Justified True Belief

(●) For fifty years he made the case that the believer, not the unbeliever, has to open the argument, and at eighty-one he said the argument had moved him. + Most people who argue about God on a Tuesday evening in a church hall are working, without knowing it, with tools Antony Flew made. The demand that a believer say what would count against his belief is one of them, and so is the move of answering "do you believe in God?" with "I have no belief either way, and the burden is yours." Two short pieces of writing, one of them barely three pages long, put both of those into general circulation and kept them there. He was the son of a Methodist minister who taught the New Testament for a living, he lost the faith of the house before he was fifteen, and he spent the next six decades as one of the most careful and most quoted philosophical atheists writing in English. He was also famously fair. He debated Christians for fifty years without once sneering at them, edited their essays into his own volumes, and told a BBC interviewer that he had never refuted C. S. Lewis, only failed to be convinced by him. Then, in the winter of 2004, at eighty-one, he said that he had come to believe there was a God after all. It was not a conversion to Christianity and he never claimed it was. He remained certain that the grave is the end of a person and that no God has spoken in history. What he had changed his mind about was narrower and, for that reason, harder to wave away: whether the universe and the first living thing in it are the sort of things that happen without a mind.

(●) 1923 AD: He was born in London to a Methodist minister who taught the New Testament for a living. + Antony Garrard Newton Flew was born in London on 11 February 1923. His father, Robert Newton Flew, was a Wesleyan Methodist minister and a working New Testament scholar who taught the New Testament at Wesley House, the Methodist theological college in Cambridge, from 1927, was its principal from 1937, and was elected president of the Methodist Conference in 1946. His mother was Winifred Garrard, whose surname her son carried in the middle of his own. This was not a household where religion sat quietly in the background on Sundays. It was the family trade, and the family stood near the top of it. He went to St Faith’s School in Cambridge and then boarded at Kingswood School in Bath, the school John Wesley founded for the sons of his preachers. So the boy who would spend his life asking Christians to say exactly what they meant had been raised in the middle of Christian scholarship, taught by Christians, and surrounded from birth by people who could answer him.

(●) c. 1938 AD: Somewhere before his fifteenth birthday the suffering he knew about convinced him there was no God, and he said nothing about it at home for years. + By his own later account he was an atheist before he was fifteen, and the reason was the problem of evil, which is the old objection that a God who could stop suffering and would want to stop it ought by now to have stopped it. He could not fit the suffering he knew about with a God who was both able and willing, so he let the belief go. And then he kept it to himself, and kept it well. He went on going to chapel with the rest of the school, and the secret held for something like eight years, until the word got out in January 1946 when he was nearly twenty-three. He also said that the world outside the school had a hand in it. His father had good German and church business on the Continent through the 1930s and took his son along, and the boy saw Germany under the Nazis at first hand: banners at the edge of small towns reading "Jews not wanted here", a notice at the door of a public library forbidding the loan of books to Jewish borrowers, ten thousand brown-shirted storm troopers on the march. That is Flew’s own telling of his childhood, given in the last book he published, and there is nobody left to check it against. What can be checked is that he never afterwards treated the problem of evil as a debating point. It was the thing that had happened to him.

(●) 1942 AD: The war taught him Japanese, sent him to Bletchley Park, and returned him to Oxford for Greats. + The war reached him before university did. Instead of going straight up he was put through the Japanese course at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and he was commissioned into Royal Air Force intelligence. He worked for the Inter-Services Topographical Department in Oxford, and in June 1944 he was posted to Bletchley Park, the country house where British code-breaking was done. The war over, he went to St John’s College, Oxford, and took a First in Literae Humaniores, the Oxford degree in Greek and Latin literature, ancient history and philosophy that everyone calls Greats, in 1947. He won the John Locke Scholarship in Mental Philosophy the following year and stayed on as a graduate student under Gilbert Ryle, the most influential Oxford philosopher of the day and the man who had just argued that the mind is not a ghost inside the machinery of the body. He also started turning up on Monday evenings at the Socratic Club, the Oxford society where Christians and their critics argued in front of each other, presided over from 1942 to 1954 by C. S. Lewis. Flew went as an unbeliever and stayed a regular. Long afterwards a BBC interviewer asked him whether he had refuted Lewis’s case for Christianity, and he answered that he had not: he had simply not found sufficient reason to believe it. He called Lewis the most effective Christian apologist of the later twentieth century, and he meant it.

