A response (not quite a reply) to

GOD and the BIG BANG

by

Antony Flew

.(a topped and tailed letter to him, in actual fact)

[On 21.8.04 I should like to say that the following now strikes me as dogmatic, and before the year is out I hope I shall be able to edit it into reasonableness.]

The first thing I want to say is that not only the idea of Hell but the whole complex of Judeo-Christian-Islamic ideas about God are wrong, that they arise out of a gigantic misunderstanding and that the penny about this will, I believe, drop into the general consciousness in the next twenty or so years. In other words, you are flogging a dead horse. Or in a phrase I remember from Hesse’s Glasperlenspiel, “Du ermüdest dich, Josef”. I am trying to concoct a science fiction family of films in which this penny drops dramatically in 2025, when I shall be dead and so shan’t experience being refuted, but that is only a way of putting the idea across --- in fact, there won’t be any need for science fiction intervention: the penny will just drop.

Until fairly recently I did have hopes of a kind of survival-of-the-spirit that could constitute a survival of me, and I typified this in one particular survival fantasy --- that in a future state of existence my spiritual self could meet and recognise Scholti, enabling me to ask him if he had conducted the wonderful performance of Fidelio that I heard in Wupperthal in 1946 (from his obituary it appeared that he could well have done). So it must have been after his death in 1997 that I began to pay attention to the evidence of neurology, and had to accept that there was no question of a disembodied spirit being able to remember anything about its previous life.

A friend whose views on such matters I respect pointed out, quite a few years ago, that a near death experience is not a death experience, and so nothing can be inferred from this famous bright light as to a possible experience of it after death. On the other hand, there seems to be evidence, if you are right, that it could be a brain dead experience, remembered after resuscitation. If that turned out to be the case I could perhaps revert to memory-after-death fantasies of my own, but I really don’t want to be tempted to. I expressed my current belief in something called Iris and Other Minds, which I put on my www.wittgenstein.co.uk internet site, written in anticipation of Iris’s death. In that I propounded that consciousness could survive, but that it could not take any memory with it of its previous life.

Friends I sent offprints of this to could not understand it. To them, consciousness without memory of individual life could only mean a kind of dissolving into a consciousness soup, an idea I find absolutely abhorrent. Not surprisingly, I could not offer them any proof of, or even argument for, my view, but it is reinforced for me every time I focus my consciousness on anything whatever: this consciousness, if it survives at all, will be this consciousness and not some other consciousness, and its individuality in no way depends on any kind of memory-carry-over. The same will apply if this is interpreted in a context of reincarnation. Claims of memories of previous lives are an illusion. For the sake of friends who tell me about such things, I have to admit that their beliefs are meaningful as fantasies. It is not meaningless to imagine that this life is being experienced by a consciousness that had experienced that one, but once day dreaming is over it is pointless to make an assertion of this, let alone to draw conclusions about the moral deserts of this life and that. Having sorted that out to my own satisfaction if no-one else’s, I have no inclination to welcome evidence about brain-death consciousness, and it would take an awful lot of it to make me change my mind.

Similarly, I have no desire to look out for evidence of the improbability of our evolution as self-conscious beings in order to bolster the idea of a designing God who decides that this pattern should be followed rather than that. The universe is large enough for the most improbable state of affairs to have come about in some corner of it, and so evidence of the contingent impossibility of our evolution would be needed to make the creationist case, and I cannot imagine what kind of evidence that could be. I have to admit that I am not even sure what kind of concept contingent impossibility is, but that is no problem because it would be for creationists to provide it with a meaning. Perhaps one could agree that anything so improbable that more than a dozen whole universes would be needed for it to come about by chance deserved to be called contingently impossible.

I am much impressed by the insight that your friend Rui Zhu prompted in you. One must test any theological idea as if one came fresh to it, and not give it the benefit of the prejudices of one’s upbringing. So I will try to give an outline of my anti-theological views while only a few people share them, because as you will see they run a risk that in the course of time they could degenerate into theological dogmas of their own, needing a Rui Zhu warning on every packet. Ti’en forbid! But nothing I can do can stop what seems to have become a natural process.

All such dogmas, this critique of theology goes, have grown up after the death of some innovator whose followers, and their followers in turn, have misunderstood the original message. The original innovator will have propounded nothing but the truth. Now there is one brass knob of my own that I should like to add to this straightforward story, namely that these innovators will have spoken in the idiom of their own time, so that if one could time travel back and listen to their actual words, one might hear turns of phrase that in one’s own time one would find anthropomorphic or even superstitious. In contrast, I am sure, if any such innovator were speaking now, he or she would be using language that could be recognised and accepted by, let us say, Wittgenstein, Ayer, Berlin and Lakatos, and equally by (though I am out of touch and don’t know whom precisely to specify) their contemporary successors.

Propounding ‘nothing but the truth’ is not, however, propounding, as requirements for belief, truths that can be perverted by later generations into falsehoods. The aim of innovators of the kind I am considering has been to enable people to be so confident of their inner identity that they have no need of beliefs about what might or might not be the case, and have no anxieties about what will follow their deaths; and not because they have been reassured that ‘their future is secure’ but because they have no focus upon their future. If one is confident in one’s consciousness one has no need of reassurance as to how or whether one’s consciousness will continue. After all, if memory ceases at death one simply won’t know the difference. And if, in one’s life, one is fulfilled and contented, one simply won’t mind not knowing the difference.

As to the views of one Robert Lane Craig, whom you quote in your letter, I hope it is clear from the above what my answer will be: being, as I have called it, confident in one’s own identity has nothing to do with accepting God’s love unless that is how one chooses to express matters; and people who refuse to speak in those terms are in no way thereby ‘rejecting God’s love’. There will always be people who find it natural to call upon God as a person (Berlin said he did so in moments of stress, though only in Russian) but when, as I put it, ‘the penny has dropped’, they will find they no longer have any compulsion to urge their way of expressing themselves on other people.

