There Is A God

I just finished reading Antony Flew’s book (written in collaboration with Roy Abraham Varghese) There Is a God. There was a lot of controversy about the book, including even accusations that it had been ghostwritten in a way that did not reflect Flew’s views, in essence manipulating a senile old man. Flew has gone on record, however, saying that he stands by what the book says. It is quite clear (both from the book and from other statements by Flew) that Flew has converted to Deism and not Christianity or some other revealed faith. He does not believe in an afterlife. And so, if Christian apologists supposedly put their words in Flew’s mouth, they did a questionable job at best.

I suppose many educated Christians today (myself included) are in fact Deists, not in the sense of adhering to the precise views of classic 18th century Deism, but in the sense of recognizing that ultimately we need to bring everything back to reason. Any appeal to revelation is inevitably ajudicated by reason. Indeed, there can be no reading of a Sacred text without our minds being involved, so any claim that something other than our minds and reason mediates and assesses truth claims is patently false, no matter how adamantly such claims may be made.

Yet reason and science (= knowledge) has its limits. Of the various points made in the book, I think the most important and most compelling is the case that science only takes us so far, after which we are left with philosophy and metaphysics. To posit an undetectable infinite multiverse of great complexity, the origins and functioning of which are unknown and unknowable, is not a satisfying answer to the question of why anything exists, much less a universe in which we can ask these questions.

This is not to say that appeal to a (arguably rather complex in his own right) personal God is more persuasive, or that any of the other alternatives are more reasonable. On the contrary, each statement that seeks to articulate the unknowable cause behind the partly-known observable universe is an expression of faith. It expresses a conviction that everything is ultimately random, or that ultimately everything is purposeful. Such language is never literal, and claims that we know there is a multiverse or that we know that a deity directly created our universe. Both ultimately express a conviction about the nature of the universe we see. Those who have had a mystical experience of the oneness of all things or of transcendence will incline in a particular direction (although often using very varied language to express their view), those who have experienced most strongly the disappointing randomness of it all will incline in another. Yet there is no language that we have that can describe that which we do not know. All of it – the language of God, the language of multiverse – is metaphor and symbolism.

The crux of the matter is this: How will you live in response to the overwhelming and awe-inspiring mystery of our existence? And to the extent that you choose to grasp at inadequate human language to articulate in prose a story about things we do not (and perhaps cannot) know, what symbols, metaphors and pictures will you choose? They will, however inadequately, tell us something about the universe, and will never give the whole story. But what the language you choose and story you tell expresses most clearly is something about you.