A System of Classical Atheism

Abstract

Some years ago, the editor of the Scottish Journal of Theology asked me to review what was, to me, an interesting and important book which amounted to a systematic attack on the existence of God, at any rate on the validity of the traditional theistic proofs of classical and modern systematic theology. In addition, such other bases of belief in God as authority revelation, historical event, and religious experience were treated, with the aim of showing that they cannot substitute for a failed philosophical theism. However, some mental block prevented me from completing the review proper. The root of the matter was that, in my Bachelor of Arts degree at Sydney University, my philosophical course had involved a system of atheism which I have recognised ever since to be more rigorous and cogent than any others, and I am not alone in this feeling. In particular, I felt that Professor Flew was in a stronger position than most philosophers of the prevailing modern British schools, but that this was because he approximated more than most to what I had learnt at Sydney, and that a still further approximation would tighten his case still more. The professor in question, the late John Anderson, was a Clydesider whose family background was the familiar Leftwing agnosticism and whose training was Absolute Idealism; in his later development, he reacted against both these elements, but his agnosticism hardened into a positive atheism.