Antony Flew's Deism Revisited: AReview Essay on There Is aGod . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
David Baggett
THIS BOOK IS ABOUT A MAN, a friendship and an argument. The man is Dr. Antony Flew, the friendship is between Flew and Dr. Gary Habermas, and the argument concerns whether or not the resurrection of Jesus really happened.
Flew is one of the foremost analytic philosophers and perhaps the most famous philosophical atheist of the twentieth century who, to the surprise of many, left atheism behind in 2004, declaring himself a theist, more accurately a Deist. His conversion caught international attention. Even Jay Leno joked about it in his monologue one night.
Flew is a longtime friend of Habermas, a garrulous and gregarious Christian philosopher who is arguably the world's leading expert on the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus. Over the course of their twenty-five-year dialogue, Flew and Habermas, their differences notwithstanding, have forged a friendship that's a real model for how friendships can thrive despite disagreements. In a context like today, where animus and invective often pervade what passes for dialogue between atheists and believers, or between theists of various stripes, we could all learn something from the graciousness and warmth of these two men.
"To the Ancients," C. S. Lewis once wrote, "friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue."' Lewis went on to say,
Blaise Pascal once lamented that people spend too much time thinking about the trivial and too little time thinking about the sublime. In a day when superficialities mesmerize attention and occupy our time, Flew and Habermas have built a friendship discussing matters of substance. They met in 1985 at a conference featuring a dialogue between theists and atheists, and immediately formed a bond. Over dinner at that same conference they planned a debate in Virginia later that year on the topic of the historical case for the resurrection of Jesus. Flew was one of the world's leading experts on miracles and David Hume. Habermas was already, even then in his mid-thirties, on his way to becoming the world's leading expert on the resurrection. The event was bound to be a special one.
And special it was! Moderated by Dr. Terry Miethe, the debate and subsequent dialogue (between Habermas, Flew, Miethe and Dr. David Beck) covered two days: May 2 and 3, 1985. Three thousand people attended, and two five-person panels of experts professionally judged the debate-one panel composed of philosophers, another of professional debate judges. This group of ten represented a range of worldviews and served on the faculties of American colleges and universities, such as the University of Virginia and George Mason University. Miethe would later publish the proceedings of this debate in Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?4 He invited Wolfhart Pannenberg, Charles Hartshorne and J. I. Packer to offer written replies, all of which are included in the book. Miethe also included a final essay by Habermas, whom judges had chosen as the winner by a 7-2 margin (with one draw).
Over the next twenty years, despite the ocean separating them physically and ideologically, Habermas and Flew continued to correspond and chat. "Over the years," Habermas says, "Tony and I also exchanged dozens of letters. In our many phone calls, we could just as easily discuss the British or American educational systems, or any number of other topics."5 More recently, at the triennial C. S. Lewis conference "Oxbridge," Habermas added,
At that same conference I met Flew and Habermas for the first time. I loved the study in contrasts. Flew is a very quiet, almost bashful, extremely soft-spoken Englishman, while Habermas is an extroverted, ebullient American. When I first met Habermas in the dining hall of St. Catherine's College, Oxford University-after realizing I had been speaking with his wife, Eileen, already-my first thought was, "It's the resurrection guy!" (My second was, "Lee Strobel was right! He really does look more like a nightclub bouncer than an ivory tower Seeing their friendship up close and personal is indeed inspiring, for it's a model of philosophical dialogue at its best.
So in the spirit of continuing the dialogue, this book is likely the final installment of their ongoing discussion about the resurrection of Jesus. After the 1985 debate, there would be two more: their second was on the Inspiration Network in April 2000 and later on the John Ankerberg Show, published as Resurrected? An Atheist and Theist Dialogue.8 Their third debate was in January 2003 at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, an event sponsored by The Veritas Forum. The first part of this book is the transcript of that debate and therefore marks the culmination of the formal part of their dialogue, which carries on informally even now.
Shortly after that debate, Flew informed Habermas he was consid ering theism, and the following January, one year to the month after this debate, Flew admitted that reading Aristotle had inclined him further toward theism. He thought that was where the evidence was leading him, and he was willing to follow it. He realized he had come to believe that God, in fact, exists.
They soon taped a lengthy conversation, had it transcribed and worked on developing a manuscript chronicling Flew's conversion (to theism, not Christianity). About two weeks before the article was due to appear, reports of Flew's change of mind hit the news, featuring titles like "Thinking Straighter: Why the World's Most Famous Atheist Now Believes in God," and, Habermas's favorite, "Flew the Coup." The edited transcript of their own discussion about Flew's ideological shift was published in early 2005 with the title "My Pilgrimage from Atheism to Theism" and is reprinted here.
Flew further described his intellectual pilgrimage in his 2007 book, written with Roy Abraham Varghese, There Is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind.10 Habermas has written a review essay of this book, which is reprinted here as well, with the gracious permission of Philosophia Christi.
Flew's intellectual honesty, his willingness to change in response to evidence, and his friendship with Habermas are compelling and inspiring stories, but both Flew and Habermas would insist that we look beyond them to the questions and issues that drew them together as friends in the first place. So, ultimately and most importantly, this book is about an argument. To a philosopher, argument is not a dirty word or a thing to be avoided. It involves no raised voices or hair-pulling, at least not paradigmatically and not just because so many philosophers are bald. Rightly understood, argument is a reasonable assessment of the evidence. It is an attempt to figure out what's true on the basis of the facts we have at our disposal. Habermas has constructed just such an argument for the resurrection.
Since this book represents the third and likely last debate between these two thinkers on this question of questions, and since Flew has now become a theist, it's an appropriate time to take stock. So in the final section, "Resurrection Matters: Assessing the Habermas/Flew Discussion," I discuss this fascinating twenty-some-year dialogue between these two gentlemen. I summarize the argument, dividing it into two parts-the evidence and the inference on the basis of that evidence-and look at the evidence and the inference from both a sympathetic and a critical perspective. I don't presume to speak for anyone but myself in offering the appraisals I do, so readers must decide for themselves what to think of it all. After identifying the salient philosophical aspects of the argument, I return again to Flew, assessing where he is in his intellectual pilgrimage and what might happen from here.
The resurrection of Jesus is surely one of the most important topics philosophers of religion can discuss. Two distinguishable issues here are often conflated: the event itself and the argument for rational belief in the event on the basis of historical evidence. Christian theology itself says that unless the event itself transpired, Christian faith is in vain. The resurrection has always been at the absolute center of what Christianity teaches. If the resurrection didn't happen, Christianity is simply false. Clearly this is the import of the apostle Paul's saying with point-blank precision and in unequivocal terms that if the resurrection didn't happen, Christian hope is empty; that if Christ isn't risen from the dead, Christians are of all people most miserable (1 Cor 15:19). If the resurrection did happen, Christianity is very plausibly taken to be true.
This book examines the historical case for rational belief in the resurrection, which is a slightly different matter. It's tempting to say that, if the historical case fails, then Christianity is false, but this isn't exactly right. Plenty of historical events have taken place without our ability today to establish that they did. An effective historical case for the resurrection makes rational belief in the resurrection possible, without ensuring that the event happened. The absence of such a case doesn't, however, mean the event didn't transpire, but it would mean that rational belief in the resurrection would have to derive from other sources.
William Lane Craig, for example, argues that we can come to know the truth that the resurrection happened both historically and in a more personal way, through something like the testimony of the Holy Spirit. Alvin Plantinga, a Reformed epistemologist, argues similarly that the great doctrines of Christianity may well be known nonevidentially and more directly. However, even if this is the case, the historical evidence should still be considered. For if such a case can be made, surely it should be made. Paul, among others, clearly intended to make such an appeal. Your personal conviction about the matter may be good for you, but it doesn't do anyone else any favors.
Careful assessment of the evidence is important in a further regard. No small number of religious believers today disparage the role of reason and evidence, not because they're intelligent Reformed epistemologists, but because they're fideists. For them faith is, by definition, blind. Looking at the evidence actually runs counter to real faith, which has as its defining mark an absence of evidence or a leap of blind faith against the available evidence.
This Enlightenment and vulgarized Kierkegaardian notion of religious faith as devoid of rationality is a radical departure from both biblical faith, rightly understood, and the view of the greatest Christian minds through the centuries-from Anselm to Augustine to Aquinas. Faith is not believing what you know ain't so, as Mark Twain once put it, nor is it inconsistent with evidence. Rightly understood, and quite to the contrary, it's more like trust in a husband or wife to be faithful. It's a choice based on solid evidence, trust in the character of this person, confidence that he or she will do what was promised. Biblical faith is unswerving trust in God to be faithful to his promises and character; it's not blind trust that he exists, but an abiding and principled sense of assurance both that he exists and that he is faithful, despite our own unfaithfulness.
For Christians, a strong historical case for the resurrection can provide a powerful antidote to the pervasive view today, held by many believers and unbelievers, that religion in general and Christianity in particular isn't about evidence, but about (blind) faith. Nothing could be further from the truth-or more effective at rendering Christian thought intellectually irrelevant.
So, without further ado, let's listen in on the last official chapter of Habermas and Flew discussing a matter that truly matters.
This evening we have with us some of the world's most prominent scholars, so it's very exciting. We also have with us Dr. Joe Lynch of the philosophy department here at Cal Poly, who will be serving as moderator this evening.
Let me explain a bit of the format for the evening. Last year we had a debate on this very same question. This year we're having more of an informal, or perhaps formal, discussion. Dr. Lynch as moderator is going to prompt these two gentlemen with questions and is going to serve to facilitate discussion of the question before us. A little background on Dr. Lynch: Dr. Lynch, once again, is a philosophy professor here at Cal Poly. He teaches classes ranging from philosophical classics to philosophy of religion to Asian philosophy to philosophy of mind and more. So he's very well qualified to be with us this evening. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from Claremont and studied with the likes of John Hick and others. I'll let him say more about these gentlemen this evening, so if you would help me welcome Dr. Lynch.
HISTORICAL EVIDENCE FOR THE CRUCIFIXION, DEATH, BURIAL AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS
Moderator: I would like to introduce to you these eminent philosophers who are with us tonight. On my left is Antony Flew. If you took philosophy of religion with me, you would read him every quarter. He is a very well-known British philosopher, and I learned earlier today that he was influential in intelligence in the RAF [Royal Air Force]. A very fun story. But he's published innumerable articles in all areas of philosophy, and relevant for our area of discussion, he's published works like God, Freedom, and Immortality and Atheistic Humanism. So you can guess what side of the discussion he might be on by that.
On my right is the chair of philosophy at Liberty University, back in my home state of Virginia, Gary Habermas. Professor Habermas has published in many philosophical journals and books, and his main areas of specialization deal with philosophical issues surrounding the resurrection. So I look forward to a good discussion, and later on you are going to have a chance to participate and ask your questions.
So, in order to get things started now, on the screen before you today you can see a title there that says "The Known Historical Facts." These are supposed to be facts that we can hook in so that we can have an area of agreement because, if we don't have an area of agreement, then it is hard to have any discussion; people will just be talking past each other. I'm going to go through these, and then I'll first throw the door open to Professor Flew and ask for his reactions and, with any luck at all, a discussion will ensue.
1. Jesus died by crucifixion.
2. He was buried.
3. The death of Jesus caused the disciples to despair and lose hope, believing that his life was ended.
4. Although not as widely accepted, many scholars hold that the tomb in which Jesus was buried was discovered to be empty just a few days later.
5. The disciples had experiences they believed were the literal appearances of the risen Jesus.
6. The disciples were transformed from doubters who were afraid to identify themselves with Jesus to bold proclaimers of his death and resurrection.
7. This message was the center of preaching in the early church.
8. This message was especially proclaimed in Jerusalem, where Jesus died and was buried shortly before.
9. As a result of this teaching, the church was born and grew. 10. Sunday became the primary day of worship.
11. James, who had been a skeptic, was converted to the faith when he also believed that he had seen the resurrected Jesus.
So, perhaps now, Professor Flew, you could say what areas you agree or disagree in?
Flew: Well, crucified, yes of course, we have abundant evidence for that. Dead? I think so, but wait a moment, because Pilate, who undoubtedly had experience of crucifixions, was surprised that Jesus was finally dead at that time and then he was taken down. Now, in view of other things that have become known now, there are possibilities of some sort of revival.
The next thing, surely, do we have evidence of the actual burial? Yes, we have evidence that Joseph of Arimathea was proposing to bury Jesus, and we also have evidence of the tomb being empty. But what we don't have evidence of is its being occupied.
A rather different line I want to take up later, granted that he rose from the dead and was moving around, is this: what is the next stage? Presumably he's not buried again; he presumably goes up to heaven. Now, what is involved in this? Is the body supposed to rise up and somehow disappear? I don't think we have any information about what is even expected to have happened there. To complete a resurrection, surely we've got to have a death and presumably an actual burial and then another stage about which nothing clear seems to have been said.
Moderator: Gary, would you like react to that?
