Antony Flew

I posted this on the Oklahoma Atheists board on December 12th. I've made a couple of changes for posting it here.

A post on the HBList mentions Antony Flew: rather dismissively, due to Flew's being a British modernist philospher - hardly someone who could be expected to really stand up for atheism - or anything else, for that matter. Plus, it seems he wrote an article on Ayn Rand's ethics which supposedly mangled her ideas.

But the post also included commentary on the current states of physics and biology, which I thought some visitors to this board might find interesting. Unfortunately, I'm not at liberty to cut and paste the entire original post here, due to the rules of the list, so I'll have to try my best to summarize it.

Basically, after mentioning Flew, the author describes what he sees as current attempts to import creationism into biology, mainly by watering down the mysticism and attempting to misdirect by misapplying theories outside their proper context. Visitors to this board are familiar with the attempt to establish "intelligent design" as a valid theory in biology, both on the political level and on the academic level.

He then asks whether a similar process occured in the field of physics and basically the answer is yes, only in physics it was Buddhism that was the flavor of mysticism being smuggled in. Unfortunately the attempt seems to have been a success.

None of this would be possible, of course, without the self-destruction of modernist philosphy, which has left a vacuum which the religionists of every flavor are eager to exploit. An earlier posting on this list lays out a disturbing progression: a philosophy of skeptism will always lead to a resurgence of irrationalism, paving the way for mysticism, culminating in nihilism and the destruction made possible by an ethics of sacrifice. If it sounds like I'm saying that it was ultimately philosophers such as David Hume who made it possible for things like the Taliban, that's what I'm saying. This is how the Dark Ages came about: observe the progression from the neo-Platonists to Augustine and Tertullian.

The only thing that can keep this from happening is to uphold Reason. The only philosphers that I see doing that today are the Objectivists.