In 2004, the infamous atheist Antony Flew came out in favor of theism, to the dismay of his extensive fan club, including such no-nonsense materialists as Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. This weekend, I thought I'd get the deets on his conversion by reading Antony's 2009 book on the subject, entitled, "There Is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind"1. Spoiler alert: Flew's last-moment conversion was not so much to the Christian God as it was to a sort of "unmoved mover" like that proposed by Aristotle in book IX of his Metaphysics2.
As with other prominent atheists, Antony's original disbelief was inspired in part by the "problem of evil," which is just a subset of the more general concerns of atheists that "God wouldn't have done it that way," a complaint we often hear from Darwinists in their opposition to the idea that a supreme power had a role in evolution. As Darwin himself wrote:
"I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [a family of parasitoid wasps] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars"3.
But what strikes me about all such arguments is that they assume that the intellectual apparatus of human beings is up to the job of performing such advanced moral calculus in the first place.
Consider an analogy:
A five-year-old tells us that God does not exist. And why not? "Because," says the child, "no God would erect dull old school buildings in places where He or She could have erected an amusement park or an ice-cream parlor instead."
Where does one even begin in disabusing the child of this theory about God? Any thorough-going rebuttal would have to include a discussion of social contracts; nutrition; education; zoning laws; the social, psychological and economic importance of private property... and the fact that God is, at best, a mediate cause when it comes to the construction of amusement parks and ice-cream parlors on planet Earth.
In other words, the child's ignorance is so profound that we can only shake our heads and conclude that, "Children simply lack the understanding necessary to opine intelligently on such topics."
Are we not in the same presumptuous and hubristic position as that child when we profess as adults to pronounce authoritatively on the topic of ultimate realities? Even rationality itself cries "halt" at some point, as Immanuel Kant reminds us in "The Critique of Pure Reason," wherein he hoists the rationalists by their own petard, proving rationally that there are metaphysical achievements to which Reason itself can never obtain, that there are, in short, things that we as human beings can never know4.
But Kant is only interested in rational knowledge. There is another form of knowledge, one of which tribal people have always been aware: namely, that which comes to us in the form of visions from psychoactive substances, particularly those that we classify as psychedelic. It will be said that these visions are hallucinations, not knowledge, but therein lies the rub. Given Whitehead's critique of bifurcationism, we see that there are no objects "out there" apart from our sensations of them, that we organize an originally inchoate atomic world into patterns that we can manipulate for our own purposes. Given this standard for "reality," we cannot glibly dismiss psychedelic visions as non-real. They are rather a different way of seeing what is out there56. Whether such visions are useful or not is another question, but it would take some highly debatable hair-splitting to argue that they are not real. Indeed, in light of Whitehead's thesis, it's not immediately clear what we even mean when we talk about the word "real" with a capital "R," as if there should be only one way of definitively seeing what is "really" out there in the inchoate world of atomic potentials that surround us. Is the 'real' world the one that just happens to be perceived by Christian Science teetotalers? If so, one thinks with the Church Lady from Saturday Night Live: "How convenient!"
"The evolution of modern medicine gave us our current, bifurcated view of drugs: the good ones that treat illness and the bad ones that people use to change their minds and moods." --Jacob Sullum, from Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use, p. 2517
Like almost all philosophers, Flew completely reckons without drugs.
But like almost all philosophers, Flew completely reckons without drugs. And so Antony Flew uses endless words over the course of a long lifetime only to come to a conclusion that he might have embraced in one single afternoon with the help of psychedelic substances. That's why I always think of the following quote by Quanah Parker of the Native American Church whenever I see folks like Flew attempting to prove or disprove god with human language:
"The White Man goes into church and talks about Jesus. The Indian goes into his tipi and talks with Jesus"8.
Just so, "the philosopher goes into his study and writes about ultimate realities, the drug user goes into his den and experiences ultimate realities."
And what about Darwin? His caterpillar argument is one based on human mood, the way that Darwin personally sees the world. Darwin was a dyspeptic, both physically and mentally. The question then arises: what metaphysic might he have held had he ingested substances that inspire and give one a sense of the wholeness of life, that nature is alive and has things to tell us?