Habermas: I would love to react to that. In probably two minutes or less! No. Okay, Tony, notice you said Jesus was crucified, and then you said, "I think he died," or something like that. "I think but I'm not positive" or "I think, but let's just look at this," something like that?
Flew: No, that Pilate thought he was dead, but very early. You know, Pilate was surprised at a report of death, and he, after all, had in that rebellious Jewish part of the Empire the experience of crucifying other people.
Habermas: Yes, that was in Mark 15. Let me ask you a question: so you like Mark, right?
Flew: Yes.
Habermas: Tony, it's going to take me a little while to explain the detailed answers to your questions. So you say the Gospel of Mark is a good source, then. Well, let me make a few comments about crucifixion. We know a lot about crucifixion today and what happens on the cross, for several reasons. Unfortunately, some people have been crucified in recent history. Further, a number of medical doctors have actually asked for volunteers to be crucified. I know at least one of those medical doctors who asked for volunteers to come in and get up on a cross.
What they find out is this: you don't fake death by crucifixion. I know you're not saying that Jesus faked death. But you don't get down off the cross alive. You don't have to use nails, and it doesn't even have to be a typical cross. But if you're hanging long enough, here's what happens according to a majority of medical researchers: when you're hanging in this position, with your arms above your head, the weight of your body pulls down on the muscles surrounding your lungs-the intercostal, pectoral and deltoid muscles-and the muscles constrict your lungs. When the weight of your body pulls down on these muscles, while you are in the low position on the cross, your knees are bent and you're slumped down, then you begin asphyxiating. And you'll die fairly quickly if you don't do something about it.
In an experiment in Cologne, Germany, done by a medical doctor some years ago, the males who volunteered were simply tied to boards. That's all they did, and they lost consciousness in a maximum of twelve minutes. They lost consciousness and didn't have that much longer to live in that position. So when you hang on a cross, assuming your feet are tied or nailed, you push up into a position where you relieve those muscles around your lungs. But you can't stand there very long, especially if you're standing on nails.2 You're fighting against gravity and you're pulling, and it is difficult to keep doing this. So you can basically stay alive as long as you can keep pushing up and down.
But when you can't push up anymore, you slump down in a low position, and that's when it's over relatively quickly. So all a centurion had to do when Jesus was on the cross was to be aware of the crucifixion and notice when the victim was standing up and when he was in the down position. When you are down for, let's say, thirty minutes, they're pretty much sure he's dead.
Now I invite you to check this out. Dozens of medical articles have been published on this process, one about fifteen years ago in the Journal of the American Medical Association [JAMA].3 In that article, three scholars, including a pathologist from the Mayo Clinic, wrote Jesus' death certificate. They concluded that he died due to asphyxiation, complicated by shock and congestive heart failure. So that's one reason to know that Jesus died.
Second, it was common-and we have a number of references to this in ancient history-for a death blow to be delivered, the final coup de grace, to somebody on a cross. We have a case where a person was threatened with a bow and arrow; we have a case where a fellow had his skull crushed before he Breaking ankles is another way to ensure the victim's death. If the victim cannot push back up again, they asphyxiate. While they did not break Jesus' ankles, we're told that they stabbed him in the chest. We have other cases outside the New Testament where the crucified were stabbed.
We're told that blood and water came from the wound. The predominant medical explanation is that around the heart there is a sac, the pericardium, and it holds a watery fluid. So predominantly among these medical doctors, it is thought Jesus was stabbed in the heart, because that's the best explanation for the presence of the water-from the sac around the heart. So in that JAMA article, they concluded that Jesus was dead when the spear entered his body, but if he was not, the spear would have killed him.
But third, as the very liberal scholar David Strauss asserted 150 years ago, the chief problem with the swoon theory is logical in na ture. If Jesus was weak and sickly and thought to be dead, but emerged from the tomb alive, then we have another sort of issue. So then he went and "appeared" to his disciples. But the problem is, they would see that he was alive, but they would never think he was risen. So picture how Jesus would inevitably look: sweating, hunched over, with his wounds opened up again. He hasn't even washed his hair; he's dripping blood so that there's a path behind him. The chief issue is that the disciples would never conclude that he was raised. They would only think he was alive, and that is a huge problem. To paraphrase Strauss, the disciples would get a doctor rather than proclaim Jesus to be risen.'
This is because Jesus would convince them that he was alive, but if there is no risen Jesus, then there is nothing on which to ground Christian teachings. If he is alive, that's great; but if they didn't believe he was actually raised from the dead, there would be no reason to accept the believer's resurrection. After all, as Paul and others would teach later, without the resurrection, there was no Christianity.
Could you imagine Peter over in the corner when Jesus struggled into the room? Peter might proclaim, "Oh boy, someday I'm going to have a resurrection body just like his." About twenty times in the New Testament, we are told that believers concluded that they will be raised like Jesus. The point is they couldn't believe that if they thought he was alive but not raised. So I'm sorry that I took so long on this explanation, but there are a few thoughts for you.' I didn't know if you wanted me to talk about the burial, too, but go ahead, you can respond.
Moderator: [To Flew] I don't know the extent to which your reser vations about the resurrection hang on your questions regarding Jesus' actual death, but if you want to say more about that, go ahead.
Habermas: Tony, you did say that you thought he died.
Flew: Well, yes, that's right. I still am puzzled about what evidence there is that there was an actual burial. Because, as you know, I believe the resurrection appearances were grief-related. I don't know if you want to call them visions or just experiences-for the existence of which there is apparently immensely strong evidence. No friend of ours has ever had one of these grief-related experiences, but apparently they are common. So that's the line I'm inclined to take, and these experiences would clearly be experiences of the dead person as they were when they were alive, so they wouldn't be experiences of a real person at all. But I would still like to know whether there was an actual burial.
Habermas: What do you think about any questions regarding his death? Are you satisfied on those? Do you think that what I've said is decent enough?
Flew: Yes, I should have thought so.
Habermas: Okay, good.
Flew: Yes, in view of the evidence about the effects of crucifixion, it suggests that this is a much quicker death than people have thought that it was.
Habermas: Just to clarify, people could be on a cross for days, and that's probably why Pilate asked that question. It depends on how long you can keep pushing up and down, but don't forget he was beaten severely, as well. So I think some extraordinary things were done in his case, and so that probably shortened it. He was on the cross for six hours. Well, should I address the burial?
Moderator: Go ahead.
Habermas: First of all, I'd say that whether or not he was buried doesn't always play a major role in resurrection discussions. If a person is truly dead, even if you have no idea where the body is, if you see him again afterward, now that's an issue.
But let's talk about Jesus' burial for a few moments.8 Here are some of the data: it's reported in all four Gospels, in multiple sources. Everything we have says that he was buried in a tomb. Moreover, there are no early sources to the contrary. That twofold combination right there should be determinative if there are no other contrary reasons.
You also had religious leaders who were at the cross and who wanted Jesus to die. The Romans' job was to make sure of that outcome and to see the act to its completion, which included the burial. Further, Matthew, as well as two other writers, Justin Martyr9 and Tertullian,10 all report that, by blaming the disciples, the Jewish observers actually admitted that the place of burial was unoccupied. Now that would be a pretty incredible admission if no one was ever buried there in the first place.
If you want additional considerations, many critical scholars believe that the Gospel of Mark made use of a pre-Markan Passion narrative. Mark is already early, only about thirty-five years after the cross. Obviously, if this source is even earlier, that's rather significant. Additionally the choice of Joseph of Arimathea as the chief male who asked for Jesus' body [Mk 15:43-46] makes sense, since he is a very obscure figure in the early traditions.
I think that the best witness to Jesus' burial may well be the fact that, in all four Gospels, it was the women who were the first to discover on Sunday morning that the tomb no longer held Jesus' body. Although there were exceptions, in the Mediterranean world in general, female testimony was normally avoided wherever possible in courts of law, especially in crucial issues, and it was often disbelieved. My point is, if you're fabricating the account of the burial, then don't allow the case for the disappearance of the body to rely on female testimony. Obviously, that would invite ancient lis teners to reject the story from the outset.
So here are more than a half-dozen reasons for the historicity of Jesus' burial, and we could add others as well. But I think that's probably why virtually no scholars question that Jesus was buried. If he's dead, he's got to be buried somewhere, right? What do you think?
Flew: Yes.
Habermas: Yes, okay.
Flew: Yes, he does have to be buried somewhere, but not necessarily in the official tomb.
Habermas: But all those reasons I just provided are reasons for burial in the "official" tomb. In making a case in the ancient world, seven or eight arguments are a whole lot of reasons. This is not my view, but ultimately somebody could say, "I simply don't know what happened at the burial, but the real issue is whether Jesus was dead and alive." If you're dead, then you ought not be seen by people later. So that's the chief issue.
Flew: But, of course, the Jewish opposition was much concerned that this death should be final.
Habermas: I'm sure you're right. And the more they wanted to be sure he was dead, that's more reason to believe he was both dead and buried, because they would want to see the process through, right? They wouldn't just walk away and leave him hanging there. They'd want to make sure they see this thing to completion. That, by the way, is what we are told in the Gospel of Matthew.
Flew: Yes, I suppose it makes the most sense to say that the disciples refused to believe that Jesus was alive again simply in some odd sort of drastic continuation of the same old life, right? They wanted to finally end this distressing opposition by the religious leaders.
Habermas: Along that line, in your lecture this afternoon you mentioned that the book of Acts was a pretty good source. There is an enigmatic reference there, only half a verse long. We're not given any further explanation, but it says that the church was founded and Christianity spread, and a large number of Jewish priests came to faith [Acts 6:7]. That's just an incredible statement about the leaders whose group opposed the Christian message and who knew the original story. Why did they convert?
Flew: What was going on in Jerusalem at that time was very puzzling, wasn't it? Both the opposition as well as the counter-response. I mean, there was a very big conflict between the official view of the Jewish leaders and the Christians.
Habermas: That reminds me-the fact that all of this occurred in Jerusalem is one more reason to believe the "official" burial account. Let's say that a very popular and local holy man died and was buried just a half-mile from here. And let's add that many are now proclaiming that, just three days later, his grave is empty. We can go see it for ourselves. I imagine that whether we believe it or not, many of us would go, since it is such a short trip. But if it happened in Rome or Tokyo, I imagine most of us wouldn't go. But if the grave was located at the end of your street or a few blocks away, I imagine some would check out the reports. Similarly, Jerusalem is the last place to proclaim the death, burial and empty tomb of Jesus unless it could be confirmed. Right? Because many could have taken a Sunday-afternoon stroll and gotten there easily enough; it's the last place to preach. So the fact that the earliest message was proclaimed in this city is one more reason to think there were checks and balances in this town. People could tell if their proclamation was true, since the earliest preaching was in Jerusalem.
Flew: Yes, the whole scenario is Jerusalem; it is the crucial place, isn't it? Jesus' trip from the backwoods up to Jerusalem constitutes the crucial challenge to traditional authority. Entering the temple, of course, would provoke the traditional authorities, wouldn't it?
Habermas: Proclaiming the message later in Rome would also be a thorn in Rome's side, because as we read in Suetonius and others, Rome had emperor worship.
Flew: Yes.
Habermas: Remember Pilate's question to Jesus?
Flew: Yes.
Habermas: `Are you the King of the Jews?"[Mk 15:2]. I don't think Jesus was any kind of a threat to the Roman regime, but they may have disagreed-with the large crowds at Passover.
Flew: Almost certainly, because the Jewish people were a major threat to the Roman imperial regime. And they were much more numerous actually than is generally believed, because of the very large number of Jews who had moved into other parts of the Empire, outside the area of modern Israel. They were a large group, exceptionally well educated and, perhaps from the point of view of the emperor, an exceptionally troublesome group.
Habermas: At Passover, they would return to Jerusalem, so this is already a rough time of the year for the Roman soldiers.
Flew: And the Romans had already had one or two, and were soon to have another, major conflict with the Jews.
Habermas: In A.D. 66.
Flew: Quite, yes.
ASSESSING THE CLAIMS OF THE RESURRECTION
Moderator: [To Flew] Well, you have some qualms, but it sounds to me like-and correct me if I'm wrong-but it sounds to me as if you're virtually conceding that perhaps you see our list of facts as relatively uncontroversial. So my best guess is that you think there's a better explanation for these data, if they are facts, than the actual resurrection. So I'm wondering if you could say something about that.
Flew: Well, surely the actual belief in the resurrection entails more than just the belief that Jesus was resurrected. It's what's supposed to have happened later: Jesus acquiring a status as somehow more than a chap who has been so fortunate as to be resurrected, of whom there are other biblical examples, aren't there? Lazarus, for instance, is supposed to have been raised, after a longer period of death than Jesus, actually; and there are at least a couple of other accounts in the Old Testament, one in 1 Kings and one in 2 Kings. And I believe there may be some similar accounts elsewhere in the Bible, but there are all these, and clearly they don't comprise the established essentials of the Christian religion anything like the whole story about Jesus' resurrection does. Of course, the nature of being resurrected in Jesus' case makes this more exciting than any of the others, due, to put it mildly, to the charismatic character of Jesus. After my recent comparisons with the prophet of Islam, the resurrection of Jesus, in view of his life and sayings and so on, is clearly going to be of more world historical interest than the resurrection of Lazarus. It's the "something more" that I am altogether unclear about.