(●) 1950 AD: A thousand-word paper called "Theology and Falsification", worked up from one he read at the Oxford Socratic Club, set the terms of the argument for the next fifty years. + The paper runs to about a thousand words, which is roughly three printed pages, short enough for a young man to read to a room and sit down again. By Flew’s own account it grew out of a paper he had read to the Socratic Club, and it was printed in Oxford as the first item in the first issue of a short-lived undergraduate magazine called University. A short-lived student magazine, a first issue, a thousand words: that should have been the end of it. Instead it was picked up for New Essays in Philosophical Theology, the 1955 collection Flew edited with Alasdair MacIntyre, where it appeared as a symposium, which in a philosophy book means one short piece with the replies to it printed alongside, in this case from R. M. Hare and Basil Mitchell. Flew himself later counted at least forty further reprintings and translations into German, Italian, Spanish, Danish, Welsh, Finnish and Slovak. It is routinely described as the most reprinted philosophical paper of the second half of the twentieth century. Whether or not the superlative can be proved, a school pupil sitting a religious studies paper in England today will still meet Flew’s two explorers and their invisible gardener (T1).

(●) 1954 AD: Nearly thirty years of chairs at Keele, Calgary and Reading made him the best known philosophical atheist writing in English. + He lectured in moral philosophy at Aberdeen from 1950, and in 1954, at thirty-one, he took the chair of philosophy at the University College of North Staffordshire. A chair, in a British university, is the senior professorship in a subject, the post the whole department is built around. The college was a new foundation that became the University of Keele in 1962, and he stayed seventeen years. A year at Calgary followed, and then the chair at the University of Reading from 1973 until he retired early in 1983 and went on teaching part time at York University in Toronto. He had married Annis Donnison in 1952, and they had two daughters. The books came steadily, and they were not all about God. There was a working scholar’s book on the philosopher he loved best, Hume’s Philosophy of Belief (1961). There was the systematic case against Christian theism, God and Philosophy (1966), which took the arguments for it one at a time and found each of them wanting. The Presumption of Atheism (1976) argued about who has to speak first (T2), and The Logic of Mortality (1987), delivered as his Gifford Lectures at St Andrews, argued that talk of surviving your own death does not add up (T3). Alongside all of that ran a second career in social and political philosophy, where he was a committed libertarian, which meant in his case a man who held that liberty and enforced equality pull against each other, and who wrote against the second of them in book after book and in pamphlets for the free-market institutes. And there was a third career in psychical research, the attempt to test claims about telepathy and about survival of death under proper laboratory conditions, where he was the rare sceptic who took the claims seriously enough to ask how a proper experiment would have to be designed, and who wrote a book about it in 1953. He was, in short, a professional. In 1985 the American sceptics’ body CSICOP, now the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, gave him its In Praise of Reason award, its highest honour, and nobody on either side of the argument thought it undeserved.

(●) 1985 AD: He argued the resurrection with Gary Habermas at Liberty University, lost on the judges’ cards, and gained a friend for the rest of his life. + Something like three thousand people came, by the accounts that have come down. Flew took the case against the bodily resurrection of Jesus, and Gary Habermas, a philosopher at Liberty University who had spent his career on the historical evidence for it, took the case for. Two panels sat in judgment on it, one marking the substance and the other the technique. Of the five philosophers who scored the content, four gave the evening to Habermas and the fifth called it a draw. The five professional debate judges, who were marking how the arguing was done rather than who was right, made it Habermas by three votes to two. The record was published in 1987 as Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? The Resurrection Debate. What matters more is what the evening started. Flew and Habermas kept writing to each other for the next twenty-five years, argued in print again, and became friends. When Flew changed his mind in 2004 it was Habermas he told, and it was the interview the two of them did together that put the news into the world.