My point here is that psychedelics in general inspire the user with an intense conviction of meaning in the world and that all discussions of ultimate realities are inadequate that ignore this fact. This, then, is the shortcoming of Antony's "tell-all" book about his glacially slow conversion to theism, the fact that he reckons without drugs - a fault for which he is scarcely alone, of course, since almost every western philosopher has reckoned without drugs since Plato. It is just that their excuse for doing so is starting to wear thin in the 21st century, thanks to the increasing reports of beneficial drug effects that are being published both by ethnobotanists and those drug researchers who are involved in the so-called "psychedelic renaissance."
Nor am I alone in citing the importance of mind-altering substances when it comes to philosophical investigations. Here is what William James wrote on this subject in "The Varieties of Religious Experience":
"No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded"9.
Author's Follow-up: March 11, 2024
Another spoiler alert: Flew's new Weltanschauung was inspired in large part by his discovery of the vast sophistication of the DNA code. He also credits the work of philosopher David Conway, especially his critique of David Hume.
"One of the leitmotifs of the Romantic movement was that the natural world can't be fully understood by dry-as-dust dissection without considering the extent to which it's coloured, even constructed by the human mind and imagination."
Notice that this is also the message of drug use -- the message of phenethylamines, of opium, of coca, and of laughing gas. Their use reminds us that there are a wide variety of ways of perceiving the world. As William James himself reported after perceiving the world with the help of nitrous oxide:
"Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.11"
This realization has significance with respect to Kant and Schopenhauer insofar as the latter philosophers implicitly posited the existence of a single privileged sober perception for humankind in general in contradistinction to the supposed madness of altered states, mostly alcohol-induced as they might have conceived such states in their day. And yet subsequent consideration of drug-aided experience suggests that there is no single privileged way of perceiving the world that is applicable to all humanity, and that, for aught we know, some drug-aided ways of seeing the world provide Homo sapiens (or at least some Homo sapiens) with a more grounded (a more ontologically real) way of seeing the world than that afforded by this suppositious universal touchstone that we call a sober mind, distracted as it so often is by psychological and sociocultural biases. It is well-known today (at least to those who have risen above a lifetime of brainwashing to the contrary) that substances like morphine and coca and phenethylamines can dramatically improve mentation and raise awareness to aspects of the world to which we might have been blind in a so-called sober state.
Consider the extraordinary world perceived by the prepared mind under the influence of opiates, as described in the following passage from a short story by Edgar Allan Poe:
"In the meantime the morphine had its customary effect- that of enduing all the external world with an intensity of interest. In the quivering of a leaf- in the hue of a blade of grass- in the shape of a trefoil- in the humming of a bee- in the gleaming of a dew-drop- in the breathing of the wind- in the faint odors that came from the forest- there came a whole universe of suggestion- a gay and motley train of rhapsodical and immethodical thought." --Edgar Allan Poe, from A Tale of the Ragged Mountains12
Or consider the extraordinary world perceived under the influence of phenethylamines, as described in the following drug-user reports in the book Pihkal by Alexander Shulgin13:
"I was caught up with the imagery, and there was an overriding religious aspect to the day."
"No visual experience has ever been like this. The meaning of color has just changed completely."
"More than tranquil, I was completely at peace, in a beautiful, benign, and placid place. "
"I acknowledged a rapture in the very act of breathing."
I am suggesting here that no one should definitively brand themselves as an atheist before at least sampling the many new ways of seeing the world that are made possible for us with the help of a wide array of psychoactive substances. Let us first try to see the world in a variety of new ways rather than rashly assuming that our current perceptual equipment as currently "tuned" is providing us with an authoritative view of "what's really out there" -- and what is not out there, for that matter.
Speaking of "dry-as-dust dissection," it is worth noting that the scientific world against which the romanticists were rebelling is as dry as ever to this very day. This can be seen in the fact that modern materialists can find no positive uses for laughing gas or coca or opium or phenethylamines. Why not? Because today's scientists are behaviorists when it comes to mind and mood1415. They ignore all common sense benefits of drug use and insist instead the drug efficacy be established by looking under a microscope. If they cannot find chemical pathways to account for ostensible drug benefits, then they acknowledge no benefits. And what's the result of this pharmacological colonialism, of this denial of the whole principle of holistic healing? Answer? Drug law refuses to budge and so I am denied medicines that could so obviously cheer me up, and in real-time at that.