Habermas: Especially if, as Christians believe, Lazarus had to die again and Jesus didn't have to do so, obviously making all the difference in the world.
Flew: Yes, it clearly does, yes.
Habermas: Especially given Jesus' claims.
Flew: Exactly so, yes.
Habermas: Humanly speaking, anyone can make extraordinary claims. But if Jesus made claims that truly were extraordinaryperhaps even without real parallels in the history of religions-and then if he's raised from the dead, well, that's really significant. After all, dead people don't do much, so if he's dead, he is not going to be raising himself.
Flew: Right.
Habermas: So, if he has made extraordinary claims, and if, as he claimed, he is acted upon by Another who raised him from the dead, now people are asking, and I think justly, "Whoa! Who is this guy supposed to be?" Because in the New Testament, the resurrection provides the evidence for the claims, hence its centrality, which is one of the historical facts that we started with tonight. Obviously you don't believe in the resurrection, so what do you think is a better explanation of the data?
Flew: Well, I'm wanting to know what is the something more, other than the character of Jesus himself, which makes this of spe cial significance? I mean, surely he is supposed to go to another place, isn't he?
Habermas: I think the best evidence we have for the resurrection is the apostle Paul and, no matter how skeptical you get, even people like Michael Martin and G. A. Wells concede that Paul was an eyewitness to what he believed was a resurrection appearance of Jesusanother of the facts up there on the screen. The same goes for James, the brother of Jesus. He was also an unbeliever during Jesus' life. That's conceded by virtually all scholars. These two men, James, the brother of Jesus, and Paul, were unbelievers until they were convinced they met the risen Jesus. Now we have Paul's testimony firsthand, and that's what makes him such a powerful witness.
Flew: Yes.
Habermas: It's rare to find any New Testament scholars who deny a Pauline authorship for 1 Corinthians. Paul states a couple of times that he saw the resurrected Jesus. In 9:1 he asks, "Am I not an apostle; have I not seen the Lord?"" Then in 15:3 and following, he passes on data that he received from someone else. He says, "I gave you as of first importance what I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scripture, and appeared," and then he lists appearances to both individuals and groups. Then Paul added, "Last of all he appeared to me." Then he concludes just three verses later, "Whether it is I or the other apostles, this is what we preach." So not only is Paul giving us his own experience, he's our best window on the other apostles and what they were preaching regarding Jesus' resurrection.
In Galatians I and 2-another undoubtedly Pauline book-twice and perhaps even three times Paul made trips up to Jerusalem. He met with all three of the best-known Christians of that time: Peter, John and James, the brother of Jesus, who were believers before Paul. He said that he set his gospel message before them so they could check it out [Gal 2:2]. They agreed with him; they didn't add anything at all to his message [2:6]. 1 mean this respectfully, but today we would call Paul obsessive because he went to Jerusalem, and that's not just like getting on a plane and making an hour plane flight. That's a pretty good trip. He went up there once in Galatians 1, then a second time in Galatians 2, and he may have gone a third time, depending on what we do with Acts 15. So he made two or three trips up to Jerusalem specifically to talk to the main disciples to ascertain this gospel message, and he reported the conclusion that they were preaching the same thing he was. So, what do you get from this? The earliest apostles were all totally convinced that they saw the risen Jesus. How can we explain that data better?
Flew: But are they repeating, substantially, the things that were said earlier about or by Jesus, or are they uttering a new message?
Habermas: I'm not sure what you're asking.
Flew: Well, roughly they are repeating his claims, aren't they?
Habermas: They're repeating their beliefs that the gospel message was true, including that they saw him.
Flew: Yes, yes.
Habermas: And so we have their testimony from a very early date. In fact, most critical scholars think we can date Paul's reception of this testimony to A.D. 35, which is only five years after the cross. This isn't the date of the events themselves, but his trip to Jerusalem, where he received this testimony.
You could even work it out: if you put the cross at 30, Paul's conversion is usually placed at one or two years later, so let's just say two-that's 32. Paul explains in Galatians I that three years later he went up to Jerusalem to talk to the other apostles. So two plus three equals five, or approximately A.D. 35. So Paul gives us the year markers right there in his works. The German historian Hans von Campenhausen states that these Pauline texts, 1 Corinthians 15 and Galatians I and 2, give us all the checks and balances we would want from an ancient historical text.'2
Flew: Oh, yes.
Habermas: In ancient history, we often have gaps of a century or more before.
Flew: Oh, yes.
Habermas: Here we get something from five years afterward, and then of course that's just when Paul received it from the other disciples. They knew it before he did, so there's no gap at all, you know, if he got this five years later. Actually, he's kind of late; as he said, "I was born out of due time." The other apostles were Christians before him. So there's virtually no gap there at all. He got it five years later. They knew it before he did.
Flew: Yes, Paul had a similar vision, but surely there's supposed to be something extra, isn't there, about the future of Jesus? We have a resurrected Jesus of whom people are having visions and so forth and so on, and then he is supposed to be going somewhere, isn't he?
Moderator: What troubles you about that?
Flew: Well, he's not going to be a continual resident of the planet Earth, is he?
Habermas: Why should that be an issue? If he was raised, he can go anywhere he wants, can't he? Why would going back to heaven, however he got there, be an issue for someone who was raised from the dead? I would think the much bigger miracle would be the resurrection, right? Let's put it this way: if Jesus Christ is who he claimed to be, and he was raised to demonstrate it, I wouldn't stand in his way wherever he wanted to go.
Flew: No, but he's claiming to be the Son of God.
Habermas: Right.
Flew: Now that seems to be a rather odd claim. This isn't so obvious to me, now, this claim of having a special relationship to the ruler of the universe.
Habermas: Yes, he claimed it was a unique relationship too. He said he was the only one who has this.
Flew: Well, yes, I can see why that should be claimed to be unique, but it's not clear to me what it's supposed to involve, really. I mean, we have the development of the doctrine of the Trinity, which is a difficult belief, to put it mildly.
Habermas: What would you do with a person who claimed to be the Son of God, who claimed to have a unique relationship with the God of the universe? He made some other pretty interesting claims too. He claimed to forgive sin, and the leaders responded, "Hey, you can't do that; that's blasphemy." But Jesus retorted, "Well, to show you I can do it, I'll heal this man." Here he also claims to be the Son of Man, which, contrary to popular opinion, is not a human claim. In first-century Jewish literature, "Son of Man" is a very lofty claim. In fact, it probably contributed eventually to his death. So Jesus makes these claims about himself, including uniqueness with the God of the universe, and they say, "Well, how do we know this?" And he responds, "Well, because I'm going to rise from the dead," and then he does it. Do you listen to him at that point? Do you think, "Uh oh, this is getting too close for comfort"?
Flew: Well, it suddenly gets too close for comfort, yes. But it remains a very perplexing claim.
Habermas: But the resurrection sort of puts his money where his mouth is, you know what I mean?
Flew: Oh, yes.
Habermas: It's one thing to make a claim, but then to be raised is rather special.
Flew: Yes.
Habermas: First of all, we don't even have claims like that from the founders of the major world religions.
Flew: Certainly not.
Habermas: So even the claim is rather extraordinary. That doesn't make it true; it just makes it extraordinary.
Flew: Absolutely.
Habermas: And we don't have claims from the orthodox followers of other major religious founders that their man was raised. So altogether, it is extraordinary.
Flew: In the case of Islam, we don't have claims to any miracles at all, and the point that Aquinas was trying to make in the Summa Contra Gentiles was precisely that there are no miracles even claimed regarding those founders. Are there any others?
Flew: I think that's right, yes.
Habermas: Now again, these are the claims, and then Jesus places everything on the resurrection. That's the big event. That's why Christians are excited about this.
Flew: Yes.
CONSIDERING THE RESURRECTION APPEARANCES
Moderator: Professor Flew, you seem to have shifted a bit here. Is your issue that the resurrection never took place or that the resurrection leads one to make fantastic claims about what it means to be the Son of God? Is it those sorts of claims or is it the resurrection per se, that there's a better explanation for it as a hallucination or something like this?
Flew: Well, I am intensely puzzled by the whole situation here. Even if you grant that the resurrection has occurred, this seems to me to be an event so extraordinary that I don't know what's to be said about it at all. And I don't believe in the objectivity of the appearances. I can see that we have a claim that the body was resurrected, but the claim to the resurrection seems to me based on the appearances.
Habermas: That's fair.
Flew: And I don't think those appearances are an adequate basis for it. In all this, I think one ought to notice that any experiences of claims to what is nowadays called the paranormal-what used to be investigated by what was called psychical research-any claims to the genuineness of such occurrences have to be founded, if they're to be believed, on an extraordinary amount of evidence. Anything that is conceived to be miraculous falls into this category, because one must approach any question about an alleged miracle with a pretty stubborn presumption that it didn't really happen, because its extraordinariness depends on its being a unique event.
Habermas: Okay, so what would you say? We have these historical facts, which are quite extraordinary data.
Flew: Yes.
Habermas: What could we propose in place of the resurrection?
Flew: Well, it's the continuous activity of Christ that is supposedly supported by the appearances.
Habermas: But if he's appearing, if he is genuinely appearing after being dead ...
Flew: But that's what I don't think was the case. We have a whole lot of people who think they saw him, but then this is what happens with ...
Habermas: What is a better explanation of the historical data we have?
Flew: That they were grief-related appearances.
Habermas: Now you don't mean real appearances?
Flew: Oh yes, well, okay, ostensible appearances. Yes, what seemed to them to be appearances-what the old-time philosophers would call sense data.
Habermas: Okay, so basically if you're going to say grief visions, you're saying hallucinations.
Flew: If you'd like, yes.
Habermas: Because the other way, it sounds like you were almost talking about a resurrection, and I know that's not what you're saying.
Moderator: That would have been a very short discussion if it were, wouldn't it?
Regarding any kind of hallucination hypothesis, whether griefrelated or any other variety, probably no natural thesis is plagued by more difficulties." Just quickly, here are a few of the problems: groups of people don't see the same hallucinations. Hallucinations are no more objective than dreams. By definition, the individual produces the mental image. Obviously I don't share the personal images you create.
Hallucinations are more radical than is sometimes thought too. When you misperceive something and take it to be what it is not, that is different. Hallucinations have no objective, external referent. It's like talking to my deceased grandmother, whom I just know all of you see right here beside me, when nothing objective corresponds to it. That's pretty radical as well as being a private claim. So any time we have groups of people who believe they saw the risen Jesus, they cannot share the same hallucination. That's highly problematic.
For example, we have discussed the pre-Pauline list of appearances in 1 Corinthians 15. There's hardly a critic around who will deny the early date of this list. Several appearances are to individuals: Peter, James and later Paul. But three groups are also listed: appearances to the Twelve, to all the apostles and to five hundred persons at once.
Group appearances are very difficult for hallucinations, because we don't hallucinate the same thing together. Another huge issue is the different personalities involved. You've got men and women who are indoors or outdoors, walking, standing or sitting. Changing scenarios also militate against hallucinations.
Further, the disciples weren't in the best frame of mind. One of the historical facts we posted earlier is that they were disillusioned; they were in a state of despair. Non-drug-induced hallucinations generally come from heightened states of awareness.
Another huge problem is the empty tomb. If they had hallucinated, there still would have been a body there. But in Jerusalem, you could have strolled down to the tomb and saw that it was empty, but not if hallucinations are the best explanation.
One more thing might be said, though we could list others. Hallucinations generally don't change lives. The more common cause is bodily deprivation, such as lack of food or water. In the case of Navy Seals research, these soldiers are talked out of these hallucinations by their friends. One reported that an octopus was waving at him and smiling; another picked up an oar and started swinging it at the porpoises jumping overhead. One soldier jumped into the water because he thought that a train was coming straight for them. Now, these experiences obviously aren't objective. Later when the soldiers were interviewed regarding the porpoises or the train or the octopus, they reported two chief reasons why they no longer believed this: those things don't happen, and their buddies didn't see them.
Now apply those same two reasons to the resurrection appearances: my buddies didn't see it (in the case of individual hallucinations), and these things don't happen (dead men don't rise, to cite David Hume). So they talked themselves out of it?
Anyway, there are many other problems too. James and Paul are two huge issues, because they were unbelievers, thus highly unlikely to manufacture hallucinations.
Moderator: [To Habermas] Can I just ask a question: is the issue, then, that we are comparing improbabilities? It would be wildly improbable to have a group hallucination of this sort, but I wonder what the improbability of that is, compared to the improbability of someone being dead rising again and actually being the Son of God? It seems to me that the intrinsic improbability is greater on the latter than the former, isn't it?
