Anthony G. Flood

Modern Atheism: Catholicism’s Frankenstein Monster? A fresh look at an old essay.

I originally posted this essay nearly 18 years ago, when I was influenced by the process theology of Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) as “processed” by David Ray Griffin (1939-2022).

I was then also navigating (internally) my relationship to the Roman Catholic Church, wherein I was raised, educated, and married but which I had set aside, first in 1979 and again (and, I hope, finally) in 2017 for the dispensationalist eschatology and ecclesiology of Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992) buttressed by the Reformed apologetics of Cornelius Van Til (1895-1987).

Natural law libertarianism and the Austrian School of Economics, as filtered mainly through the person and writings of Murray Rothbard (1926-1995), added another layer of tension to this journey, one that is reflected in part in Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic.

I had not yet returned to the view of the Bible to which He had once led me and from which, for reasons inexplicable to me, He let me wander. Despite that detour, I articulated concerns about the roots of the secularizing forces that have polluted Western culture over the past three centuries.

This essay asks questions that, for all their verbose inelegance, merit being disinterred from my old site and displayed on this one. Light editing, restructured paragraphs, and linked reference notes have, I hope, lightened the prospective reader’s burden. At over 7,000 words, it’s hardly a quick read, but I hope its contents will repay the effort of the hardy few who undertake to read it.

[Here is the original prefatory paragraph]

Worth doing EVEN badly, I think he meant.

G. K. Chesterton once defended the amateur against the professional by aphorizing that “if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly” (What’s Wrong with the World [1910]; last sentence of Part Four, Chapter XIV). And so in the spirit of this site’s “workshop” character, I am posting my notes toward an investigation I unfortunately do not see myself returning to in the near future. The following is not an essay fit for a journal.

The scholarship cited in this unfinished piece suggests an affirmative answer to the title’s question. By displaying this yet unripe fruit, however, I acknowledge that I may have overlooked important sources or misinterpreted those I have used. I invite interested readers to show, if they can, that either of these potential failings of mine is more than a theoretical possibility. I hope the order of some of the paragraphs and the occasional repetition of points does not put any reader off.

Anthony Flood, October 13, 2006

Modern Atheism: Catholicism’s Frankenstein Monster? Notes on David Ray Griffin’s Implicit Counterpoint to Stanley L. Jaki

Thomas E. Woods has written a book that has an ostensibly Catholic apologetic purpose.[1] By locating the roots of the West’s choicest fruits (science, law, education, charitable institutions, economics, etc.) in the soil of Western Christianity, Woods offers an eloquent, if indirect, apologetic for the Catholic faith. By indirect I mean that his observations do not so much argue for the truth of what Catholics believe as challenge those who are so sure that what Catholics believe is false. Presupposing that it is irrational to malign one’s benefactor, Woods’ challenge trades on his reader’s being a beneficiary of the civilization that the Catholic Church built. In one chapter, however, he has unintentionally documented how the Catholic Church, while building Western civilization, planted, seeded, and watered the garden of that civilization’s weeds, namely, materialistic mechanism, upon which it is now in danger of choking.[2]

Woods never comments on this dialectical reversal, whose irony cuts much more deeply than does his correction of popular ignorance of, say, what really happened in the Galileo episode. In recent decades scholars have been paying increasing attention to extra-scientific influences in the rise of modern science.

What does not even surface as a question in Woods’ narrative is the possibility that an enterprise that we would recognize generically as science—sustained, experimental study of nature—not only might have developed other than the way it did, but that such an alternative was already incipient in Western Europe.

In fact, Catholic divines nipped that alternative in the bud ostensibly because they deemed it incompatible with revealed truth and more pragmatically because any loss on their spiritual monopoly was bad for business. That is, science as “a self-perpetuating field of endeavor” was “enabled by a Catholic milieu” (76) because Catholic divines prevented another milieu, equally Western and arguably on the way to establishing that field of endeavor, from flourishing. Continue reading “Modern Atheism: Catholicism’s Frankenstein Monster? A fresh look at an old essay.”

The picture that snapped me out of my cynical default position

Seated left to right: Elon Musk; Donald Trump; Donald Trump, Jr.; Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Standing: Mike Johnson. Aboard Air Force One after UFC event at Madison Square Garden, November 16, 2024

Yes, Make America Healthy Again . . . tomorrow!

Where else would Bobby get a platform of this magnitude for this noble mission?

Who in Trumpworld was talking like that eight years ago?

