
Jesus. Are you any closer to thinking that the resurrection could have
been a historical fact?

FLEW: No, I don't think so. The evidence for the resurrection is
better than for claimed miracles in any other religion. It's
outstandingly different in quality and quantity, I think, from the
evidence offered for the occurrence of most other supposedly
miraculous events. But you must remember that I approached it after
considerable reading of reports of psychical research
and its criticisms. This showed me how quickly evidence of remarkable
and supposedly miraculous events can be discredited.
What the psychical researcher looks for is evidence from witnesses, of
the supposedly paranormal events, recorded as soon as possible after
their occurrence. What we do not have is evidence from anyone who was
in Jerusalem at the time, who witnessed one of the allegedly
miraculous events, and recorded his or her testimony immediately after
the occurrence of that allegedly miraculous event. In the 1950s and
1960s I heard several suggestions from hard-bitten young Australian
and American philosophers of conceivable miracles the actual
occurrence of which, it was contended, no one could have overlooked or
denied. Why, they asked, if God wanted to be recognized and
worshipped, did God not produce a miracle of this unignorable and
undeniable kind?

HABERMAS: So you think that, for a miracle, the evidence for Jesus'
resurrection is better than other miracle claims?

FLEW: Oh yes, I think so. It's much better, for example, than that for
most if not of the, so to speak, run of the mill Roman Catholic
miracles. On this see, for instance, D. J. West.35

HABERMAS: You have made numerous comments over the years that
Christians are
justified in their beliefs such as Jesus' resurrection or other major
tenants of their faith. In our last two dialogues I think you even
remarked that for someone who is already a Christian there are many
good reasons to believe Jesus' resurrection. Would you comment on
that?

FLEW: Yes, certainly. This is an important matter about rationality
which I have fairly recently come to appreciate. What it is rational
for any individual to believe about some matter which is fresh to that
individual's consideration depends on what he or she rationally
believed before they were confronted with this fresh situation. For
suppose they rationally believed in the existence of a God of any
revelation, then it would be entirely reasonable for them to see the
fine tuning argument as providing substantial confirmation of their
belief in the existence of that God.

HABERMAS: You've told me that you have a very high regard for John and
Charles Wesley and their traditions. What accounts for your
appreciation?

FLEW: The greatest thing is their tremendous achievement of creating
the Methodist movement mainly among the working class. Methodism made
it impossible to build a really substantial Communist Party in Britain
and provided the country with a generous supply of men and women of
sterling moral character from mainly working class families. Its
decline is a substantial part of the explosions both of unwanted
motherhood and of crime in recent decades.
There is also the tremendous determination shown by John Wesley in
spending year after year riding for miles every day, preaching more
than seven sermons a week and so on. I have only recently been told of
John Wesley's great controversy against predestination and in favor of
the Arminian alternative. Certainly John Wesley was one of my
country's many great sons and daughters. One at least of the others
was raised in a Methodist home with a father who was a local preacher.

HABERMAS: Don't you attribute some of your appreciations for the
Wesleys to your father's ministry? Haven't you said that your father
was the first non-Anglican to get a doctorate in theology from Oxford
University?

FLEW: Yes to both questions. Of course it was because my family's
background was that of Methodism. Yes, my father was also President of
the Methodist Conference for the usual single year term and he was the
Methodist representative of one or two other organizations. He was
also concerned for the World Council of Churches. Had my father lived
to be active into the
early 1970s he would have wanted at least to consider the question of
whether the Methodist Church ought not to withdraw from the World
Council of Churches. That had by that time apparently been captured by
agents of the USSR.36

HABERMAS: What do you think that Bertrand Russell, J. L. Mackie, and
A. J. Ayer would have thought about these theistic developments, had
they still been alive today?

FLEW: I think Russell certainly would have had to notice these things.
I'm sure Mackie would have been interested, too. I never knew Ayer
very well, beyond meeting him once or twice.

HABERMAS: Do you think any of them would have been impressed in the
direction of theism? I'm thinking here, for instance, about Russell's
famous comments that God hasn't produced sufficient evidence of his
existence.37

FLEW: Consistent with Russell's comments that you mention, Russell
would have
regarded these developments as evidence. I think we can be sure that
Russell would have been impressed too, precisely because of his
comments to which you refer. This would have produced an interesting
second dialogue between him and that distinguished Catholic
philosopher, Frederick Copleston.

HABERMAS: In recent years you've been called the world's most
influential philosophical atheist. Do you think Russell, Mackie, or
Ayer would have been bothered or even angered by your conversion to
theism? Or do you think that they would have at least understood your
reasons for changing your mind?

FLEW: I'm not sure how much any of them knew about Aristotle. But I am
almost certain that they never had in mind the idea of a God who was
not the God of any revealed religion. But we can be sure that they
would have examined these new scientific arguments.

HABERMAS: C. S. Lewis explained in his autobiography that he moved
first from atheism to theism and only later from theism to
Christianity. Given your great respect for Christianity, do you think
that there is any chance that you might in the end move from theism to
Christianity?

FLEW: I think it's very unlikely, due to the problem of evil. But, if
it did happen, I think it would be in some eccentric fit and
doubtfully orthodox form: regular religious practice perhaps but
without belief. If I wanted any sort of future life I should become a
Jehovah's Witness. But some things I am completely confident about. I
would never regard Islam with anything but
horror and fear because it is fundamentally committed to conquering
the world for Islam. It was because the whole of Palestine was part of
the land of Islam that Muslim Arab armies moved in to try to destroy
Israel at birth, and why the struggle for the return of the still
surviving refugees and their numerous descendents continue to this
day.

