Anthony Flew's "Willing Suspension of Disbelief"
For Sunday April 24, 2005
Lectionary Readings (Revised Common Lectionary, Year A)
Acts 7:55–60
Psalm 31:1–5, 15–16
1 Peter 2:2–10
John 14:1–14
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Late one Friday afternoon in 1991 the president of my college called me to his office and informed me that after six years of teaching at William Tyndale College (1985–1991), my contract would not be renewed because of severe budget deficits. It was a frigid February day, my wife was pregnant with our third child, and I felt deeply threatened and vulnerable. But as God would have it, six months later our family of five, including our newborn baby daughter, left our four bedroom house, relocated to Russia, and moved into a college dorm. For the next four years I served as a visiting professor in the department of "Scientific Atheism" at Moscow State University (1991–1995). Mixing it up with the "scientific atheists," I discovered, was a whole lot more fun than getting mixed up with the Christian fundamentalists.
Whereas most all the world in all times and places has been religious, the modern West has spawned numerous influential atheist thinkers like Voltaire, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, and more recently Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Madalyn Murray O'Hair. Entire political movements like Soviet and Chinese communism have depended upon atheistic presuppositions. Three of the four lectionary texts this week remind us of the reality of unbelief. Luke records how a raging crowd stoned Stephen to death and scattered the Jerusalem church in a wave of persecutions that would last 300 years. John's Gospel this week describes "doubting Thomas" voicing his uncertainties: "how can we know the way?" And Peter's epistle mentions "those who do not believe."
Four months ago the British philosopher Anthony Flew shocked the world when he announced that he had, in the felicitous phrase made famous by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "willfully suspended disbelief." In numerous public announcements and interviews, Flew now says that based upon the scientific evidence of the complexity in nature, he believes it is likely that some super-intelligence or first cause something like Aristotle's "god" created the universe. He describes himself as something akin to a deist like Thomas Jefferson, and compares his beliefs to those of Einstein who believed in "an Intelligence that produced the integrative complexity of creation." Flew believes in evolution but thinks it cannot account for the ultimate origins of life. His ideas, he says, bear some similarity to the Intelligent Design movement.
Now 81, Flew was raised in the home of a Methodist pastor and became an atheist at the age of 15. With more than two dozen books to his credit, he was, according to the Times Literary Supplement, "one of the most renowned atheists of the past half-century, whose papers and lectures have formed the bedrock of unbelief for many adherents." Not any more.
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Although he has a high regard for Jesus as a charismatic figure, and made generous comments about the social contributions of Methodists in Britain, Flew is not Christian, not by a long shot, nor does he have any desire to become a Christian (due mainly to the problem of evil). "I understand why Christians are excited," he says, "but if they think I am going to become a convert to Christ in the near future, they are very much mistaken." He does not believe in miracles, or in the resurrection of Jesus, and he finds the notion of divine judgment especially repugnant. He does not believe in an afterlife: "I have never wanted a future life. I want to be dead when I'm dead and that's the end to it." Nor does he think that the first cause is involved in human affairs in any personal sense. Still, Flew's conversion to theism has made its mark, as evidenced by the skepticism, anger, sheer stupefication, and even charges of "willfully sloppy scholarship" expressed by his admirers in the atheist guild.
One can "willingly suspend disbelief" for a number of reasons. In the preface to his Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge, for example, meant by his phrase the act whereby we voluntarily allow ourselves to be drawn into the world of drama or poetry. Such "poetic faith," as he described it, is thus functional and provisional, for the purpose of enjoying a text. Or again, one might willingly suspend disbelief out of sheer greed, as some biotechnology investors do, according to Paul Kedrosky—"we have no idea whether or how this new treatment might work, but we can make a bundle so let's forego critical questions."1 Similarly, Christians can "suspend disbelief" prematurely in an act of gullibility or easy-believism, as when we dodge difficult questions, disparage critical inquiry, or oversimplify complex issues.
Flew's "willing suspension of disbelief," however, is different. It is of the honest and hard fought sort, the result of over fifty years of "living the questions" (Rilke). "Since the beginning of my philosophical life," he says, "I have followed the policy of Plato's Socrates: We must follow the argument wherever it leads." When asked if it was hard to change his mind, Flew says, "No. It was not hard. I've always engaged in inquiry. If I am shown to have been wrong, well, okay, so I was wrong." His conversion is thus a tribute to his honest openness to critical inquiry, and also a reminder of the verisimilitude of the argument from design and the empirical evidence that undergirds it.2
[1] http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/001096.html.
[2] Quotes from Flew have been taken from Associated Press releases, and also from James A. Beverley, "Thinking Straighter; Why the World's Most Famous Atheist Now Believes in God," in Christianity Today (April, 2005), pp. 80-83. For a philosophically technical treatment of Flew's conversion, see Gary Habermas's lengthy interview with Flew at http://www.biola.edu/antonyflew/.