I wish the table was large enough for Tulsi and Vivek and . . . no, I won’t list every nominee and appointee for Trump’s Dream Team. (I don’t even know who among them, besides those pictured above, was aboard Trump Force One last night.)

Many battles for peace through strength, free speech, bureaucracy busting, government downsizing, crime fighting, invasion repelling, and terrorism crushing lie ahead.

We don’t have four years to undo the dystopia of the last quarter century. Two years to the midterms. One to make a decisive difference.

Expect our enemies to live up to their enemy status, but they’ve been served notice. And expect “47” and his army to work on Trump Time, 24/7, to execute the planned reversal.

In the meantime, don’t miss (as I am temperamentally inclined to do) the many opportunities there will be enjoy the turning of the tide.

Donald Trump gestures as he speaks in front of a painting of George Washington during a Pledge to America’s Workers event in the East Room of the White House on July 19, 2018.

“Trump has been compared to Lincoln. What we may need at this hour, however, is a George Washington.” Anthony Flood, “If the problem be electoral, how can the solution be? Thoughts on our parlous state,” January 7, 2021

“God spared my life for a reason.”

Donald Trump and family, West Palm Beach Convention Center, about 1:00 AM, November 6, 2024. (Photo by Jim WATSON / AFP)

Schadenfreude . . . on steroids. That’s the dominant emotion for me this morning.

Yes, I’ll look forward to learning exactly how Trump interred—Grover Clevelanded!—Sleepy Joe’s legacy and that of his feckless “insurance policy” (who will condescend to concede at the dinner hour).

To God all the glory.

The people who met defeat last night—the empty pantsuit and her equally hollow-headed Hollywood cheerleaders; the once-upon-a-time friends and admirers who disowned him; the political and judicial prostitutes who persecuted, prosecuted, indicted, impeached, and slandered him; the oh-so-ethically-sensitive “artists” who for a decade fantasized openly about how gruesomely he might be put to death—I’m glad they’re miserable. I hope their misery induces them to expatriate, as they often dare to do when elections don’t go their way.

Nota bene: They haven’t gone anywhere. They’re already plotting his demise (again) and will stop at nothing. For they don’t hate Trump as much as they hate the people who love him, obstacles to their totalitarian designs, who number in the hundreds of millions and will carry on when his work in this life is done.

So, this morning Freude and Schadenfreude are appropriate emotions. But during the interregnum and the next four years, vigilance is what’s required, coupled with an unquenchable thirst for justice.

This time, no more Mister Nice Guy.

How I philosophized when I put philosophy before Christ

In Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him, I essayed an approach to philosophizing that in some ways is continuous with the way modern philosophers (and their ancient, classical, not to mention non-Western, counterparts) go about their business, but in other ways, or rather in a fundamental way, discontinuous, even offensively so to their sensibilities (when they become aware of it).

You see, they assume a stance of theoretical and ethical neutrality toward Christ’s claims, and for one who pursues Christ as the Wisdom of God (the only wisdom or sophia worth loving), such a posture is as impossible as it is unacceptable.

The typical response, even from philosophers who identify as Christians, is that I’m seriously misunderstanding the role of philosophy. They argue that I’m blurring the line between philosophical analysis and Christian apologetics.

To integrally perform the former, that is, philosophical analysis, requires philosophers, including the Christians among them, to bracket or suspend their commitments. An example of this is the “presumption of atheism” that the late atheist-turned-deist Antony Flew (not to be confused with Anthony Flood) defended: like the presumption of innocence, the “presumption of atheism” may be defeated, but only by a sound argument for biblical theism that does not presuppose that biblical theism is true.[1]

However, my position (following, if at a galactic distance from Cornelius Van Til) is that God’s existence is the precondition of acquiring true premises and relating them logically, that is, of rational argumentation. If that is so, then one rationally ought to explicitly advert to that precondition rather than pretend that it doesn’t hold. (Even the argument for this conclusion, however indirect, presupposes that the precondition is met.)

I first tried out this idea in a post that is an ancestor of a chapter of my book: “The Problem of Philosophy” (first on November 26, 2018, then republished with links to subsequent posts, which also evolved into chapters, on July 21, 2020; the book was published June 2022).