(●) 2004 AD: At eighty-one he said the argument had led him to a God after all, a maker who has never spoken, and he held to that until his death six years later. + It came out in pieces through 2004, a letter here and a video there, rather than in any one announcement. The letter ran in Philosophy Now, and it said that a naturalistic account of the first reproducing organism had become inordinately hard even to start, and that his own 1966 book God and Philosophy should now be treated as a historical relic. Then came the video, a filmed panel discussion held in New York that May under the title Has Science Discovered God? and released on 9 December. The Habermas interview appeared in the journal Philosophia Christi that winter. The Associated Press had the story the same week the video went out, and within days the man the newspapers called the world’s most notorious atheist was on the front pages of religion sections everywhere. In 2007 came There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, written with Roy Abraham Varghese. It was immediately controversial, and the controversy was not only about the argument. A profile in the New York Times Magazine that November reported that Flew, then eighty-four, could not recall names and ideas central to the book, and suggested Varghese had done more than help. Flew answered that his name was on the book, that it represented exactly his opinions, and that he had needed someone to do the actual writing because of his age. Letters he had written before the book appeared, published after his death by one of his correspondents, set out its shape in his own hand, and its conclusion too: a God who made the world and has taken no part in it since, which is what the word deism means (T5). He died at Reading on 8 April 2010, aged eighty-seven, after several years of failing memory. He had not become a Christian and had never said he was one.

What He Taught

(T1) A claim that no possible event could count against has quietly stopped saying anything about the world. + Picture a man who tells you the neighbourhood has a night watchman. You sit up with him to watch. Nobody comes. He says the watchman is very quiet. You put flour on the path; no footprints. He says the watchman does not leave footprints. You set a camera; nothing. He says the watchman does not show on film. At some point you want to ask him what is left of the claim he started with, because a watchman who cannot be seen, heard, photographed or tracked is doing nothing that distinguishes him from no watchman at all. That is Flew’s argument, and he made it with a story he borrowed and sharpened from the Cambridge philosopher John Wisdom, whose article "Gods" had run in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society for 1944 to 1945. Two explorers find a clearing in the jungle with flowers growing among the weeds. One says a gardener must tend it. They camp and watch, and no gardener appears. They put up an electric fence and patrol with bloodhounds, and nothing is caught, shocked or scented. The believer keeps the claim by adding to it: the gardener is invisible, intangible, and gives no scent or sound. And the sceptic finally asks how such a gardener differs from an imaginary one, or from none. The technical name for the challenge is falsification. To falsify a claim is to say what would show it false, and the test asks a claim to name in advance the thing that would sink it. The test was Karl Popper’s, the philosopher of science who used it to mark real science off from the theories that explain everything and forbid nothing, and Flew’s move was simply to turn it round and point it at theology. His point was that a genuine statement about how things are always rules something out. "It will rain tomorrow" rules out a dry tomorrow, which is exactly why it tells you to take a coat. So he put a question to believers rather than an argument: what would have to happen, or to have happened, for you to give up saying that God exists and loves us? A child dying of cancer does not do it, because the believer says God’s love is not like human love. Flew’s worry was that qualification after qualification is not a defence of the claim but a slow dismantling of it, and that the believer may never notice the moment when there is nothing left to be true.

(Q) "A fine brash hypothesis may thus be killed by inches, the death by a thousand qualifications." + Source: Antony Flew, "Theology and Falsification" (1950), his opening statement in the symposium of that name in New Essays in Philosophical Theology, ed. Antony Flew and Alasdair MacIntyre (SCM Press, 1955), pages 96 to 99. The sentence that gave the whole debate its catchphrase. Flew’s charge is not that the believer says something false; it is that the believer, by qualifying, may end up saying nothing at all, and may do it without noticing (T1).

(T2) Until someone gives a reason to believe in God, the reasonable place to stand is unbelief. + A courtroom does not begin with the jury half convinced. It begins with the accused innocent, and the prosecution has to move them off that starting point. Flew took that arrangement and applied it to the argument about God. The debate, he said, should begin from what he called the presumption of atheism: the theist has to speak first, and until he has produced sufficient reason, nobody is obliged to believe anything. To make it work he had to change what one word meant, and he said so openly. In ordinary English an atheist is someone who says there is no God. Flew wanted the letter a at the front of the word, which comes from the Greek, read the way it is read in "amoral" or "asymmetrical", where it marks an absence rather than an opposite. An amoral man is not a man who has taken a stand against morality; he is a man in whom the question never arises. On that reading an atheist is not someone who denies God; an atheist is anyone who is not a theist. He labelled the two positions positive atheism and negative atheism, and it is negative atheism that gets the free starting position, because there is nothing there to defend. He added a second stage that is often forgotten and that he thought the more important of the two. Before you can ask whether God exists, he said, the believer has to show that the word "God" has been given a meaning that some actual being could satisfy. With the Loch Ness monster you know what you are looking for before the boats go out: a large animal living in one particular lake, the sort of thing a sonar sweep either finds or fails to find. With God, Flew said, you cannot assume as much. And a theology that spends its time working out how God can know tomorrow’s choices in advance and still leave a man free has quietly assumed there is a coherent something there for the knowledge and the power and the goodness to belong to, which is the very point in question.