HABERMAS: I ask this last question with a smile, Tony. But just think
what would happen if one day you were pleasantly disposed toward
Christianity and all of a sudden the resurrection of Jesus looked
pretty good to you?

FLEW: Well, one thing I'll say in this comparison is that, for
goodness sake, Jesus is an enormously attractive charismatic figure,
which the Prophet of Islam most emphatically is not.



1 "Christianity Challenges the University: An International Conference
of Theists and Atheists," Dallas, Texas, February 7-10, 1985,
organized by Roy Abraham Varghese.

2 See Gary R. Habermas and Antony G. N. Flew, Did Jesus Rise from the
Dead? The Resurrection Debate, ed. Terry L. Miethe (San Francisco:
Harper & Row, 1987; Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2003).

3 Some examples by Antony Flew include "Miracles and Methodology," in
Hume's Philosophy of Belief: A Study of His First Inquiry (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961); "The Credentials of Revelation:
Miracle and
History," in God and Philosophy (New York: Dell, 1966); "Miracles," in
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Macmillan,
1967); "The Impossibility of the Miraculous," in Hume's Philosophy of
Religion,
(Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 1985); introduction
to Of Miracles, by David Hume (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1985);
"Neo-Humean Arguments about the Miraculous" in In Defence of Miracles:
A Comprehensive Case for God's Action in History, ed. R. Douglas
Geivett and Gary R. Habermas (Downers Grove, IL: Inter Varsity Press,
1997).

4 Some examples by Gary Habermas include The Risen Jesus and Future
Hope (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003); The Historical Jesus:
Ancient Evidence for the Life of Christ (Joplin, MO; College, 1996);
The Resurrection of Jesus: An Apologetic (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker,
1980; Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984); "Knowing that
Jesus' Resurrection Occurred: A Response to Stephen Davis," Faith and
Philosophy
2 (1985): 295-302; "Resurrection Claims in Non-Christian Religions,"
Religious Studies 25 (1989): 167-77; "The Late Twentieth-Century
Resurgence of Naturalistic Responses to Jesus' Resurrection," Trinity
Journal 22 (2001):
179-96. For a more popular treatment, see Habermas and Michael R.
Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (Grand Rapids, MI:
Kregel, 2004).

5 Gary R. Habermas and Antony G. N. Flew, Resurrected? An Atheist and
Theist Debate, ed. John Ankerberg (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield,
forthcoming).

6 The dialogue took place as a part of the Veritas Forum and is
accessible at
http://www.veritasforum.com/talks/httm.

7 Telephone conversation, September 9, 2004.

8 Both participants also agreed to the title of the interview.

9 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1971).

10 Gerald L. Schroeder, The Science of God: The Convergence of
Scientific and Biblical Wisdom (New York: Broadway Books, 1998).

11 Letter from Antony Flew, November 9, 2000.

12 Antony Flew, "God and the Big Bang" (lecture, 2000), 5-6; this is a
lecture commemorating the 140th anniversary of the British Association
meeting regarding Charles Darwin's The Origin of the Species.

13 C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1980),
especially Book 1.

14 Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1948).

15 G. W. Leibniz, Theodicy, ed. A. Farrer, trans. E. M. Huggard (1710;
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965).

16 Donald W. Livingston, Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume's
Pathology of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998),
150.

17 Antony Flew, Social Life and Moral Judgment (New Brunswick, NH:
Transaction, 2003).

18 Antony Flew, "Selves," Mind (1949): 355-8.

19 Antony Flew, The Logic of Mortality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987).

20 Richard Swinburne, The Evolution of the Soul (Oxford: Clarendon,
1986).

21 Antony Flew, Merely Mortal? Can You Survive Your Own Death?
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2000).

22 For many cases see Gary R. Habermas and J. P. Moreland, Beyond
Death: Exploring the Evidence for Immortality (Wheaton, IL: Crossway,
1998; Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2003), chapters 7-9.

23 Letter from Antony Flew, September 6, 2000.

24 Joseph Butler, Butler's Works, ed. W. E. Gladstone (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1896), 1:387.

25 Antony Flew, A New Approach to Psychical Research (London: C. A.
Watts, 1953).

26 Letter from Antony Flew, September 6, 2000.

27 Flew, "God and the Big Bang," 2. Habermas's influence on Flew's
statement here is noted in Flew's letter of November 9, 2000 (cf. note
11 above).

28 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q.23, a.3.

29 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Book 3, chapter 67.

30 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, III, supp.94, a.1-3.

31 Qur'an 2, trans. Arthur J. Arberry (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1998).

32 Qur'an 5.

33 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998), 416, chapter 44.

34 This is the version of the Qur'an as "interpreted" by Arthur
Arberry, in the Oxford University Press edition.

35 D. J. West, Eleven Lourdes Miracles (London: George Duckworth,
1957).

36 Bernard Smith, The Fraudulent Gospel: Politics and the World
Council of Churches (London: Foreign Affairs, 1977).

37 See, for example, Bertrand Russell, Bertrand Russell Speaks His
Mind, ed. Woodrow Wyatt (New York: Bard Books, 1960), 19-20.