Habermas: Do you know you're citing the fellow seated right there [points to Flew]?
Moderator: I told you he was an eminent philosopher!
Habermas: Yes, that's right. He wrote the article on "miracles" for the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, where he raised that same issue.16 It's a great question. But to me the problem is this: Okay, what's more unlikely? A group hallucination or a resurrection? And one might think, on the surface, that a resurrection would be stranger than a group hallucination, even though we don't know of any documented group hallucinations in history either. Still, a resurrection seems stranger.
The chief problem here is that the hallucinations are not one-time exceptions. If our reports are true, there are appearances to unbelievers, as well as group appearances to the five hundred at once, to all the apostles, to the disciples and to the women. So you have several groups. Now I would ask you, what's more likely? A number of unique group hallucinations, or a single resurrection? It's not just one group appearance. I agree with you, it is a probabilities issue.
Moderator: Right, well, I don't know that you have to be committed to ... Some people say they have an appearance, and they don't.
Flew: And the vision to the five hundred-we really don't have evidence of that which would satisfy anyone if it wasn't accompanied by things that they were more inclined to believe, like the appearances to Paul and so on. I mean, that claim is tossed out like, "Oh, yes, and there was an appearance to five hundred." That's always seemed to me a very odd, arbitrary and implausible addition to the whole thing.
Habermas: The reason it's taken seriously is that it's in the prePauline list in I Corinthians 15. He said he received it from somebody else and critics think it can be dated to A.D. 35 in Jerusalem, so this list is taken very seriously.
By the way, this particular portion itself is a creedal text-including non-Pauline terms, a codified list, the immediate syntax before and after, and so on. There are dozens of these creeds in the New Testament. They're texts that were oral testimony dating before the earliest New Testament book was written. Paul says he received this, and again, most critical scholars place this reception in Jerusalem about A.D. 35. The reason scholars take the appearance of the five hundred so seriously is that it appears in the list that Paul presents in I Corinthians 15-because it comes from the earliest strand of evidence.
Flew: I'm afraid that this thing tends to discredit anything it is associated with, it seems to me.
Habermas: Why would it be an issue? I mean, if Jesus preached to larger groups than that-we have the famous feeding of the five thousand incident, there's another group of four thousand-if there were thousands of people on occasion, why is it a priori odd that five hundred people would be together this time?
Flew: Well, I'm afraid that the feeding of the five thousand is one of the statements that I find great difficulty in believing.
Habermas: What I'm saying is, as far as a group of people coming together, five hundred is no problem, say, in the Passover season. But the issue is not how many people ...
Flew: But the group of five hundred having a vision is much more remarkable than a group of 500 or 501 or 499.. .
Moderator: Eating fish.
Flew:... coming together. It seems to me that it is utterly disproportionate to all the other claims and would require very much stronger evidence.
Habermas: What do you think about Jesus appearing to twelve people at once? Or appearing to the apostles? Are you comfortable with that?
Flew: Ummm ...
Habermas: You see, if he appeared to anybody, you still have a resurrection.
WHAT COUNTS AS EVIDENCE?
Moderator: [To Flew] May I ask you this question? You don't like the appearances, but what would count for a resurrection? Could anything count, or is that in principle just so wildly implausible that nothing would count? Perhaps video would? I don't know.
Flew: Well, yes.
Moderator: That would help.
Habermas: I just happen to have some photos here. They'll be on sale afterward.
Flew: A special bargain offer.
Habermas: Just tonight. But that's a good question, Joe. What counts as great evidence?
Flew: I'm not sure I can answer that one at all, no.
Habermas: Let me ask this way: how about your essay "Theology and
Flew: Yes.
Habermas: An article that you wrote in 1955.
Flew: It was published in 1955, 1 think, yes.
Habermas: Well, it was good. You said it counts against a view when it is unfalsifiable.
Flew: Absolutely.
Habermas: Is your present view unfalsifiable?
Flew: My unbelief, you mean?
Habermas: Your unbelief specifically in the resurrection.
Flew: Yes.
Habermas: If we have our list of historical facts and every time you bring up a natural possibility, each one seems to be opposed by a number of rejoinders, at what point do you say that it begins to look like a real resurrection? Or conversely, at what point would you say that your view is or is not falsifiable?
Flew: I think the only honest answer is that I don't know. I am not sure.
Habermas: You know Tony Flew is responding to Tony Flew here.
Flew: Yes, yes, I think the unfalsifiability of unbelief is somehow a different problem from the unfalsifiability of a belief.
Habermas: But if you can't falsify your own view, and if there is no probable rejoinder to the resurrection, and you're left with, "Well, I don't want to believe it anyway," of course that's your right.
Flew: Yes.
Habermas: So it's your belief that your position on the resurrection is unfalsifiable. Right?
Flew: Yes, but I suppose one could always imagine things that would be just overwhelming confirmation.
Habermas: Would a resurrection falsify your belief? Could this be it? Could this be the data that would do it? I mean, in principle, the resurrection would falsify it, wouldn't it?
Flew: Yes, I suppose I have an almost invincible disinclination to believe the whole resurrection story, yes, because it seems to me so wildly inconsistent with everything else that happens in the universe.
Habermas: Maybe the universe is different too. That's another issue, but perhaps ...
Flew: Yes.
Habermas:... this might be one of those singularities, as you might say, that should make you question a lot of other items of your system.
Flew: Oh yes, I think the answer to that must be certainly yes. Yes, that it is just so extraordinary if actually the whole thing happens, you know. Straightforwardly, it is a creature of flesh and blood that the apostles see, and so on.
Habermas: It would be rather wonderful, wouldn't it?
Flew: And that Thomas could touch him with his thumb, or was it his finger, and all that. The whole total story is so wildly unlike the things that happen in Los Angeles even!
Habermas: Earlier I lectured on the topic of near-death experiences. An NDE is not a resurrection, to be sure. But take a highly evidenced NDE where someone recalls data during an EEG that is flat for three hours, and they report things they saw during that time, although their brain apparently wasn't working. These experiences raise the bar a little. NDEs say, "Wow, this world might be different from what we think it is."
Flew: Yes, this is going to be looked at. It has been studied by people as the putative phenomena of extrasensory perception and, of course, there are complications in the theory that there is retroactive sensory perception.
Habermas: But even so, you have something special here. What if we gave a definition of life after death as something like extrasensory perception after death? What I mean is, this notion of extrasensory perception may delay the conclusion, but if you have people reporting things when their brain isn't functioning, and they seem to be alive and well, and we have dozens of these highly evidenced cases .. .
Flew: But they're extrasensorially perceiving things that were going on when they were brain-dead, isn't that it?
Habermas: Brain-dead, that's right. I'm not trying to get us off the subject. I'm just saying there could be things in this world that show the world isn't what we thought.
Flew: Oh, very much so.
Habermas: That's all I was saying.
Moderator: [To Habermas] Could I ask you a question about that? Because that sort of thing would say to me that, if the world-and by the world you mean the laws of nature-may be different from what we understand it to be, do you really want to say that the Christian confidence in the resurrection is a part of the natural order of things that we just haven't discovered yet, or do you want to say it is a supernatural intervention?
Habermas: Jesus states these special things about himself, claiming he'll be raised from the dead to show who he was. Basically, he says, "I'm the only one who knows the God of the universe, and the resurrection will show that he's raised me from the dead to confirm this." When you put that together, that's where you get the supernatural conclusion, due to his claim that the God of the universe is acting upon him. I mean, that is a supernatural connection.
On the other point-the natural plane-if somebody said to me, "Well, what if we find an explanation in the future? What if, a hundred years from now, we find something that makes sense?" I would just say the same thing we say about all scientific theses: "Well, then, let's face it in a hundred years. As far as we're concerned, we need to decide on the data we have. We can only deal with what we have right now." I think that's something about which we can agree. You can only make a present decision based on what you have presently. So to answer your question directly, Jesus made these special claims, and the resurrection showed that the God of the universe was acting upon him. So I would say this is supernatural.
Moderator: Well, it just occurs to me that if it were more like the extrasensory thing-that, surely, someone could have the ability and be mistaken even about what the nature of that ability was. I once heard a lecture where someone claimed that Jesus' death on the cross was not real, but that it was a technique that he learned while studying yoga. I took yoga for a year, and I didn't get that "surviving the crucifixion" lesson. I think I missed that day.
But I'm wondering what would warrant the inference that, just because he makes a claim, there's this uniqueness. You're making the case that there is strong historical evidence that the appearances are real, and he makes an additional claim that there is a God and that "I'm the Son of God." But I'm just having a hard time making that compatible with the view that maybe the world is different from what we know. Because the world being different would make it part of natural phenomena that we just don't know yet. And it seems to me that the Christian view would be something else; what would it be to have a whole bunch of natural evidence that somehow adds up to supernatural?
Habermas: If you are referring to NDE research, I don't think the realm of the afterlife is a natural realm. Further, the afterlife is part of the same realm as inhabited by the resurrection. So by raising the evidence for NDEs, I am decidedly not moving from the natural to the supernatural sphere, but providing evidence for another example of the supernatural, and in the same general area as well. This should prevent the common claim that the resurrection introduces a concept for which there are absolutely no comparisons.
The resurrection itself would be pretty tough to explain naturally. David Hume says that it would be a miracle if a man returned from the dead.' So we're not adding a bunch of "nonsupernaturals" to get a "supernatural." The resurrection itself would seem to be a very supernatural claim, beyond any laws of nature. I know you were teasing about the yoga training, but if anyone is held under water for ten minutes, then they're dead, whether they are practicing yoga or not. And a person on the cross, if what I said earlier is true, is also dead.
Moderator: I have no doubts about that.
Habermas: By the way, I know a pathologist who got up very briefly onto a model cross. He told me that, after only two minutes, he experienced excruciating pain in his chest. If a person is going to hang in that low position on the cross without pushing up, no disci pline is going to keep them breathing. Those are the built-in checks and balances of crucifixion. I know you're not questioning that. When you mentioned yoga, I just repeated this. But there are built-in checks and balances on the cross that guarantee death.
IS BELIEF JUSTIFIABLE?
Moderator: Well, Professor Flew, according to your position, the best explanation for that data, if you're willing to accept it, is some kind of illusion. So, what is your response to the unlikelihood of a collective event? I know you're not a collectivist, but this would be a collectivist interpretation.
Flew: Back to the situation. I am going to say that I have almost an invincible unbelief. This is so unlike anything in the rest of my experience of the world that I just don't know how to cope with this at all.
Habermas: Is this "invincible unbelief" unfalsifiable?
Moderator: His view would be that if it's not falsifiable, it's meaningless.
Flew: No, no, I don't think this would be so. I suppose I can imagine a series of developments which would make it clear to me that the universe wasn't at all as I previously thought it to be. But, of course, I don't think anyone believes that this is going to happen. They believe that this is a unique, central position, you know. It is my position that any Christian believer would have to say about these facts or alleged facts that they are the most important facts in human history. They just don't have any analogy in any experience of anything else. This is essentially a once-for-all divine intervention in the affairs of the universe. Is that not roughly what the claim is?
Habermas: It would be a pretty major claim.
Flew: Yes.
Moderator: So it's your view that those who believe now in the resurrection-at least that their beliefs are not warranted; they're not justified?
Flew: No, I don't think I want to say with absolute confidence that they're not justified, because reasonable people may make disastrous mistakes on what they themselves have good reason to believe.
Moderator: So this is a disastrous mistake, but a rational one?
Flew: No, I don't want to say it is irrational for other people to believe in this. It seems to me it would be perfectly rational for them to believe in this, but I can't cope with this idea at all. It seems to me so unlike anything else that happens in the universe.
The way I would normally approach this is by taking a favorite example of mine. The commander of a unit of tanks who, because of the available intelligence that he had-and he had every reason to expect they had gotten it right (because they usually did so)-in fact leads his unit into a trap which massacres the lot of them. You cannot say that he was an irrational man being in that position. I think this idea can be extended to many other things-to some of the most recent arguments for the existence of God, for example. I think that people who already believe in God are quite rational in thinking this is a confirmation; ditto with the big bang theory.
If the main purpose of God in creating the whole universe was to have human beings, as it would appear from the book of Genesis, in which God is not apparently sustaining but only an initiating force, and therefore his creatures are reasonably free human beings-if his purpose were that, he would surely have created the universe as all the scientists of the Middle Ages believed he had-as the center of the universe. It's the view that was overthrown by the scientific work of Copernicus. But the idea that the creator of the universe would plan the universe so the eventual emergence of Earth and human beings was the product of an extraordinarily unlikely coincidence of the physical constants, all of which he presumably formed as the creator of the universe, it seems to me it's positively preposterous to think of this as a good reason for unbelievers to believe that God created the universe. But I think it's reasonable enough for the people who believe that already. This is confirmation. You show that he planned it all in this extremely subtle way and he made all the physical constants combine in this way so that it would happen like that.
Habermas: It would be wonderful, wouldn't it?
Flew: It would have been wonderful.
