I’ve been reading about Antony Flew tonight. He, according to the blurb, is, or rather was, the world’s most notorious atheist until, very late on life he underwent a conversion to god. As a fellow atheist traveller, who has read a good bit on the subject by the likes of Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, Baker, Hirsi Ali, Dennett and Krauss (other atheists are available), it’s little surprising that I had never heard of ‘the world’s most notorious atheist.’
I now read that, in old age, Flew ‘wrote’ a book, ‘There is a god’, with the assistance of one Roy Abraham Varghese, who just happens to be another one of those pseudo-science ‘experts’ who writes rubbish about the existence of god and the afterlife.
So many of the reviews of the book are simply an excuse to attack the likes of Richard Dawkins who go down the scientific line and make judgements based on evidence, which is always a problem for ‘faith’ which is essentially belief without evidence. Dawkins, I read, rants and is ‘shrill’ in his arguments which, from men – it’s usually men – of the cloth are never. You never read about loud sermons from the pulpit, do you? It’s only those without ‘faith’ who hector! Yeah, right!
It is obvious why theists like stories like those about Flew. It vindicates their views on the existence of the sky god, the omnipresent being who watches the entire world’s population 24/7 and then sits by as innumerable tragedies envelop many of them. I don’t know whether Flew really did have an old age conversion, but I do know that the devout pretended for years that Charles Darwin, who presented the theory, now fact, of evolution had a deathbed conversion, which he palpably didn’t. In fact, Darwin agonised for years about what he had discovered and how it rendered religion as man made and made up.
Good luck to all of you of faith. I hope you enjoyed christmas day as much as I did, especially those wonderful customs the vast majority of which are not found in the good, or should I say bad, book. The tree, the turkey (we had beef), presents; none of these traditions have anything to do with the supposed Jesus of Nazareth but, apart from a lot of turkeys and cows who were slaughtered for the festival, we had a good day.
It is entirely possible that I might too have a death bed conversion. I already know that I don’t particularly want to die – ever – but I am convinced I will. Furthermore, I don’t expect to survive my own death and go to heaven, or hell. But if I am horrible ill, no longer in control of my faculties and desperate, I might reach out to a non existent deity and beg for an extension. I doubt it, mind you, and anyway an eternity in a jam-packed afterlife which will probably have no pubs and no football in either place, hardly appeals.
More than anything with Flew’s story, I sense exploitation, I suspect religious propaganda and, frankly, I don’t believe it. But if I am wrong, I simply ask this: god, if you are out there, make yourself known to me. Science has not yet proved that you don’t exist but then surely the onus is on the devout to prove you do and in that they have failed dismally and just because some rabbi, vicar, imam, priest or jedi can prove to me that faith is more than hokum pokum, I’ll stick with what I know.