Which brings me to the Big Bang and whether it “popped into existence without a cause”. The origin of the Big Bang can only be the energy partially turned into matter in a manner which we call the Big Bang, and the question is whether that process can be said to have had a cause; that is, whether some other entity or event was needed to ‘trigger’ the change from energy into matter. Very well: suppose astrophysicists do find evidence that leads them to talk of such a cause. The only thing that gives an impression that this discovery could argue for creationism is the habit of mind of arguing a priori that there must be a cause, and of using this a priori requirement to specify the characteristics that a cause must have.

All that is appropriate is to try to find out, scientifically or otherwise, but not by a priori argument, what the Big Bang and, if evidence suggests this, its cause is actually like. And if the evidence is that it did indeed just pop into existence, it is still a matter of enormous human interest to know what happened; while if the evidence suggests a cause, that too will be a matter of enormous human interest. Either way, “finding out” is the catchword, and if there are any non-scientific ways of finding out they must at least be empirical. Attempts to establish in advance what qualities the cause ought to have are meaningless.

In something I hope to publish soon called Born under the Pleiades I say what I can about some sixty years of search and experience upon this point. Here I can only express myself briefly and negatively (in the spirit of another Dionysius whom I encountered in lectures at Hamburg University in the Summer Semester of 1948). My first observation is that the universe’s origin is clearly also the origin of our own lives, and it seems appropriate that we should feel grateful for this. In so doing, there is no call on us whatever to personify what we feel gratitude towards, or to give any theological account of the significance of our gratitude. Gratitude is something immediate and direct.

Second is a conviction rather than an observation, and I assert it more tentatively. It is that the universe’s origin is also the origin of our moral sensitivity. We gain moral stamina from it, the ability to do what we ought in difficult and sometimes heroic circumstances. What is not entailed in this conviction is that any command flows from the origin to the effect that this and this must always be done and that and that never done. Individual ‘innovators’ may well, understandably and properly, have proclaimed such commands for our guidance, on their own responsibility and of their own initiative, and above all for their own time. Injunctions of the form ‘x is always but y never to be done’ are not part of the essence of moral obligation, which, like gratitude, is something immediate and direct. Nor, of course, does it follow that when this point is understood no obligation holds and everything can be left hanging out and relative.

Iris Murdoch went to great pains to say something along these lines in her book on Morals (published in 1992 and read by me early in 1993, when I had a long correspondence with her about it, partially recorded in Pleiades). I tried to persuade her that her defence of the Good was too abstract. When one is dealing with something in comparison with which the eruption of a volcano is a mere spark, one should not over-conceptualise. Her account, I said, lacked an explanation of the reality that was in question.

This reality is so magnificent and majestic that it has no need of the attributes given it by religious people. Personality attributes, in particular, are gratuitous, however understandable. They arise, I believe, from the manner in which the many people I have called innovators have, in their various times, expressed themselves, and from the ways they have been viewed by the people who have had the good fortune to know them, and then by people who have had to rely on memory and legend. My main proposition can be put like this: the universe’s origin has indeed qualities over and above those that are scientifically discoverable, and these qualities reverberate within our consciousness. Naturally, they reverberate more with some people than with others, and most of all with the people I call innovators. The most significant of these invoke awe in us, even when we disagree violently with what we take to have been their assertions.

My next remark is about a concept that you call revelation. It is understandable that you should take this concept to characterise one family of theistic doctrines. I reject it absolutely, and would do so whatever doctrines it played a part in. What is pernicious about it is that it is, so to speak, self defining: a Deity resides in splendour and from time to time allows information to trickle out about its nature. No, not at all: people over the millennia sense intimations and do their best to transmit them, but the only valid transmission is one that enables its recipients to sense intimations for themselves. This is not a case of X revealing X, but of people learning to apprehend something to which neither description nor (erst recht!) denoting name is appropriate.

Iris, in her account of the Good, has no place for Divine judgement, and you may fear that in declaring that her Good has overwhelmingly more reality than she allows it, I am making room to bring in judgement myself. Well --- if our world persists in mismanaging itself and everything goes for a Burton, its last observers might understandably call that a judgement, but it would not be coming from an entity which finds itself displeased with us. Going for a Burton is something that is liable to happen to worlds that mismanage themselves.

Along with Divine judgement, another theological concept that needs to go is that of prophecy. I can’t give a scientific account of my views here and I risk sounding cuckoo, but the event that blew away prophecy for me was the fall of the Berlin wall. I could not resist comparing it with the story of the walls of Jericho. That, in round numbers, was written some six hundred years after the supposed event and with no intention whatever of decribing something two and a half thousand years away in the future. But if, in some way I cannot explain, events of our time led a Jew (who for good measure had witnessed the capture of Jerusalem) to pen a description of such extreme factual inaccuracy and yet such emotional appositeness, how inaccurate are the passages in various scriptures that do put themselves forward as prophecies liable to be? Of course, a sufficient psychological explanation could be a wish to transform the fall of Jerusalem into a victory, but as a television witness of the fall of our wall and a real witness of the damnable thing itself a few years earlier, I cannot give up my hunch; and if it has no possible foundation it is still, as a mere analogy, a warning to people who are tempted to pay respect to quasi-prophetic scriptural passages, that there is nothing to do with them but wait and see what actually happens.

That is simply a sketch of what I believe about the questions your paper raises. I don’t pretend it constitutes any kind of serious argument. Thank you for giving me an excuse to let my hair down at least.