Geoff Arnold's Blog

Andrew Sullivan just posted a lengthy quotation from Burke. Sully obviously intended it to support his case for Obama’s candidacy, but to me it seemed an excellent argument for the coming together of “the new atheists” at this moment of history. (My emphasis.)

Whilst men are linked together, they easily and speedily communicate the alarm of any evil design. They are enabled to fathom it with common counsel, and to oppose it with united strength. Whereas, when they lie dispersed, without concert, order, or discipline, communication is uncertain, counsel difficult, and resistance impracticable. Where men are not acquainted with each other’s principles, nor experienced in each other’s talents, nor at all practised in their mutual habitudes and dispositions by joint efforts in business; no personal confidence, no friendship, no common interest, subsisting among them; it is evidently impossible that they can act a public part with uniformity, perseverance, or efficacy… When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

In a world in which the politics of intolerance and violence is increasingly fuelled by fundamentalist religion, the non-religious among us (atheists, humanists, “brights”, freethinkers, agnostics, et cetera) need to stand together for reason and tolerance and against superstition and bigotry. And we are not, in general, as organized and obedient as church- and mosque-goers, and so it takes a lot of energy and passion to rouse us out of our comfortable seats. Those who disagree with us may call this intemperate, strident, or angry; ignore them, because this is about organizing ourselves, not selling our ideas.

In this month’s Atlantic, there’s a piece by Hanna Rosin called How Hollywood Saved God. In it she describes the making of the film of “The Golden Compass”, based on the first book of Philip Pullman’s famous trilogy. I loved the novels, and like many other fans I was worried about how New Line Cinema would treat the strong anti-religious themes of the books. Sadly, it appears that they have eviscerated the story, eliminating religious references and transforming the Magisterium into a cross between the Third Reich and George Lucas’s Evil Empire.
I can’t say that this was unexpected. Nevertheless, I had consoled myself with the thought that at least the films would be a ‘gateway drug’, taking advantage of the Potter-fuelled enthusiasm for children’s literature to get people of all ages reading Pullman’s novels. I hadn’t taken account of the pusillanimous nature of American publishers. Here’s Rosin; the emphasis is mine:

In The Amber Spyglass, a former nun turned physicist guides Lyra to her destiny using clues from the I Ching. The physicist divines that she should tell Lyra the story of when she was 12 years old at a birthday party and a boy “took a bit of marzipan and he just gently put it in my mouth,” and she fell in love.
This simple story sets off salvation. When she hears it, Lyra “felt something strange happen to her body. She felt a stirring at the roots of her hair: she found herself breathing faster.” (At least that’s what she felt in the British edition; the American version leaves these lines out.)

Aargh! What else have they left out or bowdlerized? Sometimes this totally screwed-up American attitude towards sexuality just makes me want to spit! I guess it’s time to place an order with Amazon.co.uk for a set of the original editions, just like I had to do with the early Harry Potter books.
I’m still looking forward to seeing the film: I hear that Nicole Kidman’s performance is almost perfect. I just know that when I’m sitting there in the cinema, I’ll be thinking about a slightly different story from most of the rest of the audience…

Over the years I’ve posted a number of pieces about the philosopher Antony Flew, and his flirtations with theism. Back in May I wrote (under the heading The longest running soap opera in the philosophy of religion) that:

You can now pre-order There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, authored by Antony Flew and Roy Abraham Varghese. It’s scheduled to be published in November, 2007.

Well, it’s now November, and the notorious book has been published. And in today’s New York Times Magazine, Mark Oppenheimer has pulled together the whole story in a piece entitled The Turning of an Atheist. It’s a rather sad tale of an old man in his dotage, allowing himself to be exploited by others, to the point where he allowed his name to be put to a book which he didn’t even write:

In August, I visited Flew in Reading…. I visited on two consecutive days, and each day Annis, Flew’s wife of 55 years, served me a glass of water and left me in the sitting room to ask her husband a series of tough, indeed rather cruel, questions.
In “There Is a God,” Flew quotes extensively from a conversation he had with Leftow, a professor at Oxford. So I asked Flew, “Do you know Brian Leftow?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t think I do.”
“Do you know the work of the philosopher John Leslie?” Leslie is discussed extensively in the book.
Flew paused, seeming unsure. “I think he’s quite good.” But he said he did not remember the specifics of Leslie’s work.
“Have you ever run across the philosopher Paul Davies?” In his book, Flew calls Paul Davies “arguably the most influential contemporary expositor of modern science.”
“I’m afraid this is a spectacle of my not remembering!”
He said this with a laugh…. But he forgot more than names. He didn’t remember talking with Paul Kurtz about his introduction to “God and Philosophy” just two years ago. There were words in his book, like “abiogenesis,” that now he could not define. When I asked about Gary Habermas, who told me that he and Flew had been friends for 22 years and exchanged “dozens” of letters, Flew said, “He and I met at a debate, I think.”… And he seemed generally uninterested in the content of his book — he spent far more time talking about the dangers of unchecked Muslim immigration and his embrace of the anti-E.U. United Kingdom Independence Party.
As he himself conceded, he had not written his book.
“This is really Roy’s doing,” he said, before I had even figured out a polite way to ask. “He showed it to me, and I said O.K. I’m too old for this kind of work!”

What a pity.
UPDATE: Richard Carrier has a fairly complete account of the background to, and authorship of, that bloody book. As Oppenheimer reported, Flew admitted that he didn’t write a word of it. Digging further, Carrier reveals that even the ghost had a ghost:

In my opinion the book’s arguments are so fallacious and cheaply composed I doubt Flew would have signed off on it in sound mind, and Oppenheimer comes to much the same conclusion. It seems Flew simply trusted Varghese and didn’t even read the book being published in his name. And even if he had, he is clearly incapable now of even remembering what it said. The book’s actual author turns out to be an evangelical preacher named Bob Hostetler (who has also written several books with Josh McDowell), with considerable assistance from this book’s co-author, evangelical promoter and businessman Roy Abraham Varghese.
However, I don’t completely believe the story they told Oppenheimer. The style of the chapters attributed to Flew differs so much from the portions explicitly written by Varghese (such as a lengthy preface), that I suspect Hostetler was responsible for much more than the publisher claims. Whether that’s so or not, this is a hack Christian tract, not formal or competent philosophy, nor anything from the mind of Antony Flew.

And that’s the thing that really bothers me. Unlike Carrier, I actually think that Flew was ((Tense deliberately chosen.)) a genuinely interesting philosopher, and I’m happy to have some of his books on my shelf. But in years to come, when all this tawdry mess is forgotten, Flew’s bibliography will include this ghastly little book which contains none of his ideas and none of his incisive prose. I’ve actually seen the book, on the shelves of the local chain bookstore. Varghese’s name appears in small print on the front of the book, but the spine and back flap simply identify Flew as the author.
Amazon.com has a “review” by the literary agent for the project, Steven Laube. He cites a press release from the publisher, responding to the NYT piece, which quotes Flew as saying:

“My name is on the book and it represents exactly my opinions. I would not have a book issued in my name that I do not 100 percent agree with. I needed someone to do the actual writing because I’m 84 and that was Roy Varghese’s role. The idea that someone manipulated me because I’m old is exactly wrong. I may be old but it is hard to manipulate me. This is my book and it represents my thinking.”

Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? But the evidence is against him. I’ve read Flew’s work: he is (or was) the kind of nit-picking writer who couldn’t abide to leave any loose ends or contradictions. Here’s Richard Carrier again:

For example, the author pretending to be Flew claims there hasn’t been enough time for abiogenesis. The real Antony Flew knows this is false. In fact he conceded it was false to me in writing, and I quoted him on this fact in my online article. You would think that even a forger who wants the world to think this is Flew’s response to his own critics and that Flew remains a theist for sound reasons, would at least have his fictional Flew explain his retraction and re-retract it somehow. Instead, the author appears not even to know that Flew publicly retracted the claim that there hasn’t been enough time for abiogenesis. The author is also clearly unaware of the fact that Flew had radically changed earlier drafts of his preface to God & Philosophy to reflect exactly this change of position, even though this was also a matter of public record. Thus no explanation is given for his sudden (though apparently fictional) re-reversal.

Varghese and Hostetler have clearly put words into Flew’s mouth. I see no reason not to believe that they, or the publisher, have also supplied him with the text of this disclaimer.
To summarize: I do not doubt that Flew now holds some vaguely deistic belief. However, he has demonstrated such lapses in memory, confusion, contradiction, and loss of his distinctive critical style that it seems virtually certain that he had nothing to do with this book and is unaware of most of its contents. And that’s outrageous.
UPDATE 2: Well, here’s a strange twist: Flew as a possible defender of eugenics. Curiouser and curiouser.