Habermas: That's the point.
Flew: I think it is an important thing to see that in these matters people can fundamentally disagree, though they are equally rational people. They're doing what it is entirely reasonable to think on the basis of what they already believe.
Habermas: Let me ask you a question about your tank illustration. Regarding a person who makes a rational but very wrong decision, if that was meant to be a parable of Christianity, it seems to me that the problem is that the knife cuts both ways, right? I mean atheism could be the tank commander too, right?
Flew: Oh yes, certainly.
Habermas: Okay.
Flew: I'm not saying that this is something that is reasonable for Christians but not for other people.
Habermas: So we're back to deciding on the data in front of us.
Flew: Yes, in the light of our own, as we think, most reasonable beliefs before we came to this problem.
Moderator: So if one already believes in a transcendent God, then belief in the resurrection can be rational? But if you don't ...
Flew: 1 think this would be the case. I've only thought about it in light of the latest arguments for the existence of God, which were introduced before I started thinking about them. I was an adolescent before the big bang theory was formulated. How old can you get?
Moderator: I'm looking at a cheat sheet, and it says that it's almost time for closing statements from the speakers, after which we can have a period of questions and, with any luck, answers. So [to Flew], would you like to make a closing statement?
Flew: No, I have already said what I particularly wanted to say.
Habermas: That was the apex of your case.
Moderator: [To Habermas] Would you like to make a closing statement?
Habermas: Sure. When I leave tonight, I will remember the tank commander. Well, let me state a little bit about my methodology, which I haven't gotten to yet. I hope this will provide a context for everything I've said here. The method I use when speaking about the resurrection is not to assume that the Bible is inspired, or even reliable. I would rather work from a lowest common denominator and work up from there. We started tonight with a list of historical facts, and I think that's the best way to go. Tony and I basically agreed on these. In an earlier debate, we had almost total agreement. So Tony and I pretty much share this same foundation, and it's pretty much shared by the entire scholarly community, Christian and non-Christian alike. By beginning with such a basis, you don't have to object to something solely because it's found in the Bible, should you reject that source; this last response misses the point. The chief issue, then, is whether these are historical facts that are known on their own grounds, no matter what your position. So, do we have good reasons to accept them as historical?
I will mention that we have a dozen and a half non-Christian sources for Jesus outside the New Testament as well. Contrary to popular belief, Jesus is one of the most mentioned people in ancient history. In fact, the earliest comment about Jesus could well be from a Greek historian, predating the New Testament. And what he records, by the way, is a miracle. So tonight, I'm not proposing believing something because it's in the New Testament. I'm arguing that if all we know about the New Testament is that it's a book of ancient literature, and I'll just note that it was Dr. Flew who said in his lecture this afternoon that the New Testament comes with very good credentials, that's enough. I don't have to even make his assumption, since I can reach my conclusions with just the data like the list that we started with tonight-we must account for the facts.
Now, I was quite pleased to hear Tony say that Christians are ra tional in believing in the resurrection, given their belief structure. But I think you can get there another way too: the single historical fact that is the most crucial on our list is that the disciples believed that they saw the risen Jesus. They thought they saw the risen Jesus. Scholars say almost unanimously, "Well, of course they thought they saw the risen Jesus."
But did they really see him alive? Here's where you bring in all the other accompanying reasons-their transformed lives, they are willing to die for it, how do you account for James, and then Paul, who were both unbelievers? They also believed that Jesus appeared to them. So you have this belief that they thought Jesus appeared to them, and you ask, "Can I explain these facts with other natural hypotheses, given what I know of science or history or philosophy or anything?" And if the data still look as if Jesus appeared, then I think we have a problem if we're going to reject it, or if we say that my belief structure doesn't work here. You still have to deal with the datait's your own data!
I will say, too, that I spent ten years searching. I used to argue with Christians and told them some pretty nasty things. I almost became a Buddhist. I ended up doing my doctoral dissertation on the resurrection and being convinced it happened. But then in 1995, 1 had a chance to test all of this firsthand. My wife passed away with stomach cancer. Actually, Tony knew her because he came to our home and stayed with us at the school for a couple of weeks.
And then of course you have all these issues about evil and pain. When all of this happened, a graduate student called me and asked, "Where would you be today if it weren't for the resurrection of Jesus?" And I realized that if Jesus was raised from the dead, it makes all the difference in the world. That meant my wife would be raised just like Jesus. That's pretty significant when I'm sitting there looking death in the face and watching her die.
I'll just end with the last verses of 1 Corinthians 15, the same passage we've been talking about tonight. Paul basically taunts death. At the end of the chapter, he says, "Death, where is your sting; grave, where is your victory?" He is basically saying, "You've got nothing, you've got nothing," because as he goes on to say, the answer is the resurrection of Jesus. Paul was a scholar. Earlier today Tony called him a very worthy philosopher, and Paul converted to Christianity because he saw the risen Jesus. So I'll end with that thought. For me, within my noetic structure, if the resurrection happened about A.D. 30, then it's an event that has continuing meaning today, for my family and all we went through in 1995. If you have the resurrection, you have plenty.
QUESTIONS FROM THE AUDIENCE
Moderator: So that concludes the official part of the conversation, and now it's your turn, if you like, to come to a microphone and ask a question. If you want to come up, make sure it is a question that you have and not a speech, and that the question is brief.
Habermas: Are they going to address it to one of us?
Moderator: And please address the question specifically to one or the other, and I see we have someone here, so go right ahead.
Question 1: Actually, I was hoping to hear from both of you, and I had two really quick ones. One is, what do both of you have to say about the speculation that the followers of Jesus moved the body of Jesus and hid it in order to keep the movement going? And the other is, does Jesus' divinity depend on the resurrection? If you have no resurrection, do you have no divinity? Are they dependent? Those are my questions.
Habermas: Okay, we have a couple of questions, so here's a couple of responses. The first question: what about the hypothesis that the disciples may have stolen the body to perpetrate their claim? In the history of responses to the resurrection, this one has hardly ever been held by any major critical scholars since Hermann Reimarus, a German rationalist, did it about 1760. If critics don't hold a theory, you can know that there are reasons why they don't, and there's a lot of problems with this one.
When somebody is willing to die for their position, no matter what it is-it could be an atheist dying for communism-you don't say they perpetrated a fraud. Let's say that they went ahead and died. You'd say, "I may not believe what they do, but it's clear that this person must have really believed what they taught."
Now, Tony will quickly point out that believing something doesn't make it true, and that's correct. But here's the point: if the disciples were willing to die for what they believed, and we have ample evidence of that-we can talk about it if you want, from early historythen they at least believed it. So to say they stole the body and then lied about the appearances seems to be a huge problem, for it is almost impossible to account for their actions. Plus you've got James and Paul, who were unbelievers. How do you get James and Paul involved in this plot? There's a lot of other issues too.
The other question was, can we have the deity of Jesus Christ without a resurrection? Theoretically, Jesus could have said, "I'm deity, take it or leave it." Or "I'm deity and I'll heal this person's leg to show it." Then you'll have to evaluate that on its own grounds and see what you think. So, yes, that could work, but what I'm saying is that the evidential value would be a lot lower, and further, that's not all Jesus claimed. Jesus said "I'm deity and I'll show it by being raised from the dead," so now he's making the ultimate claim. It's a stand or fall kind of view. That's why Paul says, if Christ has been raised, you know the Christian faith is true; otherwise our faith is in vain.
Question 2: This one is for Dr. Habermas. You were saying that Paul received the creed from an outside source. Is this one of the sources outside of the Bible that was possibly verified?
Habermas: Paul said, "I gave you what I was given," or "I delivered to you what I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, was buried, rose again on the third day, and appeared." Then he reproduced that list of appearances. This text is not Paul's-it's pre-Pauline. It's a piece of material that he took from somebody else and included in his book. By far, the most typical critical position is he received that material while he was in Jerusalem at about A.D. 35, or five years after the crucifixion. That's his testimony.
Questioner: Do we have any information about that source that he received the information from?
Habermas: Critical scholars take very seriously Paul's statement in Galatians 1:18-19 that he went up to Jerusalem just three years after his conversion, to meet with Peter and James the brother of Jesus. The immediate context concerns the gospel, which the New Testament defines repeatedly and clearly as including the resurrection. Just a few verses later, Paul tells us that he went back to Jerusalem fourteen years later, specifically to discuss the nature of the gospel [2:2]. The other apostles, Peter, James and John, agreed with his message and added nothing to it [2:6, 91. As Paul said several years later, he and the other apostles were preaching the same message with regard to Jesus' resurrection [1 Cor 15:111. So the consensus among scholars is that Paul probably received the creedal material when he visited Jerusalem the first time, which is the A.D. 35 date that I just mentioned. At the very least, from an exceptionally early date, these four major disciples discussed the nature of the gospel message and agreed on the details. This is rarely questioned by critical scholars. But note carefully, this is when Paul received and confirmed the message. The other apostles who passed it on to him had it before he did, and the events themselves are earlier still. So we are essentially back to the exact time when it all happened, as critical scholars have noted.
Question 3: [To Flew] I'm looking for a little clarification as far as evidence goes, for what constitutes evidence in ancient documents. It seems like Dr. Habermas has presented some sources to be considered from outside the text of the New Testament. And specifically speaking about the resurrection, I would think that an appearance would be made to somebody who was not a follower of Jesus at the time. And I would think that Saul of Tarsus would be considered one of those people to whom an appearance would be made. Such a radical change from his former lifestyle of persecution of the Jesus followers would be some form of evidence to me, but are there any outside sources from some other people to back up the claim that Saul was actually not a follower of Jesus?
Moderator: Is your question about the historical nature of Saul of Tarsus, or is your question to Flew about what sort of historical evidence he might count?
Questioner: Basically I guess the part about Paul. I'll go with him because that's what I'm having a problem with. It seems that Paul has presented his eyewitness account and then that's not good enough. Considering he wasn't a follower and then all of a sudden changed due to this appearance, I would think that that would hold some sway.
Flew: I'm not clear on what you're asking, but I think the worthwhile thing to say about this is that the evidence of Paul is certainly important and strong precisely because he was a convert. He was not a prior believer, and the evidence that he hadn't been previously a believer is about as clear as it could have been because he had been an active opponent. I think this has to be accepted as one of the most powerful bits of evidence that there is, precisely because he was converted by his vision, the nature of which I think is obscure. But still he was effectively converted by this from being an active opponent of the whole Christian movement.
Moderator: He concedes it as evidence, but it's just not convincing. It is striking, though, isn't it, that even someone like Saul, while not a prior believer, is someone who believes firmly in God, right?
Flew: I think that's very worthwhile to bring out. The evidence of Paul is the most powerful thing, apart from the fact that he was an outstanding philosophical mind, as the major Reformers were also.
Moderator: But an appearance to Pontius Pilate would have been cool. That would have been very nice.
Habermas: Yes, it would be, but I wonder: would that do it? I mean, I remember back in my days when I was searching, I told you I was arguing with Christians. I'd say, "If he appeared to Pilate, that would really be neat." Of course, he did appear to James, the brother of Jesus-you know, that's a family skeptic-versus an outsider. That's two skeptics who convert. But I remember having a skeptical episode where I looked out behind my house. There was this large tree, and I remember thinking to myself, "You know, if God really existed, he could knock that tree down." And I stood and I stared at it, and I said, "I thought so." Then I turned and walked away. Guess what? That night there was a storm and that tree was knocked down, and only that tree. For a few years I walked by that tree every day and it never, ever touched my skepticism. So I'm wondering, would that really have done it?
Moderator: Would it have convinced Antony Flew?
Habermas: I don't know.
Moderator: But you were convinced by the resurrection, by less than an appearance to Pontius Pilate. The evidence that you have is enough.
Habermas: You know what I'd like to see? I'd like for him [Flew] to see the resurrected Jesus.
Moderator: Well, I was going to ask that actually, about his own sense experience.
Habermas: By the way, folks, if you don't know this, Tony and I have been friends for almost twenty years. We've had a great few days here together, and everything I say teasingly I say respectfully. He is a good friend, and I really appreciate him.
Moderator: And they hardly ever come to blows.... The line for questioning is on-this one in the middle.
Question 4: This is to Dr. Habermas. You say that we have to pay attention to the evidence, and there's a lot of historical evidence that Jesus did rise. My question is also there's a lot of evidence this century that there was a boy found in Tibet who was the fourteenth reincarnation of Buddha. And there's a lot of evidence for that-that he passed a lot of tests that he couldn't have passed if he had not been the fourteenth reincarnation of Buddha. So how do we decide which factual evidence to believe?
Habermas: What would qualify as evidence for that claim?
Questioner: There's a story that he ran into a room and pointed at a chest of drawers and said, "My teeth are in there," and the teeth of the thirteenth Dalai Lama-his false teeth-were in there. They put him through a bunch of other rigorous tests.
Moderator: May I say that there are codified tests for proving that he is the fourteenth Dalai Lama?