I think that those whom I’ve failed to convince regard me as either stubborn or obtuse. This experience has persuaded me that resistance to the exposure of theoretical neutrality (and the “presumption of atheism” it seems to entail) is so sedimented into the consciousness of the modern intellectual—again, even of the Christian modern intellectual—that he or she cannot imagine an alternative to that stance. Continue reading “How I philosophized when I put philosophy before Christ”

Van Til on C. S. Lewis: man’s problem is rebellion, not finitude

Not able at the moment to cobble together an original post, but also not wanting more time to pass before I post something, I share this brief criticism of an aspect of the theology of Anglican lay theologian and evangelical apologist C. S. Lewis by the Reformed apologist Cornelius Van Til.—AGF

A position similar to that of Romanism [i.e., Roman Catholicism] is frequently maintained by evangelical Protestants. As a recent illustration, we mention the case of C. S. Lewis.[1]

Like Romanism, Lewis, in the first place, confuses things metaphysical and ethical. In his book Beyond Personality he discusses the nature of the divine trinity.

To show the practical significance of the doctrine of the trinity he says:

The whole dance, or drama, or pattern of this three-personal life is to be played out in each one of us: or (putting it the other way ‘round) each one of us has got to enter that pattern, take his place in that dance.[2]

The purpose of Christianity is to lift the Bios or natural life of man up into the Zoe, the uncreated life. In the incarnation there is given one example of how this may be done. In him there is “one man in whom the created life, derived from his mother, allowed itself to be completely and perfectly turned into the begotten life.” Then he adds: “Now what is the difference which he has made to the whole human mass? It is just this; that the business of becoming a son of God, of being turned from a created thing into a begotten thing, of passing over from the temporary biological life into timeless ‘spiritual’ life, has been done for us.”

All this is similar in import to the position of Aquinas which stresses the idea that man is, through grace, to participate in the divine nature.

It is a foregone conclusion that the ethical problem cannot be fairly put on such a basis. Perhaps the most fundamental difference between all forms of non-Christian ethics and Christian ethics lies in the fact that according to the former, it is man’s finitude as such that causes his ethical strife while according to the latter, it is not finitude as such but created man’s disobedience of God that causes all the trouble. Continue reading “Van Til on C. S. Lewis: man’s problem is rebellion, not finitude”

Stalin: Apostate, terrorist, tyrant . . . philosopher

Mugshot, 1901 (age 23) © David King Collection, London

Realizing that there’s more sand at the bottom of my life’s hourglass than at the top, I’ve been reflecting on that life’s inflection points. One was my conversion to Marxism.

I’ve been thinking about Josef Stalin (1878-1953) for over fifty years, that is, for about as long as I’ve studied philosophy, by which I mean the pursuit of answers to questions of the greatest generality (being, knowledge, goodness), whether or not my philia of sophia (or, as has too often been the case, moria) has ordered that pursuit.

I had rebelled against my Christian inheritance to embrace Stalinist Marxism while attending a Catholic military high school—just as Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili—whom the world knew as Joseph Stalin—had given himself over to Marxism at Tbilisi Seminary in Sakartvelo (Georgia to Westerners, Gruzia to Russians). He had succumbed to Lenin’s malign influence; I, to that of Herbert Aptheker, who came of age in the decade following Stalin’s consolidation of power at the end of 1929. Continue reading “Stalin: Apostate, terrorist, tyrant . . . philosopher”

Two anniversaries of Pat and me

September 9, 1972, was the first time I spoke to Pat Martino on Folk City’s stage while he packing up after his last set. (I had seen him there many times that summer, one perk of having FC’s Mike Porco as a friend of the family).

Exactly 23 years later, a fellow fan took a picture of him, Gloria, and me in Blue Note’s second-floor dressing room. This was directly across the street (that is, West Third Street) from where Folk City once was. (These music venues were never contemporaries.)

I’ve published this picture before, but not the copy Pat signed almost 14 years later on March 15, 2009 at the Rubin Museum of Art (150 West 17th Street). The occasion was the premiere of Unstrung!, a documentary about Pat’s recovery from brain surgery and amnesia. (Free download of medical journal article on Pat’s case.) Gloria couldn’t make the event, but Mom, who’s the reason I got into jazz, did. A few months earlier, her friend had played Pat’s Strings! album on his turntable, thereby altering the course of my musical life.

My diary for September 9, 1972 shows that I was equally excited about meeting another fan of Pat’s:

Was I knocked out when Mom came over to me [at my Folk City table in the main music room] and told me that George Benson was there diggin’ on the music! I went over to his lovely wife to ask if that was truly him and then introduced myself and asked him a few questions. He’s coming out with a book by which student of various levels can progress and “get more serious.” What a surprise that was! Pat M. came over and and rapped about guitar makes (George has an 1898 Gibson) and other things. Ornette Coleman was sitting at the bar. . . . I talked to Pat about little things. He’s really at peace with himself. He went for a walk after his set. Mom was sitting at the bar and stopped him to talk. He’s so gracious. Mom and I hung around to be driven home [in the Bronx] by Mike [whom, in my diary, I cluelessly surnamed “Gerde”!].

