Well known atheist changes his mind

[Stunster]

There is a vibrant discussion of the news that the British philosopher, Anthony Flew, hitherto a lifelong atheist (since age 15, he's now 81) has given up his atheism in favor of deism--the view that an intelligent creator made the world. The story and the discussion can be found here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=1058931&mesg_id=1061398

Here is my contribution to that discussion. Responses welcome!
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I remember reading Flew when I was a philosophy undergraduate. The
piece, I think, points up the tremendous difficulty in supposing that
our universe, with its specific physical laws, could have come into
being by chance.

Consider the idea that you have a huge barrel in front of you,
containing 10 million straws of differing lengths. Unless you pull
out the shortest one, you will be shot on the spot by an automatic
light-sensitive weapon which instantly registers the length of the
straw you draw. You pull a straw out, and there's no shooting. You
are hugely relieved and amazed to be alive.

Now consider two versions of the same story: a) this is the only
drawing that takes place; b) millions of similar drawings are
simultaneously taking place all over the world.

If the situation is b, then your relief will still be great, but
there's no reason to suppose a conspiracy to save your
life----somebody, somewhere had to draw the shortest straw, and it may
as well be you. There's no great surprise in that. Indeed, the
probability that there would be one survivor of the drawing would be
1. I.e., it's a certainty. But suppose the situation is a. The
probability that there would be a survivor of such a drawing is 10
million to 1 against, or 0.0000001. This is a reason not just for
surprise, but for believing that the drawing was fixed or designed to
ensure your survival. It is far more likely that the drawing was
fixed, than that you survived by sheer chance.

Well, if there is only one universe, then the chances of it being so
structured as to be capable of evolving human beings are far smaller
than 10 million to 1 against, if the structuring occurs by random
chance. It is vastly more likely to have been designed that way.
Similarly, if you came across a rock in Iran, upon which were marks
which, if read as Greek letters, said (when translated into English)
"Alexander the Great fought a victorious battle in this place against
the forces of the Persian king", it would be irrational to believe
that the letters were carved by random erosion, rather than by some
ancient Greek.

To deal with this problem, the Multiverse Hypothesis has been
proposed. This has the effect of making the situation described
above a b-type one. There are, on this hypothesis, untold billions,
or possibly an infinity, of 'straw-drawings'---i.e.
universe-creations. It is thus certain, or very likely (if you make
the number of creations high enough) that one universe will have a
physics like ours, and will therefore generate beings like us.

But the Multiverse Hypothesis suffers from the problem that all the
other universes are inherently unobservable by us. This immediately
violates the scientific method. And so we have the supremely ironic
result that a colossally huge number of unobservable entities are
posited, while eschewing the scientific method, for the sole 'ad hoc'
purpose of denying the existence of *one* unobservable (God). This
is perhaps the most egregious violation of Ockham's Razor ever
proposed. Furthermore, there is no way of knowing what the random
universe-generating mechanism could possibly be like, or of observing
it, or of understanding why it should exist at all. It would seem
purposeless, utterly devoid of reason, and ridiculously extravagant
from an ontological point of view that there should be such a thing.
But the same charge can't be levelled against theism, since its
ultimate being is supremely endowed with purpose and reason and value
(and in classical theism at least, is ontologically simple, timeless,
and perfect).

So, it is easy to see why Flew should now feel compelled to admit the
existence of an intelligent creator. He does not, however, think that
this being is involved in our lives, and prefers to conceive of God
deistically, rather than theistically.

But surely there is reason to believe that an *intelligent, rational*
creator God *would be* involved with his creatures? Are there any
examples of human beings, acting as intelligent, rational creators and
designers, *not* being involved with the things they make or design?
Hardly any, and if there are such cases, we would be strongly inclined
to say that the act of design/creation would be *irrational* in those
circumstances. A person who made things for no reason would be
considered at best odd, if not insane. A person who made things
simply to look at them would be odd. Ah, but what about
artists---isn't that what they do? Well, actually, artists make
things so that *other people* can look at them. If the artist makes
things which only she will look at, it is usually only done in the
context of preparing art for the public---practice drawings, first
drafts, etc. The ultimate goal is to share the artist's art with others.

