Deep Read: Conversion or Confusion?

It was less than two years ago that Random House got in a heap of trouble for publishing a non-fiction book that utterly misrepresented its author's experiences. Now, HarperCollins has done something very similar, in a very different context.*

Last time around, of course, the book was A Million Little Pieces, James Frey's phony memoir of hard living and recovery. This time, it's There Is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, by the British philosopher Antony Flew.

Or maybe that should be "by" the British philosopher Antony Flew. For, as Mark Oppenheimer reveals in The New York Times Magazine, Flew didn't co-write There Is a God; it was written for him by Roy Abraham Varghese, a Christian business consultant who sponsors research and scholarship that "proves" the existence of God, and who is credited as his co-author. Before embarking on the book, Varghese had literally spent decades trying to win Flew over to the side of belief, making real headway only after the older man's mental faculties began to wane.

And Varghese was no mere ghostwriter. Though he claims he was channeling Flew's thoughts, Oppenheimer quizzed Flew and found him incapable of having done the intellectual work behind the book. Indeed, the 84-year-old academic cheerily confessed himself ignorant of most of the writers and arguments cited in There Is a God.

Here's how Flew himself described his collaboration with Varghese: "This is really Roy's doing. He showed it to me, and I said O.K. I'm too old for this kind of work!"

It doesn't say much for theism that its proponents feel the need to resort to such deceptions to attain a propaganda victory. And it doesn't say much for HarperCollins that the company is willing to put out a book that, if not sold to the publisher under false pretenses, is certainly being sold to the public that way.

*CORRECTION, 9:12 p.m.: This post originally identified A Million Little Pieces, incorrectly, as a HarperCollins book.