(Q) "In this interpretation an atheist becomes: not someone who positively asserts the non-existence of God; but someone who is simply not a theist." + Source: Antony Flew, "The Presumption of Atheism," first printed in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy 2:1 (1972), and reprinted as the title essay of The Presumption of Atheism, and Other Philosophical Essays on God, Freedom and Immortality (Elek for Pemberton, 1976), opening section. The redefinition that half the internet now takes for granted, printed in the essay that introduced it. Flew was candid that this was not established usage and that he was proposing a change (T2).

(T3) A person is a living human being, so nothing that outlasts the body could be the same person. + Ask someone to point at a person and they point at a body. The words we use for people, "you", "I", "the woman in the blue coat", pick out things you can see, touch, hear and talk to. Flew built an argument on that plain observation and held it his whole life, including after 2004. If person-words are words for flesh-and-blood creatures, then "Flew survived his death" is either self-contradictory or false, and the burden falls on whoever wants to say otherwise to explain how any surviving thing could be identified as the same man. He worked through the standard answers one at a time, and he had a name ready for each of them. The reconstitutionist says that God will one day gather up the scattered material and put the body back together, and Flew asked why a reassembled duplicate would be you rather than a copy of you, the way a bombed church raised again out of its own salvaged stones is a reconstruction of the church and not the church that stood. The astral-body view says that something subtle and shadowy walks away from the corpse, and he asked what makes that wisp the man rather than a ghost of him. The Platonic and Cartesian view, which goes back to Plato and got its modern shape from Descartes, says that the real person is an immaterial soul wearing a body for a while and then setting it down, and Flew thought that got the ordinary meaning of the word "person" exactly backwards. His own position he called the Aristotelian view of man: we are mortal creatures of flesh and blood. Christians should notice which doctrine this attacks and which it leaves standing. Flew’s target is the immortality of a naturally deathless soul, the Greek idea that the real you simply carries on. It is not the Christian hope, which is the resurrection of the body: not survival but the raising of the dead person, body and all, by an act of God. Flew knew the difference perfectly well, and he argued against the resurrection separately and on historical grounds, which is what the 1985 debate with Habermas was about.

(Q) "I don’t want a future life. I want to be dead when I’m dead and that’s an end to it." + Source: Stuart Wavell, "In the beginning there was something," an interview with Flew in The Sunday Times, 19 December 2004. Said within days of the announcement that he had come to believe in God, and said with some irritation, when the interviewer suggested he might be hoping for an afterlife or for a God who was kind. The change of mind never touched this (T3).

(T4) Darwin explains how living things changed, not how the first living thing arrived. + Flew was never impressed by an argument for God that ran on a gap in current knowledge, and he said so for fifty years. That move has a name, the God of the gaps: whatever the laboratories have not explained yet is handed to God, and the room left for God shrinks with every issue of every journal. What changed in Flew was not the standard but what he had come to think the problem was. Darwin explains how living things that already reproduce get better at living. He does not explain the first thing that reproduced, because natural selection has nothing to work on until copying with variation is already happening. That first step is what biologists call abiogenesis, life from non-life, and Flew concluded in his eighties that the more was known about the machinery inside a cell, the further off any account of it looked. The particular thing that struck him was DNA. A strand of DNA is not just complicated the way a snowdrift is complicated. It is a coded instruction set that a cell reads, and reading it requires other machinery that the code itself specifies. Instructions are no use without something able to read them, and a reader is no use with nothing to read, so on this account the code and the reader have to arrive together or neither of them works at all. Flew said in the 2004 video that the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements needed to produce life had shown him that intelligence must have been involved in getting those elements to work together. He kept the argument modest, and the modesty is part of the claim. He was not offering a proof, and he was not signing up to the wider programme of the American intelligent-design movement, which holds that design in living things can be detected by the methods of science. He was saying something smaller and harder to wave off: that of the explanations on the table, a mind was now the one he found least unreasonable, and that he had reached seventy without thinking so.

(Q) "It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism." + Source: Antony Flew, "Letter from Antony Flew on Darwinism and Theology," Philosophy Now, issue 47 (August and September 2004). The first public sign, printed in a philosophy magazine months before the news broke, that the argument had taken him somewhere new. In the same letter he called his own God and Philosophy a historical relic and repeated the rule he had followed since Oxford: we must follow the argument wherever it leads (T4).