Of course, some people make things just for their own amusement. But
in such cases, they *interact* in some fashion with the thing they've
made---they play with it, or use it in some way, because they derive
enjoyment from doing so. But what enjoyment would someone derive
from creating a universe, whose most interesting inhabitants one would
then choose not to communicate or interact with in any fashion? Why
would a rational being go to the trouble of making rational beings,
but then not have anything to do with those other rational beings?
Even in our own fictional accounts of creating supposedly rational
entities like Frankenstein or the 2001 Space Odyssey computer, there
is always interaction between the creator and the creature.
Sometimes there is even some kind of emotional relationship.

I submit that it would be a lot more natural if a divine creator
interacted or communicated somehow with his creatures, and decidedly
odd if he did not.

A further consideration is that the universe is not just an arena
where scientific physics plays out. It's also a moral arena. Why
should that be? Was it just an accident that the intelligent
designer god whom Flew now posits made the universe, and then had
morality come into the world as an *unforeseen, accidental
by-product*. I don't think that's plausible.

All the rational creatures we're familiar with are also moral
agents---agents, that is, who are capable in principle of entering
into moral relationships. Why would a rational creator not be also a
moral agent? And if the creator is a moral agent, that would mean
that the creator would have an understanding of moral value. But
moral value arises precisely in relationship with other moral agents.
Hence, a rational creator who is also a moral agent--as one would
expect him to be (and certainly Kant would insist that all rational
beings are ipso facto moral beings)---such a creator would know that
moral value would arise in the creator's relating meaningfully to the
rational moral creatures he has made.

Now of course, one might object that this is all only what we would
expect, and reality might be different. But on the hypothesis that
there is a rational, intelligent designer/creator of the world, our
expectations in this regard are ultimately the result of that creator
making the world and us the way the world and we are. Our
expectations in this regard would, in short, have been 'put there' by
the creator. Why would the creator do such a thing if the
expectations were invalid or bore no relation to reality? The only
reason a creator would do such a thing would be malicious desire to
deceive us.

What is the likelihood that an intelligent, rational creator of the
universe would be malicious? Well, on some theories of morality
(notably Kant's), to be rational entails being moral. Or to put it
another way, immorality is a species of irrationality. But if a
Flew-type god is highly or supremely rational, which seems implicit in
the notion of being the creator of the whole world, and therefore of
all the rational minds within it, then on Kantian grounds we should
doubt that the creator is malicious.

Even leaving Kant to one side, there seems to be a contradiction or at
least a strong incongruity between Flew's obvious admiration for the
extraordinarily intelligent design of life-systems in the universe,
and the idea that the being responsible for this design is malicious.
For one thing, it seems possible that a being with malevolent
creative intentions would have made life-systems much more frustrating
or painful than they naturally seem to be. Among sentient creatures,
pain is the exception rather than the rule. Normal, healthy sentient
beings are satisfied, and the very notion of 'normal health' indicates
that the overall nature of the design of life is not malevolent, since
it suggests that health, not pain or illness, is the norm. One just
needs to look at most kids in a school yard at break-time to see that
they are happy to be alive. Why would a malevolent creator not make
their lives worse?

It will, of course, be objected that there is a great deal of
suffering, pain and disease in the world, not least among children.
But is this really and mainly the fault of the way nature is designed?
Or is it really and mainly because of human choices? Recent
studies, just to take an almost random sample of many, suggest that
exposure to benzene is harmful, and that chronic stress is linked to
cellular aging:

Benzene Exposure Linked to Blood Changes

Fri Dec 3, 3:22 AM ET
By PAUL RECER, AP Science Writer

WASHINGTON - Blood changes, including a steep decline in
disease-fighting white cells, have been found in workers persistently
exposed to low levels of benzene, a common industrial chemical known
to pose a leukemia risk at high concentrations.