Finally, no drug-related essay about "looking for God" would be complete without a reminder that the Vedic religion was inspired by (and inspired) the use of psychoactive drugs16.
By the way, I am not trying to sell the reader on any one particular "world view" here -- not on atheism, deism, or pantheism. I am simply suggesting that we should keep an open mind about so-called ultimate realities until such time as we have considered all the evidence -- and that is something that we have not been able to do until now as a species thanks to what Russell Newcombe would have called the intoxiphobia17 of the west, which led eventually to drug prohibition, a policy which has demonized and outlawed the very substances that could help us view the world from a variety of new perspectives, perspectives that were undreamt of by the philosophers of yore.
Indeed, my drug experiences -- limited as they are -- tell me that certain drugs make me MORE sober -- if by "sober" we are referring to Webster's fourth definition of that term, as being "marked by temperance, moderation, or seriousness." Yes, drug use can make one more sober! at least in cases wherein the baseline mental dialogue going on in a person "behind the scenes" is masochistic and full of pessimistic auto-suggestion. In that case, the default state is one of uncertainty and misguided effort and irrationality and randomness, whereas the supposed "drugged" state, as in the case of Augustus Bedloe in the Poe story mentioned above, is one of concentration and productivity. This is why Arthur Conan Doyle imagined Sherlock Holmes as a devotee of cocaine. The author specifically wanted to create a character who had devoted his life to the sharp study of the world made possible by use of that substance. Unfortunately, Doyle was more than willing to backpedal on Holmes' drug use in deference to the intoxiphobic beliefs of his American publishers at Collier's magazine, who were already ahead of their times in denouncing "drugs" in the late 19th century. Doyle thus parlayed Holmes' drug use into a morality play so that the American Sherlock Holmes could maintain the keen intellect without help from demonized substances.
And so Americans celebrate a kind of Sherlock Holmes lite -- just as we celebrated Ben Franklin lite and Robin Williams lite -- we glory in the drug-aided acumen of these individuals while dogmatically insisting that they were drug-free prodigies who were high on nothing but sunshine. We live in a kind of parallel reality, in which facts themselves have to give way to Drug War prejudices.
If anyone manages to die during an ayahuasca ceremony, it is considered a knockdown argument against "drugs." If anyone dies during a hunting club get-together, it is considered the victim's own damn fault. The Drug War is the triumph of hypocritical idiocy.
The war on drugs is has destroyed America's faith in the power of education. In fact, it has made us think of education as WRONG in and of itself. It has made us prefer censorship and fear-filled ignorance to education!
The UK just legalized assisted dying. This means that you can use drugs to kill a person, but you still can't use drugs to make that person want to live.
When the FDA tells us in effect that MDMA is too dangerous to be used to prevent school shootings and to help bring about world peace, they are making political judgments, not scientific ones.
Prohibitionists have blood on their hands. People do not naturally die in the tens of thousands from opioid use, notwithstanding the lies of 19th-century missionaries in China. It takes bad drug policy to accomplish that.
The book "Plants of the Gods" is full of plants and fungi that could help addicts and alcoholics, sometimes in the plant's existing form, sometimes in combinations, sometimes via extracting alkaloids, etc. But drug warriors need addiction to sell their prohibition ideology.
Almost all talk about the supposed intractability of things like addiction are exercises in make-believe. The pundits pretend that godsend medicines do not exist, thus normalizing prohibition by implying that it does not limit progress. It's a tacit form of collaboration.
Drugs that sharpen the mind should be thoroughly investigated for their potential to help dementia victims. Instead, we prefer to demonize these drugs as useless. That's anti-scientific and anti-patient.
If opium were legal, then much of the nostrums peddled by drug stores today would be irrelevant. (No wonder the drug war has staying power!)
"Drugs" is imperialist terminology. In the smug self-righteousness of those who use it, I hear Columbus's disdain for the shroom use of the Taino people and the Spanish disdain for the coca use of the Peruvian Indians.
If anyone manages to die during an ayahuasca ceremony, it is considered a knockdown argument against "drugs." If anyone dies during a hunting club get-together, it is considered the victim's own damn fault. The Drug War is the triumph of hypocritical idiocy.