(T5) A mind lies behind the order of the world, and it has said nothing since. + When the story reached the newspapers a great many Christians read it as a conversion, and it was not one. Flew was careful, and being careful about exactly what a claim does and does not include was the thing he had done all his life. What he affirmed was deism, and the word needs teaching, because it looks like a smaller version of Christianity and is not. A deist holds that a mind is behind the world’s order and its origin, and that this mind has done nothing since: no covenant, no prophets, no incarnation, no answered prayer. Think of a man who builds a clock, sets it going, and never comes back into the room. Thomas Jefferson was a deist in roughly this sense, and Flew told Habermas that a deism of the sort Jefferson advocated was what he would accept. The God he described was the God of Aristotle, and he took over the whole list of attributes from the philosopher David Conway, who had lately argued the Aristotelian case afresh and whom Flew named among the writers who had persuaded him. An attribute is simply a property a thing has, and Conway’s list runs to seven: immutability, which is not changing; immateriality, not being made of matter; omnipotence, being able to do anything that can be done; omniscience, knowing everything there is to know; oneness or indivisibility, being one thing and having no parts to come apart; perfect goodness; and necessary existence, which means being the sort of thing that could not have failed to be there. And he was just as clear about what he still denied. There is no revelation, which is to say that no book anywhere carries God’s word, and no afterlife waits at the end of anybody (T3). He had told Habermas flatly that this God is not the source of good and has no dealings with individual human beings. That is hard to square with the perfect goodness sitting in the list he had borrowed, and he never did square it. What the deism did do for him was dissolve the question that had made him an atheist at fourteen, because a maker who takes no interest in human affairs cannot be charged with neglecting them. It is a real and enormous distance from the Christian claim, and Flew never pretended otherwise.

(Q) "I now believe that the universe was brought into existence by an infinite Intelligence. I believe that this universe’s intricate laws manifest what scientists have called the Mind of God. I believe that life and reproduction originate in a divine Source." + Source: Antony Flew with Roy Abraham Varghese, There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind (HarperOne, 2007), page 88, opening the chapter where he lays out his own view. Three sentences, and every one of them says less than a Christian creed says. Notice what is not in the list: no promise, no forgiveness, no rising from the dead, no name (T5).

(Q) "In fact, I have to say here that Bishop Wright presents by far the best case for accepting Christian belief that I have ever seen." + Source: Antony Flew with Roy Abraham Varghese, There Is a God (HarperOne, 2007), introduction, where Flew describes Appendix B, the dialogue on Jesus in which the New Testament historian N. T. Wright, then bishop of Durham, sets out the case for the resurrection. Flew gave a Christian scholar the last word in his own book, said the case was the strongest he had met, and remained unpersuaded. That is the whole man in one sentence, and it is why Christian philosophers had spent fifty years finding him worth answering.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) The falsification challenge got answered in the same volume, and the answers turned into a literature. + Flew did something unusual with his own attack: he printed the replies alongside it. In New Essays in Philosophical Theology his three pages are followed by R. M. Hare and then by Basil Mitchell, with a short reply from Flew at the end, and the four pieces together are still what students are given. Hare answered with a story about a lunatic who is convinced that all dons, which is what Oxford calls the men who teach there, want to murder him. His friends introduce him to don after mild, respectable don, and every meeting only confirms him in it: that was their diabolical cunning, and they are plotting against him the whole time. Hare’s word for such a conviction was a blik, an unfalsifiable way of taking the world that sits underneath the evidence rather than resting on it, and he argued that everyone has bliks and that we cannot get on without them. Flew thought this conceded his case rather than answering it, and he was probably right: if religious belief is a blik it is not a claim about how things are. Mitchell’s reply is the one Christians have kept. During the war, he said, a partisan in an occupied country meets a Stranger one night who impresses him deeply and tells him he is on the resistance’s side, indeed that he is in command of it. Afterwards the partisan sees the Stranger sometimes helping the resistance and sometimes in police uniform handing patriots over. He does not pretend the second sort of evening is nothing. He says he trusts the man, and he knows the trust is costing him something. Mitchell’s point answers Flew exactly: the believer does count the evidence against, and refuses to let it be decisive, and that is a recognisable and reasonable way for a person to treat someone he has grounds to trust. John Hick then added a third route, arguing that Christian claims are verifiable in principle even if not falsifiable now, because if the promises are true the believer will know it afterwards and if they are false nobody will ever be around to find out.