Wed Dec 1, 1:49 AM ET

LOS ANGELES (AFP) - Chronic stress appears to shorten the life of the
body's immune cells, and may compromise the body's ability to fight
off disease, US researchers said.

....Thus, a good deal of human illness appears to be due to choices
which we ourselves make, rather than something necessitated by nature.
Of course, if determinism is true, then the creator is causally
responsible for our choices. But the truth of determinism is far
from being established, and in any case determinism seems incompatible
with what we know about nature from quantum mechanics. And if we are
responsible for our own choices, then that means we are responsible
for our bad choices---both morally bad choices, and ones that are
merely imprudent or mistaken.

Furthermore, most sentient beings cling to life. Among humans, most
people appear to prefer life to death, and this seems almost
universally true of other sentient beings. People in general seem to
be glad that they are alive, even grateful. There are exceptions.
But that's the point---they're exceptions. A malevolent creator
would surely have seen to it that they were not exceptions, but rather
the norm. Though why a putatively rational, intelligent creator
would purposely create beings whose normal inclination would be
towards suicide is itself a question that seems to negate its own premiss.

On the whole therefore, we seem to have little reason to suppose that
the rational/intelligent creator god posited by Flew would act from
malice. Hence there'd be little reason to suppose that the creator
would purposely try to deceive his creatures as regards their
expectations. And among our expectations is the expectation that any
rational creature is likely also a moral agent who will therefore know
that moral value arises in and through choosing to relate and interact
as a rational/moral being with other similar beings, if one can.
Hence there seems little reason to doubt this expectation (since there
seems little reason to suppose that the creator would be a malicious
deceiver), and hence we are probably justified in expecting that the
creator of the world would choose, if possible, to relate and interact
with us.

What evidence is there that the creator has chosen to do so? Well,
it strikes me that there is a colossal amount of such evidence, if we
consider simply the tremendously widespread phenomenon of religious
experience. By that term I include everything from a natural
disposition to believe in the existence of a divine being, to special
experiences of apparent communication with such a being. The former
has been the norm for a long time in most cultures---few cultures or
civilizations have been 'naturally' atheistic, or at least naturally
disposed to believe that there are no supernatural beings. On the
contrary. And the latter type of experience is well attested in the
mystical literature of all the world's major religions. At least
some of these accounts have more than the ring of truth (in the sense
that the mystical writer appears to be telling the truth about what
she has felt, seen, or otherwise experienced), and many of them are
compelling in other ways too, especially the ones linked to dramatic
and impressive moral transformations for the better. Certainly this
kind of transformation has long held by the mainstream theorists of
the major religions to be a criterion of authenticity with respect to
the claimed experiences (other criteria include such things as the
experiencer's consistency, known capacity for honesty, integrity, and
modesty, lack of interest in profiting financially, general
psychological health, etc). Other religious experiences include a
not insignificant number of cases of people claiming to have witnessed
healing miracles.

And there is of course a very large body of monotheistic literature
attesting to religious experience of a transcendent God who desires us
to understand the centrality of the moral life, and desires to forgive
us for and save us from our moral failures and other bad choices. In
short, many people claim to have experienced some kind of interaction
with the creator.

Flew would dismiss all this. But it's surely important to see that,
a priori, there seems little reason to doubt that a rational,
intelligent creator would also be a moral creator and would therefore
*desire* moral interaction with those of his creatures who were
themselves moral beings. And it's surely important to see that, a
posteriori, there is an enormous number of people who claim to have
been the recipients of, and to have engaged in, moral interaction with
the divine creator of the world.

Since I myself have had two extraordinary experiences of interacting
with God, and many ordinary or everday religious experiences (such as
feelings of peace in prayer, or being moved by the love of God and
neighbor exhibited by others), I find it hard to accept that what
seems to be quite likely on a priori grounds---namely, that a rational
creator of the world would also be moral and would desire moral
interaction with his creatures---is not also something that we have
good reason to believe has actually occurred, in fact, quite frequently.