Intellectual Ancestors Part 2

Part 1 is here.




 In (I think) 1962 I was at a debate at the Oxford Union between a Christian whose name I forget and Professor Anthony Flew, a noted atheist who recently died a deist. The motion was along the lines of "This house believes that God exists". 


Flew was an impassioned speaker, filled, like Thomas Hardy, with anger at the imagined insouciance of a Deity who tolerated all the evil in the world. As his peroration, he raised his enpurpled face and eyes to Heaven (or more accurately the ceiling), shook his fist, and addressed God, 


"If you exist, I hate you. You are evil. The world is full of wickedness and grief and You do nothing!"


As a believer, I was filled with pity for the man, so brilliant a philosopher, and so unable to account for the discrepancy between the goodness and justice he craved and believed God did not care about.


St Anselm of Canterbury wrote,


I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this also I believe, –that unless I believed, I should not understand.


St Anselm also described Theology as Faith seeking understanding. For me, Flew's rage, the rage of the atheist, was and is the sign of a frustrated search for Faith. He was seeking understanding, asking God, even, to explain what he could not comprehend.


To believe in goodness is a sign of goodness, not of idealism. An ideal is an abstraction raised above human considerations, and can be used to justify killing, torture, enslavement and corruption of morality. (O Liberty, what wrongs are committed in thy name!) Idealists have been and are perpetrators of great evils and horrors in the world. Goodness is a Divine quality or attribute, and potentially within Mankind as the Creation of a good God. Flew wanted the world to be a good place, saw it was not and , erringly, though understandably, blamed God.


I think that his chances of Heaven are higher than those of a Bishop who errs, knowing better. 


God rest his soul!