(†) The presumption of atheism drew the reply that a claim is a claim, whoever makes it. + Two lines of answer came back, and both of them shaped the philosophy of religion that followed. The first went after the redefinition. William Lane Craig and others argued that if "atheist" is stretched to cover anyone who is not a theist, then it covers babies, dogs and people who have never considered the question, and the word has been emptied out to win the argument before it starts. Someone who actually says there is no God has made a claim about reality and owes reasons for it exactly as the theist does. Flew’s courtroom picture cuts the other way too: the presumption of innocence is a rule about what a court may do to a defendant, not a discovery that defendants are usually innocent, and nothing about it tells you where the truth lies. The second answer went deeper, and it came from Alvin Plantinga. Flew had assumed that a belief is rational only if it is inferred from other beliefs that support it, an assumption philosophers call evidentialism, and Plantinga argued that a great many of the things we hold most firmly are not like that at all. Your belief that other people have minds, that the world did not begin five minutes ago, that you had breakfast this morning: none of these is inferred from anything, and all of them are perfectly rational. Plantinga called such beliefs properly basic, and argued that belief in God can belong in the same class, formed directly in a person who is functioning as they were made to function. Alongside this, Richard Swinburne set about doing the very thing Flew had demanded, and built a cumulative case for theism piece by piece: no single piece settles the matter, and the pieces taken together are meant to make God more likely than not, which is what a probabilistic case is. Between them, the man who insisted the theist must speak first got two generations of theists who did.

(†) The change of mind was won by natural theology, and Christians who claimed more than that were corrected by Flew himself. + Natural theology is the attempt to reach conclusions about God from the world itself, without appealing to any revelation: the order of the cosmos, the origin of life, and the fine-tuning of the constants, which is the observation that the numbers fixing how physics works sit in the narrow band that lets anything be alive at all. Revealed theology begins somewhere else, with what God is said to have said. Flew moved on natural theology alone, and he moved because of arguments Christians had gone on making through the decades when the fashion was against them. Habermas was the friend who got the news first and the one Flew trusted to publish it. Their interview in Philosophia Christi in the winter of 2004 is the primary document for the whole business, and it is careful, unexcited, and full of Flew’s own qualifications. When enthusiastic reports made him sound like a convert, he corrected them; when sceptical reports made him sound senile, he answered those too. The correcting cut in the useful direction for anyone doing apologetics. A change of mind is worth what its reasons are worth, and Flew’s reasons took him precisely as far as a designing intelligence and no further. That is what natural theology can deliver, and Christians have always said as much. Paul at Athens told his hearers that God made men to seek him and feel their way toward him (Acts 17:27), which is a description of exactly the search Flew made, and Romans says the invisible attributes of God have been clearly perceived in the things that have been made (Romans 1:20). Neither passage says the search arrives at the manger.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: a God who speaks, a grave that opens, and a Father who loves. + Flew ended as a deist, and the distance between a deist and a Christian is not a matter of degree. Three things divide them, and he named all three himself. - A God who speaks. Flew’s intelligence made the world and then said nothing. The whole Bible is the record of the opposite: "Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son" (Hebrews 1:1-2). Christianity is not the claim that a mind lies behind the laws of nature. It is the claim that this mind has spoken, and finally in a person: "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). - A grave that opens. He held to the end that death ends the person (T3), and he argued the historical case against the resurrection in print for decades. Christians cannot treat that as a detail, because Paul does not: "And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins" (1 Corinthians 15:17). The Christian answer to Flew’s argument about person-words is not that a ghost survives. It is that God raises the dead, body and all. - A Father who loves. The God Flew accepted was not the source of moral good and took no interest in human affairs, and he said that this was what let him set the problem of evil aside. The gospel does not set it aside. It answers it by claiming that God entered the suffering himself: "In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him" (1 John 4:9). The boy at Kingswood who could not square a good God with the evil he had seen in Germany was asking a real question, and it is the question the cross exists to answer. There is a fair way to summarise him. He asked the question a believer most needs to be able to answer, and he asked it courteously for sixty years. He then followed his own rule far enough that, at eighty-one, people who had spent decades praising him for that very rule began explaining in print that he must be losing his memory. He got further, on argument alone, than most people ever get. And he stopped where reason without revelation always stops.