Questioner: For proving that he is the fourteenth Dalai Lama ... so my question is, if that's also factual evidence that would prove a different parallel religious universe, how do you know which historical evidence to take from?
Habermas: Good question. So you're talking about something like reincarnation, right? The leading reincarnation expert in the world is Ian Stevenson, a medical doctor and a professor at the University of Virginia. Your professor here, I think, used to know him, or at least studied there and knows of him. Stevenson has published several serious books on reincarnation, and he looks at all the data of cases like that: people who say, go to this town and make this right hand turn and make this one and you'll come to this little hut that looks like this. When he finished all his studies, Dr. Stevenson said that there are two theories that account for all the data: one is reincarnation, the other is a type of possession. He said they both account for all the data. So if we go back to the resurrection, it would seem to me you'd want to have an alternative that explains all the known data just as well.
Moderator: So your view is that the Dalai Lama is possessed?
Habermas: No, I've never met him. Thankfully, I can quote Ian Stevenson, and he says the data can be explained either way, and so I think that's not a close case if there are equal hypotheses.
Question 5: My question is for Dr. Flew. I haven't read any of your books, but I was wondering what made you argue against Jesus Christ or the God of Christianity instead of basing your philosophy against a Buddhist God or a Hindu God. What was your motivation for placing your argument against Christianity?
Moderator: Before he answers, I think he's an equal opportunity religious critic. [To Flew] The questioner was wondering why your focus is in her view anti-Christian, rather than anti-Hindu or Islam or something like that. I mean, part of the answer is, this is about the resurrection and so there's not much point in criticizing Buddhism for that, right?
Flew: Well, it's because this was the subject announced for the evening, but I will indulge myself a little. The much-respected supervisor of my graduate studies, Gilbert Ryle, whose work on the concept of mind some of you may have heard of, once said cheerfully, "Some of my colleagues think I'm prejudiced, but in my opinion there's nothing that rises in the east except the sun."
Question 6: My question is for Dr. Flew. As an atheist you believe that human beings have no soul; there's no afterlife. When we die, we simply cease to exist, right?
Flew: Yes, if I'm asked whether I believe in a future life. But whenever I think of the doctrine of hell and damnation, I'm a little uneasy. I don't accept the existence of a future life. I don't want a future life, thank you very much. And I don't even want a life of eternal bliss as it is described in most heavens, because it simply wouldn't appeal to me. You are asking what I believe, and I'm not being asked to give any reasons for my belief. Although my opinion about the ideas of the East is not necessarily the same as that of my supervisor's.
Questioner: So you'd rather take the chance that if you or anyone who dies is right, no matter what they believe, there are no consequences, no gain, versus the fact that, if Christians are right, when they die they gain eternal bliss with God in heaven and, when you die, there is eternal damnation waiting for you.
Moderator: I believe he wants to give Pascal's wager.
Flew: Oh yes, you want me to respond to Pascal's wager. I'm afraid at this time in the evening I don't feel fit to do so. I have recently written some second thoughts about this wager, but I don't recall them right now.
Habermas: At least he's honest.
Moderator: Is that your answer? He wants to know, all other things being equal, if there's a better payoff for having faith, then why not choose it?
Flew: Some people may be interested that this is actually an argument derived from Islam. It was something taken over by Pascal. Well, it's a powerful argument, I think, but for it to be effective, the idea of a future life has to be granted at the beginning, doesn't it? You are betting on the alternative possibilities of a future life in eternal torment, given to you by the predestinating God of traditional Christianity and Islam. This is not exactly what anyone would call a good God in any understanding, or any normal understanding of goodness, but still, yes, for the wager to be an effective challenge, the person who receives the wager has got to regard the hypothesis of a future life as a fairly live hypothesis, wouldn't they? Then they're challenged to take action to ensure that the future life is satisfactory, rather than the alternative.
And the idea of a future life is not one that should be taken as obviously a sound and coherent life, because human beings are creatures of flesh and blood. And what is supposed to survive? It is supposed to be an immaterial spirit that is in control of the human being. Well, this is not a basic, accepted fact; this is a notion held by some people and not by everyone, because they have been taught to believe it. It cannot be just taken as obviously being confronted with two equally reasonable betting options. You know Pascal offered the wager as a betting option; he was, in fact, a creator of some probability theories in his mathematician's life. Well, this isn't an option like making a bet on who's going to win a race when there's no doubt that there's going to be a race and there's no doubt as to who are the par ticipants in the race. It is making a bet between two alternatives, both of which are based even for their intelligibility on a speculation. That's the best I can do for the moment.
Moderator: The issues involving pragmatic reasoning in Pascal's wager might be another topic for another panel perhaps. That's a good question, and that's probably not entirely satisfactory to you. You can talk to him later about it.
Question 7: My question is for Dr. Flew. If Jesus didn't rise from the dead, then what historically recorded evidence is there for the location of the body, or what happened to the body?
Flew: I don't know. I don't pretend to know. Because I don't think we can be in a position to know that the body was deposited in a tomb, though of course the opponents of Christianity wanted to find the body, didn't they? They wanted to find a body that hadn't risen.
Habermas: I thought you said earlier that we had enough basis, that those seven or eight reasons I gave were satisfactory for a burial?
Flew: Yes, I think they probably were satisfactory.
Habermas: So she wants to know, if we do have a burial, then what happened to the body? The tomb had to be open within days because it was right within the city, where people could just take a stroll and verify it or falsify it.
Flew: Well, I presume what happened to the body if it was buried-I don't know whether there's a different Christian view. Perhaps there is, and perhaps the view is that the body was resurrected.
Habermas: That's what Christians believe.
Moderator: She wants to know what you think.
Questioner: I mean, because you've been asking Dr. Habermas all night to show historical evidence and documented evidence that the body did resurrect, and he's quoted the Bible and he's quoted other texts. So is there any text or any person who has actually claimed that the body is or was still there afterward?
Moderator: May I say that I don't think that he disputed that historical evidence. I think his claim was that we agreed to this, but he didn't think it warranted the belief for him in the resurrection. He doesn't claim to have evidence that shows that the body was taken to Albuquerque or something. He's just saying, "I know what you're saying, and maybe it is rational for you to believe it, but it doesn't add up for me."
Question 8: My question is for Dr. Habermas. I am curious if Jesus claims to be the Son of God, and Christians accept that Jesus is the Son of God, in fact the second person of the Trinity. If I am correct, how miraculous is it really that he rose from the dead? I think what I'm asking is, as a Christian, should it be regarded as a miracle that the Son of God, or the second person of the Godhead, rose from the dead to begin with?
Moderator: So it's not a miracle, because it is what you expect?
Habermas: This is the Christian naturalistic theory for the resurrection. Seriously, suppose you were in the countryside leaving your first-century shop and going to hear Jesus speak on a sunny afternoon. You hear him preach, and he makes some extraordinary claims, and these claims don't seem to be computing. I mean, it's not every day that you bump into the Son of God, right? So this fellow claims to be the Son of God, and that is rather extraordinary. When you hear his claims, you're not a Christian. I mean, for the most part, these folks are listening, and they're probably going back to their shops, scratching their heads and thinking this fellow is really something.
As Dr. Flew said today, Jesus was an incredibly charismatic figure, and people thought he was fantastic. Over and over again, the Gospels say he spoke as somebody who had wisdom, not as one of the religious leaders they'd heard. So they were impressed with him, but nonetheless I think they're going back to their shops, scratching their heads, saying, "I don't know what to make of this fellow."
Then somebody comes to your shop a few months later and says, "Hey, did you hear that the Galilean is dead? Yeah, the Romans killed him." Oh man, what do I think now? You go back to work in your shop.
But two weeks later, someone says, "Hey, did you hear? The Galilean that you went to hear speak was raised from the dead! That big fisherman, Peter, is coming to town today. I think we should go hear him speak."
I think many of these folks were very skeptical when they first heard Jesus' message, but what closed the argument for those who believed? What closed the argument for them was the resurrection. I don't think it made sense to many of them until they got all the puzzle pieces put together. And the resurrection is what put all the puzzle pieces together. I don't know if that answers your question or not.
Question 9: Okay, my question is directed to Gary Habermas. And my question is, you guys talked a little bit about the idea of having tangible evidence of the resurrection like the video camera, but if God does exist, wouldn't he provide some kind of tangible evidence so we would not have to have this argument in the first place? And then also in addition to that, if I believe correctly, a major idea of Christianity is this idea of faith, and doesn't the idea of having the resurrection occur sort of contradict that idea of having faith in God at the same time?
Habermas: I understand the faith part, but what was the first part of your question?
Questioner: The first part of my question was, if God exists, wouldn't he provide some kind of tangible evidence?
Habermas: Sure, I mean he doesn't have to, but if God exists I would think that providing tangible evidence is one very important way he could act, so when we see that in history we think, "Wow, he's acted." I mean, that's precisely what they think. Now, as far as your question about faith, that's a great question. Perhaps I'm not taking you correctly, but I'm hearing something like this: Isn't Christianity about faith, and you're sitting here talking about evidence all night. How do you relate faith to evidence?
Questioner: Well, talking specifically about the resurrection, you mentioned several times in your argument that a purpose of the res urrection was to show that Jesus was the Son of God. You mentioned it just now in your story of the Jewish shopkeeper. It was used as evidence that he existed, but doesn't that contradict the idea of having faith in God?
Habermas: Okay, let me give you another example. You date somebody and, after a while, you think you know this person better than anyone else on the face of the Earth. But you're still not married unless you say, "I do." Perhaps you do know them better than anyone else, but you still must say, "I do."
I think that's an analogy to Christianity. When people come to Christ, they're saying "I do" to Jesus. I don't think there's any conflict between my knowing somebody real well and then thinking, "You know what, you're the kind of person with whom I would like to spend the rest of my life." But now it takes a commitment. Don't I realize that half the marriages in this country break up? Don't I know that this person might not be what they seem? You know, there are all kinds of objections. But I may still say, "Let's do it. Would you marry me?"
I think it's very similar with faith. Just because you have all your ducks in a row doesn't mean there's nothing that can disturb this. You can still have doubts or other issues, and obviously this happens to marriages too. So I think you try to be really careful, you try to line your data up, and you can decide if you want to say "I do" to Jesus Christ. That "I do" step, that faith, that commitment, is not contradicted by the fact that you thought through everything first. In fact, we say the opposite-we say that the person who was careful on the front end and who then takes a step is smarter than the person who makes a fast decision, whether it is faith or marriage. So I don't think there needs to be any conflict whatsoever between evidence and faith. We still have to invoke the commitment portion.
Question 10: Okay, the disciples were all Jews with Jewish teaching, and isn't Jewish belief that the Messiah would have been an earthly Messiah, someone to set up some kind of worldly kingdom? And to my knowledge, the idea of a resurrection was never taught in the Old Testament. So what sort of a resurrection would give the disciples the idea?
Habermas: I think you're largely correct. Probably the most common Jewish view was that a king would come and set up God's kingdom, which he'd set up on behalf of the God of the universe. Interestingly enough, in Daniel 7:13-14, this person is one like a Son of Man, and he is separate from the person Christians call God the Father because, in the same context, the latter is called the Ancient of Days.19 But the Son of Man goes to Earth to set up the kingdom. Very interestingly, this was Jesus' favorite self-designation. He called himself the Son of Man more than any other title.
There's a lot of content here that I'm not going to be able to mention, but personally I think that Jesus' use of the Son of Man title comes very close to who the Son of God is: I think they are two angles on the same person, and both are indications of a claim to deity. Maybe that doesn't help you, but I'm saying, yes, the disciples apparently held your view and they thought Jesus was fulfilling it. But Jesus took the kingdom teaching in a different direction. As Jesus said, it was not just an earthly kingdom, but God's rule both on earth as well as in heaven. You might say that the resurrection initiated both stages.
Question 11: Sort of going in the same vein of video evidence, video is pretty good evidence versus written evidence. It seems like our ability to provide more authentic proofs, such as video proof, might be better than a person saying I saw somebody throw a football and score a touchdown. Recent audio or video records are hard to refute, but it seems, when it comes to something like the Bible, there's less and less evidence as time advances.
Moderator: Or perhaps as an alternative, if the resurrection happened now and we caught it on MTV ...
Habermas: That would be pretty neat, and again I have those in the back-photographs of the Shroud of Turin, the most investigated archaeological artifact in history. Some think it is a sort of photo of Jesus' resurrection. Seriously, I didn't bring those here. But for good or for ill, we're dealing with an ancient historical event. And in ancient history, we can only deal with the tools we have. Let me give you an example. We use the phrase `Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon," and we often say that to indicate a really sure event. But there are very few firsthand reports in the ancient world for Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon River. Multiple sources increase the likelihood of reliability. Obviously, we didn't have a video camera there, but the data you do have, you have to deal with it, and that's how ancient history is done. No one's going to throw ancient history out the window, so you must deal with what you have.