As 1994 was the last year I kept a diary, I have only that photo to stir my memory of that 1995 meeting (of whose significance as the anniversary of our first chat I was not then cognizant). The following summer (June 30, 1973, to be exact) I’d see both Pat and George (and a half-dozen other jazz guitar greats) in the Wollman Amphitheater in Central Park at the Newport Jazz Festival. The concert was aptly named “Guitar Explosion.”

Happy to share with those who care and remember that September.

George Benson and Pat, Central Park, June 30, 1973. A flipped image: Pat, who was right-handed, appears to be holding a guitar made for a left-handed player.

80 years ago today

Pat Azzara at about six months. He adopted the surname “Martino” when he went on the road. His father, an amateur guitar strummer, was known as “Micky Martino.”

Allied forces liberated Paris. Composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein turned 26 and would soon bask in the Broadway success of On the Town. There was, however, another birthday that day (literally, the day of his birth). It was of another great musician whom it was my privilege to know, the guitarist Pat Martino (1944-2021).

It is almost impossible for me to grasp that he would have turned 80 today. In fact, he’s been gone almost three years. To me, he’s still the “guitar god” I met at Folk City on West Third Street in Greenwich Village, when I was 19 and he an old man (in my eyes) of 28. I distinctly remember chatting with him on the northeast corner of West Third and Sixth Avenue (yes, just outside the basketball court informally known as “The Cage”) about how I was picking up the jazz tradition on our common instrument. A few months later, he’d offer to teach me if I’d be willing to travel to his hometown of Philly.

My first initial impression of his playing, like that of many young listeners discovering their favorite musicians, was of his speed of execution. (“Look how fast he plays!) I slowly but surely realized that “fast” does not capture the beauty of his streams of eighth notes. The excitement I so poorly conveyed derived from his melodic inventiveness and “pulse.” He didn’t sound like anyone else, but you knew if someone else was playing his lines Continue reading “80 years ago today”

Christianity and intelligibility, Part VI: Something about Mary

This continues a series of posts in which I engage Maverick Philosopher Bill Vallicella over my idea of philosophizing before and after Christ. (See Parts I, II, III, IV, V.)

Bill Vallicella asks me if Mariology (the doctrine of Mary, the mother of Jesus) is a part of the presuppositionalist “package deal,” that is, an essential element of the worldview that (I argue) uniquely makes intelligible predication possible.[1]

My answer is, yes, “some version of Mariology,” as Bill puts it, is derivable from an exegesis of Scripture, but not the Roman Catholic version that Bill tacitly presupposes.

That version was unknown to the writers of Scripture and the early Church Fathers. History knows of no writing alleging Mary’s “immaculate conception” (freedom from contracting Adam’s sin, “original sin”) until over a thousand years since Christ’s Ascension had passed. That’s when theologians could consider, and then reject, the musings of Eadmer, a 12^th-century monk who studied under Anselm (who denied Mary’s immaculate conception).[2]

Bernard of Clairvaux rejected the idea as a novum. He was joined in rejecting it (as inconsistent with the need for universal redemption in Christ) by Peter Lombard, Alexander of Hales, Bonaventure, Albert the Great, and Aquinas. The distinctive dogma that the Roman Catholic magisterium has since 1854 taught de fide (that is, as binding on all Catholics) forms no part of the Biblical worldview. Continue reading “Christianity and intelligibility, Part VI: Something about Mary”

Christianity and intelligibility, Part V: Worldview and the “eye of faith”

This continues the series in which I discuss Maverick Philosopher Bill Vallicella‘s critique of my idea of philosophizing before and after Christ. (See Parts I, II, III, IV.)

In Philosophy after Christ, I wrote:

The relationship of evidence of one thing to another depends on there being minds fitted with reliable cognition that can surmise and test that connection. What must the world include for evidentiary relationships to be possible?

We may not be certain whether A is evidence of B, but that things are in evidentiary relationships to each other is something about which we not only have no doubt but wouldn’t know how to doubt. Is that merely a brute psychological fact without further ground? For doubting expresses intellectual exigency, critical “demandingness,” a healthy fear of being duped; exercising that virtue makes no sense except in a world that is completely intelligible (formally, efficiently, materially, and finally).[1]

And that brings us, as every philosophical question must, to worldview.

Continue reading “Christianity and intelligibility, Part V: Worldview and the “eye of faith””