Antony Flew's theism
Antony Flew, a famous atheist, has recently become a theist/deist along the lines of Thomas Jefferson, apparently because the evidence for theism according to his criteria became too convincing. He still does not accept any kind of divine revelation. Here is a news article on his “conversion,” and here is an interview of Flew by Gary Habermas, who was instrumental in Flew’s becoming a theist. It seems that he answered the evidentialist challenge to belief in God in favor of God. This is interesting to me in light of my recent study of reformed epistemology, which considers the evidentialist challenge invalid, and also cites Flew as believing that God is “guilty until proven innocent,” rather than innocent until proven guilty, as the reformed epistemologists submit can be the case.
This brought to mind one of the ideas I struggled with most with reformed epistemology.
Though I cannot grasp all the nuances, I think I understand that the reformed epistemologists believe (in the tradition of Kuyper) that there can be two “rational” sciences that entail different presuppositions and different conclusions, namely a regenerate science and an unregenerate science. Kuyper believed that Christians and non-Christians could be equally scientific, but have different starting points and frameworks of assumptions. So they were not working on one building in the name of science, but on two different buildings. (From George Marsden’s Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, 122) This is in opposition to B.B. Warfield, who believed that science was an “objective, unified, and cumulative enterprise of the entire human race,” and that basically rational discussion would always lead to belief in God (Marsden, 123).
Though it seems that Kuyper has basically won in the minds of most (at least in the circles I read), I still can’t get my mind around the whole idea for one reason: I would like to think that an idea can’t be rational if it misrepresents reality, which it seems like I would have to admit if I were to accept the Kuyperian view. Can a view of science that misses out on reality itself really be considered to be rational? I can see that a person who believes in the eternality of the cosmos, as Carl Sagan does—“The cosmos is all there is, there was, or ever will be”—would be able to concoct a mostly consistent and believable body of beliefs, but is this necessarily rational? I guess this depends on one’s definition of rational, but it still seems like a point I can’t let go. Wouldn’t any science that misrepresents reality be bad science, not merely unregenerate science? I guess maybe this assumes too much out of a human ability to understand reality.
As has been the case with all I’ve written in response to my epistemology class, I look back on what I write and feel like I have just contradicted what I said by how I wrote it, or some other inconsistency. So basically I am writing this in the hope that I need to put stuff down on paper and make mistakes in order to gain better understanding. With that, can anyone offer any help with this topic based on my rambling? And does anyone have thoughts on Flew's theism?
Matt Stewart
This brought to mind one of the ideas I struggled with most with reformed epistemology.
Though I cannot grasp all the nuances, I think I understand that the reformed epistemologists believe (in the tradition of Kuyper) that there can be two “rational” sciences that entail different presuppositions and different conclusions, namely a regenerate science and an unregenerate science. Kuyper believed that Christians and non-Christians could be equally scientific, but have different starting points and frameworks of assumptions. So they were not working on one building in the name of science, but on two different buildings. (From George Marsden’s Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, 122) This is in opposition to B.B. Warfield, who believed that science was an “objective, unified, and cumulative enterprise of the entire human race,” and that basically rational discussion would always lead to belief in God (Marsden, 123).
Though it seems that Kuyper has basically won in the minds of most (at least in the circles I read), I still can’t get my mind around the whole idea for one reason: I would like to think that an idea can’t be rational if it misrepresents reality, which it seems like I would have to admit if I were to accept the Kuyperian view. Can a view of science that misses out on reality itself really be considered to be rational? I can see that a person who believes in the eternality of the cosmos, as Carl Sagan does—“The cosmos is all there is, there was, or ever will be”—would be able to concoct a mostly consistent and believable body of beliefs, but is this necessarily rational? I guess this depends on one’s definition of rational, but it still seems like a point I can’t let go. Wouldn’t any science that misrepresents reality be bad science, not merely unregenerate science? I guess maybe this assumes too much out of a human ability to understand reality.
As has been the case with all I’ve written in response to my epistemology class, I look back on what I write and feel like I have just contradicted what I said by how I wrote it, or some other inconsistency. So basically I am writing this in the hope that I need to put stuff down on paper and make mistakes in order to gain better understanding. With that, can anyone offer any help with this topic based on my rambling? And does anyone have thoughts on Flew's theism?
Matt Stewart
posted by CROATOAN at 7:26 PM
1 Comments:
Matt
Good stuff. Your anguish or frustration over something being rational but somehow not a representation of reality is good question. Here are a couple of responses off the cuff.
1) Recognize that the heirs of Kuyper break into two wings (speaking very broadly) when it comes to epistemology. On the one side would be Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff (although Wolterstorff is harder to catagorize) and the heirs who stick more closely to the work of Herman Dooyeweerd and Dirk Vollenhoeven (and their philosophy of the cosmonomic idea).
2) To quote Dooyeweerd: "Every philosophy which claims a Christian starting point is confronted with the traditional dogma concerning the autonomy of philosophical thought, implying its independence of all religious presuppositions. It may be positied that this dogma is the only one that has survived the general decay of the earlier certitudes in philosophy." So the rules of rationality are not autonomous but emerge out of previous assumptions or commitments.
You know where to find me if you want to pursue this more.
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