Flew in from the cuckoo's nest

Recently I heard that Anthony Flew has renounced his atheism and become a Theist. He is agnostic about revelation and so he's not a Christian or a Muslim or a Jew. I have a slight claim to fame in that once upon a time I worked with his daughter .. anyway ...This interview is very interesting in unpicking some of the issues about beliving in God from a philosophical pov.
What I'm delighted to find is someone articulating something which I have found interesting and sometimes frustrating; that atheists tend to use an argument about evil negating God when actually the problem only exists if there is a God conceived of in fairly Christian terms, Iow they are arguing against God on the basis of something that is only possible in respect of a belief in God; otherwise there is no such thing as evil in the way they conceive. The term is only meaningful in a theistic context. This snippet of dialogue hints how ...
HABERMAS: In God and Philosophy, and in many other places in our discussions, too, it seems that your primary motivation for rejecting theistic arguments used to be the problem of evil. In terms of your new belief in God, how do you now conceptualise God’s relationship to the reality of evil in the world?
FLEW: Well, absent revelation, why should we perceive anything as objectively evil? The problem of evil is a problem only for Christians. For Muslims everything which human beings perceive as evil, just as much as everything we perceive as good, has to be obediently accepted as produced by the will of Allah. I suppose that the moment when, as a schoolboy of fifteen years, it first appeared to me that the thesis that the universe was created and is sustained by a Being of infinite power and goodness is flatly incompatible with the occurrence of massive undeniable and undenied evils in that universe, was the first step towards my future career as a philosopher! It was, of course, very much later that I learned of the philosophical identification of goodness with existence!
There are other things that Flew has to say that I think we should take on board: " I think those who want to speak about an afterlife have got to meet the difficulty of formulating a concept of an incorporeal person." Though this in fact makes room for Resurrection. I thinkm that Resurrection may well make far more sense in a culture where belief in an afterlife [presumably the floaty diembodied kind belived on spirtualists] is waning and there is an increasing sense of the bodiliness of human being. Of course Resurrection only works theistically, automatic immortality ain't on the menu in such a world. I've been saying for a number of years that my position as a Resurrection-believing Christian is far closer to the atheist position on afterlife than the popular mind realises.

For such a view NDE's [oh sorry; 'near death experiences'] can be interpreted as problematic. Listen in on how Flew handles it [and it is an issue for Christian orthodoxy too since a lot of NDE testimony is problematic for us].
HABERMAS: Actually you have also written to me that these near death experiences “certainly constitute impressive evidence for the possibility of the occurrence of human consciousness independent of any occurrences in the human brain.” (26)
FLEW: When I came to consider what seemed to me the most impressive of these near death cases I asked myself what is the traditional first question to ask about “psychic” phenomena. It is, “When, where, and by whom were the phenomena first reported?” Some people seem to confuse near death experiences with after death experiences. Where any such near death experiences become relevant to the question of a future life is when and only when they appear to show “the occurrence of human consciousness independent of any occurrences in the human brain.”

On a different tack, he has some interesting things to say in respect of Islam, and I think there is quite a lot to agree with in this: As for Islam, it is, I think, best described in a Marxian way as the uniting and justifying ideology of Arab imperialism. Between the New Testament and the Qur’an there is (as it is customary to say when making such comparisons) no comparison. Whereas markets can be found for books on reading the Bible as literature, to read the Qur’an is a penance rather than a pleasure. There is no order or development in its subject matter. All the chapters (the suras) are arranged in order of their length, with the longest at the beginning. However, since the Qur’an consists in a collection of bits and pieces of putative revelation delivered to the prophet Mohammad by the Archangel Gabriel in classical Arab on many separate but unknown occasions, it is difficult to suggest any superior principle of organization.
It's hard to deny the comparison, Flew is not by any means saying nice things about the NT, in context he is pretty unhappy with that as well. He is clearly still interested in the issues of how religions may calim merciful and compassionate views of God yet be so adamant about hell...
One point about the editing of the Qur’an is rarely made although it would appear to be of very substantial theological significance. For every sura is prefaced by the words “In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.” Yet there are references to Hell on at least 255 of the 669 pages of Arberry’s rendering of the Qur’an (34) and quite often pages have two such references.
There's also an interesting assesment of Muhammed:
Whereas St. Paul, who was the chief contributor to the New Testament, knew all the three relevant languages and obviously possessed a first class philosophical mind, the Prophet, though gifted in the arts of persuasion and clearly a considerable military leader, was both doubtfully literate and certainly ill-informed about the contents of the Old Testament and about several matters of which God, if not even the least informed of the Prophet’s contemporaries, must have been cognizant. Such remarks make him a little fearful for his future safety while giving some small comfort to Christians: This raises the possibility of what my philosophical contemporaries in the heyday of Gilbert Ryle would have described as a knock-down falsification of Islam: something which is most certainly not possible in the case of Christianity. If I do eventually produce such a paper it will obviously have to be published anonymously. Some comfort too in his closing remarks: LEW: Well, one thing I’ll say in this comparison is that, for goodness sake, Jesus is an enormously attractive charismatic figure, which the Prophet of Islam most emphatically is not.

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