'Material in this section originally appeared as Antony Flew and Gary Habermas, "My Pilgrimage from Atheism to Theism: A Discussion Between Antony Flew and Gary Habermas," Philosophia Christi 6 (2004): 197-211; Gary R. Habermas, "Antony Flew's Deism Revisited: A Review Essay on There Is a God," Philosophia Christi 9, no.2 (Winter 2007): 431-41. Used by permission of Philosophia Christi and the Evangelical Philosophical Society <www.epsociety.org>.
z"Christianity Challenges the University: An International Conference of Theists and Atheists," Dallas, February 7-10, 1985, organized by Roy Abraham Varghese.
In May of that year, Flew and Habermas debated at Liberty University before a large audience. The topic that night was the resurrection of Jesus.' Although Flew was arguably the world's foremost philosophical atheist, he had intriguingly also earned the distinction of being one of the chief philosophical commentators on the topic of miracles.4 Habermas specialized in the subject of Jesus' resurrec tion.5 Thus, the ensuing dialogue on the historical evidence for the central Christian claim was a natural outgrowth of their research.
Over the next twenty years, Flew and Habermas developed a friendship, writing dozens of letters, talking often, and dialoguing twice more on the resurrection. In April 2000 they participated in a live debate on the Inspiration Television Network, moderated by John Ankerberg.6 In January 2003 they again dialogued on the resurrection at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.7
During a couple of telephone discussions shortly after their last dialogue, Flew explained to Habermas that he was considering becoming a theist. While Flew did not change his position at that time, he concluded that certain philosophical and scientific considerations were causing him to do some serious rethinking. He characterized his position as that of atheism standing in tension with several huge question marks.
Then, a year later, in January 2004, Flew informed Habermas that he had indeed become a theist. While still rejecting the concept of special revelation, whether Christian, Jewish or Islamic, nonetheless he had concluded that theism was true. In Flew's words, he simply "had to go where the evidence leads.""
The following interview took place in early 2004 and was subsequently modified by both participants throughout the year. This nontechnical discussion sought to engage Flew over the course of several topics that reflect his move from atheism to theism. The chief purpose was not to pursue the details of any particular issue, so we bypassed many avenues that would have presented a plethora of other intriguing questions and responses. These were often tantalizingly ignored, left to ripen for another discussion. Neither did we try to persuade each other of alternate positions.
Our singular purpose was simply to explore and report Flew's new position, allowing him to explain various aspects of his pilgrimage. We thought that this in itself was a worthy goal. Along the way, an additional benefit emerged, as Flew reminisced about various moments from his childhood, graduate studies and career.
Habermas: Tony, you recently told me that you have come to believe in the existence of God. Would you comment on that?
Flew: Well, I don't believe in the God of any revelatory system, although I am open to that. But it seems to me that the case for an Aristotelian God, who has the characteristics of power and also intelligence, is now much stronger than it ever was before. And it was from Aristotle that Aquinas drew the materials for producing his five ways of, hopefully, proving the existence of God. Aquinas took them, reasonably enough, to prove, if they proved anything, the existence of the God of the Christian revelation. But Aristotle himself never produced a definition of the word god, which is a curious fact. But this concept still led to the basic outline of the five ways. It seems to me that, from the existence of Aristotle's God, you can't infer anything about human behavior. So what Aristotle had to say about justice (justice, of course, as conceived by the founding fathers of the American Republic as opposed to the "social" justice of John Rawls9) was very much a human idea, and he thought that this idea of justice was what ought to govern the behavior of individual human beings in their relations with others.
Habermas: Once you mentioned to me that your view might be called Deism. Do you think that would be a fair designation?
Flew: Yes, absolutely right. What Deists, such as Mr. Jefferson, who drafted the American Declaration of Independence, believed was that, while reason, mainly in the form of arguments to design, assures us that there is a God, there is no room either for any supernatural revelation of that God or for any transactions between that God and individual human beings.
Habermas: Then would you comment on your "openness" to the notion of theistic revelation?
Flew: Yes. I am open to it, but not enthusiastic about potential revelation from God. On the positive side, for example, I am very much impressed with physicist Gerald Schroeder's comments on Genesis 1.10 That this biblical account might be scientifically accurate raises the possibility that it is revelation.
Habermas: You very kindly noted that our debates and discussions had influenced your move in the direction of theism." You mentioned that this initial influence contributed in part to your comment that naturalistic efforts have never succeeded in producing "a plausible conjecture as to how any of these complex molecules might have evolved from simple entities."" Then in your recently rewritten introduction to the forthcoming edition of your classic volume God and Philosophy, you say that the original version of that book is now obsolete. You mention a number of trends in theistic argumentation that you find convincing, like big bang cosmology, fine-tuning and Intelligent Design arguments. Which arguments for God's existence did you find most persuasive?
Flew: I think that the most impressive arguments for God's existence are those that are supported by recent scientific discoveries. I've never been much impressed by the Kalam cosmological argument, and I don't think it has gotten any stronger recently. However, I think the argument to Intelligent Design is enormously stronger than it was when I first met it.
Habermas: So you like arguments such as those that proceed from big bang cosmology and fine-tuning arguments?
Flew: Yes.
Habermas: You also recently told me that you do not find the moral argument to be very persuasive. Is that right?
Flew: That's correct. It seems to me that for a strong moral argument, you've got to have God as the justification of morality. To do this makes doing the morally good a purely prudential matter rather than, as the moral philosophers of my youth used to call it, a good in itself. (Compare the classic discussion of Plato's Euthyphro.)
Habermas: So take C. S. Lewis's argument for morality as presented in Mere Christianity.13 You didn't find that to be very impressive?
Flew: No, I didn't. Perhaps I should mention that, when I was in college, I attended fairly regularly the weekly meetings of C. S. Lewis's Socratic Club. In all my time at Oxford, these meetings were chaired by Lewis. I think he was by far the most powerful of Christian apologists for the sixty or more years following his founding of that club. As late as the 1970s, I used to find that, in the U.S.A., in at least half of the campus bookstores of the universities and liberal arts colleges which I visited, there was at least one long shelf devoted to his very various published works.
Habermas: Although you disagreed with him, did you find him to be a very reasonable sort of fellow?
Flew: Oh yes, very much so, an eminently reasonable man.
Habermas: And what do you think about the ontological argument for the existence of God?
Flew: All my later thinking and writing about philosophy was greatly influenced by my year of postgraduate study under the supervision of Gilbert Ryle, the then professor of metaphysical philosophy in the University of Oxford, as well as the editor of Mind. It was the very year in which his enormously influential work The Concept of Mind was first published.14 I was told that in the years between the wars whenever another version of the ontological argument was raised, Gilbert forthwith set himself to refute it.
My own initial lack of enthusiasm for the ontological argument developed into strong repulsion when I realized from reading the Theodicy of Leibnizls that it was the identification of the concept of Being with the concept of Goodness (which ultimately derives from Plato's identification in The Republic of the Form or Idea of the Good with the Form or the Idea of the Real), which enabled Leibniz in his Theodicy validity to conclude that a universe in which most human beings are predestined to an eternity of torture is the "best of all possible worlds."
Habermas: So of the major theistic arguments, such as the cosmological, teleological, moral and ontological, the only really impressive ones that you take to be decisive are the scientific forms of teleology?
Flew: Absolutely. It seems to me that Richard Dawkins constantly overlooks the fact that Darwin himself, in the fourteenth chapter of The Origin of Species, pointed out that his whole argument began with a being that already possessed reproductive powers. This is the creature the evolution of which a truly comprehensive theory of evolution must give some account. Darwin himself was well aware that he had not produced such an account. It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design.
Habermas: As I recall, you also refer to this in the new introduction to your God and Philosophy.
Flew: Yes, I do; or, since the book has not yet been published, I will!
Habermas: Since you affirm Aristotle's concept of God, do you think we can also affirm Aristotle's implications that the First Cause hence knows all things?
Flew: I suppose we should say this: I'm not at all sure what one should think concerning some of these very fundamental issues. There does seem to be a reason for a First Cause, but I'm not at all sure how much we have to explain here. What idea of God is necessary to provide an explanation of the existence of the universe and all which is in it?
Habermas: If God is the First Cause, what about omniscience, or omnipotence?
Flew: Well, the First Cause, if there was a First Cause, has very clearly produced everything that is going on. I suppose that does imply creation "in the beginning."
Habermas: In the same introduction, you also make a comparison between Aristotle's God and Spinoza's God. Are you implying, with some interpreters of Spinoza, that God is pantheistic?
Flew: I'm noting there that God and Philosophy has become out of date and should now be seen as an historical document rather than as a direct contribution to current discussion. I'm sympathetic to Spinoza because he makes some statements which seem to me correctly to describe the human situation. But for me the most important thing about Spinoza is not what he says, but what he does not say. He does not say that God has any preferences either about or any intentions concerning human behavior or about the eternal destinies of human beings.
Habermas: What role might your love for the writings of David Hume play in a discussion about the existence of God? Do you have any new insights on Hume, given your new belief in God?
Flew: No, not really.
Habermas: Do you think Hume ever answers the questions of God?
I too, having been brought up as a Methodist, have always been aware of the possible and in many times and places actual benefit of objective religious instruction. It is now several decades since I first tried to draw attention to the danger of relying on a modest amount of compulsory religious instruction in schools to meet the need for moral education, especially in a period of relentlessly declining religious belief. But all such warnings by individuals were, of course, ignored. So we now have in the United Kingdom a situation in which any mandatory requirements to instruct pupils in state-funded schools in the teachings of the established or any other religion are widely ignored. The only official attempt to construct a secular substitute was vitiated by the inability of the moral philosopher on the relevant government committee to recognize the fundamental difference between justice without prefix or suffix and the "social" justice of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice.
I must sometime send you a copy of the final chapter of my latest and presumably last book, in which I offer a syllabus and a program for moral education in secular schools.'7 This is relevant and important for both the United States and the United Kingdom. To the United States because the Supreme Court has utterly misinterpreted the clause in the Constitution about not establishing a religion: misunderstanding it as imposing a ban on all official reference to religion. In the United Kingdom any effective program or moral education has to be secular because unbelief is now very widespread.
Habermas: In God and Philosophy and in many other places in our discussions too, it seems that your primary motivation for rejecting theistic arguments used to be the problem of evil. In terms of your new belief in God, how do you now conceptualize God's relationship to the reality of evil in the world?
Flew: Well, absent revelation, why should we perceive anything as objectively evil? The problem of evil is a problem only for Christians. For Muslims everything which human beings perceive as evil, just as much as everything we perceive as good, has to be obediently accepted as produced by the will of Allah. I supposed that the moment when, as a schoolboy of fifteen years, it first appeared to me that the thesis that the universe was created and is sustained by a Being of infinite power and goodness is flatly incompatible with the occurrence of massive undeniable and undenied evils in that universe was the first step toward my future career as a philosopher. It was, of course, very much later that I learned of the philosophical identification of goodness with existence.
Habermas: In your view, then, God hasn't done anything about evil.
Flew: No, not at all, other than producing a lot of it.
Habermas: Given your theism, what about mind-body issues?
Flew: I think those who want to speak about an afterlife have got to meet the difficulty of formulating a concept of an incorporeal person. Here I have again to refer back to my year as a graduate student supervised by Gilbert Ryle, in the year in which he published The Concept of Mind.
At that time there was considerable comment, usually hostile, in the serious British press, on what was called Oxford Linguistic Philosophy. The objection was usually that this involved a trivialization of a very profound and important discipline.
I was by this moved to give a talk to the Philosophy Postgraduates Club under the title "Matter Which Matters." In it I argued that, so far from ignoring what Immanuel Kant described as the three great problems of philosophers-God, Freedom and Immortality-the linguistic approach promised substantial progress toward their solution.
I myself always intended to make contributions in all those three areas. Indeed my first philosophical publication was relevant to the third.' Indeed it was not very long after I got my first job as a professional philosopher that I confessed to Ryle that if ever I was asked to deliver the Gifford Lectures I would give them under the title "The Logic of Mortality."" They were an extensive argument to the conclusion that it is simply impossible to create a concept of an incorporeal spirit.
Habermas: Is such a concept necessarily required for the notion of an afterlife?
Flew: Dr. Johnson's dictionary defines death as the soul leaving the body. If the soul is to be, as Dr. Johnson and almost-if perhaps not quite-everyone else in his day believed it to be, something which can sensibly be said to leave its present residence and to take up or be forced to take up residence elsewhere, then a soul must be, in the philosophical sense, a substance rather than merely a characteristic of something else.
My Gifford Lectures were published after Richard Swinburne published his, The Evolution of the Soul.20 So when mine were reprinted under the title Merely Mortal? Can You Survive Your Own Death?" I might have been expected to respond to any criticisms which Swinburne had made of my earlier publications in the same area. But the embarrassing truth is that he had taken no notice of any previous relevant writings either by me or by anyone published since World War II. There would not have been much point in searching for books or articles before that date since Swinburne and I had been the only Gifford lecturers to treat the question of a future life for the sixty years past. Even more remarkably, Swinburne in his Gifford Lectures ignored Bishop Butler's decisive observation: "Memory may reveal but cannot constitute personal identity." 22
Habermas: On several occasions, you and I have dialogued regarding the subject of near-death experiences, especially the specific sort where people have reported verifiable data from a distance away from themselves. Sometimes these reports even occur during the absence of heartbeat or brain waves.23 After our second dialogue you wrote me a letter and said, "I find the materials about near death experiences so challenging. . . . This evidence equally certainly weakens if it does not completely refute my argument against doctrines of a future life."24 In light of these evidential near-death cases, what do you think about the possibility of an afterlife, especially given your theism?
Flew: An incorporeal being may be hypothesized, and hypothesized to possess a memory. But before we could rely on its memory even of its own experiences, we should need to be able to provide an account of how this hypothesized incorporeal being could be identified in the first place and then-after what lawyers call an affluxion of timereidentified even by himself or herself as one and the same individual spiritual being. Until we have evidence that we have been and presumably-as Dr. Johnson and so many lesser men have believed-are to be identified with such incorporeal spirits, I do not see why near-death experiences should be taken as evidence for the conclusion that human beings will enjoy a future life or-more likely, if either of the two great revealed religions is true-suffer eternal torment.
Habermas: I agree that near-death experiences do not evidence the doctrines of either heaven or hell. But do you think these evidential cases increase the possibility of some sort of an afterlife, again, given your theism?
Flew: I still hope and believe there's no possibility of an afterlife.
Habermas: Even though you hope there's no afterlife, what do you think of the evidence that there might be such, as perhaps indicated by these evidential near-death cases? And even if there is no clear notion of what sort of body might be implied here, do you find this evidence helpful in any way? In other words, apart from the form in which a potential afterlife might take, do you still find these to be evidence for something?
Flew: It's puzzling to offer an interpretation of these experiences. But I presume it has got to be taken as extrasensory perceiving by the flesh-and-blood person who is the subject of the experiences in question. What it cannot be is the hypothesized incorporeal spirit which you would wish to identify with the person who nearly died, but actually did not. For this concept of an incorporeal spirit cannot properly be assumed to have been given sense until and unless some means has been provided for identifying such spirits in the first place and reidentifying them as one and the same individual incorporeal spirits after the affluxion of time. Until and unless this has been done, we have always to remember Bishop Butler's objection: "Memory may reveal but cannot constitute personal identity."
Perhaps I should here point out that, long before I took my first university course in philosophy, I was much interested in what in the United Kingdom, where it began, is still called psychical research, although the term parapsychology is now used almost everywhere else. Perhaps I ought here to confess that my first book was brashly entitled A New Approach to Psychical Research'21 and my interest in this subject continued for many years thereafter.
Flew: When I came to consider what seemed to me the most impressive of these near-death cases, I asked myself, what is the traditional first question to ask about "psychic" phenomena? It is, "When, where and by whom were the phenomena first reported?" Some people seem to confuse near-death experiences with after-death experiences. Where any such near-death experiences become relevant to the question of a future life is when and only when they appear to show "the occurrence of human consciousness independent of any occurrences in the human brain."
Habermas: Elsewhere you again very kindly noted my influence on your thinking here regarding these data being decent evidence for human consciousness independent of "electrical activity in the brain."27 If some near-death experiences are evidenced, independently confirmed experiences during a near-death state, even in persons whose heart or brain may not be functioning, isn't that quite impressive evidence? Are near-death experiences, then, the best evidence for an afterlife?
Flew: Oh, yes, certainly. They are basically the only evidence.
Habermas: What critical evaluation would you make of the three major monotheisms? Are there any particular philosophical strengths or weaknesses in Christianity, Judaism or Islam?
Flew: If all I knew or believed about God was what I might have learned from Aristotle, then I should have assumed that everything in the universe, including human conduct, was exactly as God wanted it to be. And this is indeed the case, in so far as both Christianity and Islam are predestinarian, a fundamental teaching of both religious systems. What was true of Christianity in the Middle Ages is certainly no longer equally true after the Reformation. But Islam has neither suffered nor enjoyed either a Reformation or an Enlightenment. In the Summa Theologiae we may read:
What and how much that something more is, the Summa Contra Gentiles makes clear:
The Angelic Doctor, however, is always the devotedly complacent apparatchik. He sees no problem about the justice of either the inflicting of infinite and everlasting penalties for finite and temporal offences, or of their affliction upon creatures for offences which their Creator makes them freely choose to commit. Thus, the Angelic Doctor assures us:
In order that the happiness of the saints may be more delightful to them and that they may render more copious thanks to God . . . they are allowed to see perfectly the sufferings of the damned.... Divine justice and their own deliverance will be the direct cause of the joy of the blessed, while the pains of the damned will cause it indirectly ... the blessed in glory will have no pity for the damned.30
The statements of predestinarianism in the Qur'an are much more aggressive and unequivocal than even the strongest in the Bible. Compare the following from the Qur'an with that from Romans 9.
"Arthur J. Arberry, trans., Qur'an 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
32Qur'an 5.
In the United Kingdom the doctrine of hell has for the last century or more been progressively deemphasized, until in 1995 it was explicitly and categorically abandoned by the Church of England. It would appear that the Roman Catholic Church has not abandoned either the doctrine of hell nor predestination.
Thomas Hobbes spent a very large part of the forty years between the first publication of the King James Bible and the first publication of his own Leviathan engaged in biblical criticism, one very relevant finding of which I now quote:
And it is said besides in many places [that the wicked] shall go into everlasting fire; and that the worm of conscience never dieth; and all this is comprehended in the word everlasting death, which is ordinarily interpreted everlasting life in torments. And yet I can find nowhere that any man shall live in torments everlastingly. Also, it seemeth hard to say that God who is the father of mercies; that doth in heaven and earth all that he will, that hath the hearts of all men in his disposing; that worketh in men both to do, and to will; and without whose free gift a man hath neither inclination to good, nor repentance of evil, should punish men's transgressions without any end of time, and with all the extremity of torture, that men can imagine and more.33
As for Islam, it is, I think, best described in a Marxian way as the uniting and justifying ideology of Arab imperialism. Between the New Testament and the Qur'an there is (as it is customary to say when making such comparisons) no comparison. Whereas markets can be found for books on reading the Bible as literature, to read the Qur'an is a penance rather than a pleasure. There is no order or development in its subject matter. All the chapters (suras) are arranged in order of their length, with the longest at the beginning. However, since the Qur'an consists in a collection of bits and pieces of putative revelation delivered to the prophet Muhammad by the archangel Gabriel in classical Arabic on many separate but unknown occasions, it is difficult to suggest any superior principle of organization.
One point about the editing of the Qur'an is rarely made, although it would appear to be of very substantial theological significance. Every sura is prefaced by the words "In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate." Yet there are references to hell on at least 255 of the 669 pages of Arberry's rendering of the Qur'an,34 and quite often pages have two such references.
Whereas the apostle Paul, who was the chief contributor to the New Testament, knew all the three relevant languages and obviously possessed a first-class philosophical mind, the Prophet, though gifted in the arts of persuasion and clearly a considerable military leader, was both doubtfully literate and certainly ill informed about the contents of the Old Testament and about several matters of which God, if not even the least informed of the Prophet's contemporaries, must have been cognizant.
This raises the possibility of what my philosophical contemporaries in the heyday of Gilbert Ryle would have described as a knockdown falsification of Islam: something which is most certainly not possible in the case of Christianity. If I do eventually produce such a paper, it will obviously have to be published anonymously.
Habermas: What do you think about the Bible?
Flew: The Bible is a work which someone who had not the slightest concern about the question of the truth or falsity of the Christian religion could read as people read the novels of the best novelists. It is an eminently readable book.
Habermas: You and I have had three dialogues on the resurrection of Jesus. Are you any closer to thinking that the resurrection could have been a historical fact?
Flew: No, I don't think so. The evidence for the resurrection is better than for claimed miracles in any other religion. It's outstandingly different in quality and quantity, I think, from the evidence offered for the occurrence of most other supposedly miraculous events. But you must remember that I approached it after considerable reading of reports of psychical research and its criticisms. This showed me how quickly evidence of remarkable and supposedly miraculous events can be discredited.
What the psychical researcher looks for is evidence from witnesses of the supposedly paranormal events recorded as soon as possible after their occurrence. What we do not have is evidence from anyone who was in Jerusalem at the time, who witnessed one of the allegedly miraculous events and recorded his or her testimony immediately after the occurrence of that allegedly miraculous event. In the 1950s and 1960s I heard several suggestions from hard-bitten young Australian and American philosophers of conceivable mira Iles the actual occurrence of which, it was contended, no one could have overlooked or denied. Why, they asked, if God wanted to be recognized and worshiped, did God not produce a miracle of this unignorable and undeniable kind?
Habermas: So you think that, for a miracle, the evidence for Jesus' resurrection is better than other miracle claims?
Flew: Oh yes, I think so. It's much better, for example, than that for most-if not all-of the, so to speak, run-of-the-mill Roman Catholic miracles. On this see, for instance, D. J. West's Eleven Lourdes Miracles.
Habermas: You have made numerous comments over the years that Christians are justified in their beliefs such as Jesus' resurrection or other major tenets of their faith. In our last two dialogues I think you even remarked that for someone who is already a Christian there are many good reasons to believe Jesus' resurrection. Would you comment on that?
Flew: Yes, certainly. This is an important matter about rationality which I have fairly recently come to appreciate. What it is rational for any individual to believe about some matter which is fresh to that individual's consideration depends on what he or she rationally believed before being confronted with this fresh situation. For suppose they rationally believed in the existence of a God of any revelation, then it would be entirely reasonable for them to see the fine-tuning argument as providing substantial confirmation of their belief in the existence of that God.
Habermas: You've told me that you have a very high regard for John and Charles Wesley and their traditions. What accounts for your appreciation?
Flew: The greatest thing is their tremendous achievement of creating the Methodist movement mainly among the working class. Methodism made it impossible to build a really substantial Communist Party in Britain and provided the country with a generous supply of men and women of sterling moral character from mainly working class families. Its decline is a substantial part of the explosions both of unwanted motherhood and of crime in recent decades. There is also the tremendous determination shown by John Wesley in spending year after year riding for miles every day, preaching more than seven sermons a week, and so on. I have only recently been told of Wesley's great controversy against predestination and in favor of the Arminian alternative. Certainly he was one of my country's many great sons and daughters. One at least of the others was raised in a Methodist home with a father who was a local preacher.
Habermas: Don't you attribute some of your appreciation for the Wesleys to your father's ministry? Haven't you said that your father was the first non-Anglican to get a doctorate in theology from Oxford University?
Habermas: What do you think that Bertrand Russell, J. L. Mackie and A. J. Ayer would have thought about these theistic developments, had they still been alive today?
Flew: I think Russell certainly would have had to notice these things. I'm sure Mackie would have been interested too. I never knew Ayer very well, beyond meeting him once or twice.
Habermas: Do you think any of them would have been impressed in the direction of theism? I'm thinking here, for instance, about Russell's famous comments that God hasn't produced suffi cient evidence of his
Flew: Consistent with Russell's comments that you mention, Russell would have regarded these developments as evidence. I think we can be sure that Russell would have been impressed too, precisely because of his comments to which you refer. This would have produced an interesting second dialogue between him and that distinguished Catholic philosopher Frederick Copleston.
Habermas: In recent years you've been called the world's most influential philosophical atheist. Do you think Russell, Mackie or Ayer would have been bothered or even angered by your conversion to theism? Or do you think that they would have at least understood your reasons for changing your mind?
Flew: I'm not sure how much any of them knew about Aristotle. But I am almost certain that they never had in mind the idea of a God who was not the God of any revealed religion. But we can be sure that they would have examined these new scientific arguments.
Habermas: C. S. Lewis explained in his autobiography that he moved first from atheism to theism and only later from theism to Christianity. Given your great respect for Christianity, do you think that there is any chance that you might in the end move from theism to Christianity?
Flew: I think it's very unlikely, due to the problem of evil. But, if it did happen, I think it would be in some eccentric fit and doubtfully orthodox form: regular religious practice perhaps, but without belief. If I wanted any sort of future life I should become a Jehovah's Witness. But some things I am completely confident about. I would never regard Islam with anything but horror and fear because it is fundamentally committed to conquering the world for Islam. It was because the whole of Palestine was part of the Land of Islam that Muslim Arab armies moved in to try to destroy Israel at birth and why the struggle for the return of the still surviving refugees and their numerous descendents continues to this day.
Habermas: I ask this last question with a smile, Tony. But just think what would happen if one day you were pleasantly disposed toward Christianity and all of a sudden the resurrection of Jesus looked pretty good to you?
Flew: Well, one thing I'll say in this comparison is that, for goodness' sake, Jesus is an enormously attractive charismatic figure, which the Prophet of Islam most emphatically is not.
Gary R. Habermas