"Blah blah blah blah.."
http://www.leestrobel.com/videos/Creator/strobelT2036.htm
Great find. Thanks for posting this.
BACKGROUND OF ANTONY FLEW...
Professor Antony Garrard Newton Flew (born February 11, 1923) is a British philosopher. Though in December 2004 he began expressing deist opinions, he was formerly known principally as a supporter of libertarianism and atheism.
Flew was born in London in 1923, the son of a Methodist minister. He was educated at St. Faith's Preparatory School, Cambridge followed by Kingswood School, Bath. During the Second World War he studied Japanese at the School of Oriental and African Studies, and was a Royal Air Force intelligence officer. After the war, Flew achieved a first class degree in Literae Humaniores at St John's College, Oxford. Flew was a graduate student of Gilbert Ryle, and one of the more prominent in the group identified with ordinary language philosophy. He was among many Oxford philosophers fiercely criticised in Ernest Gellner's book Words and Things, which he called a "juvenile work". Another early highlight in his career was a 1954 debate with Michael Dummett over backward causation.
He was a Lecturer in Philosophy at Christ Church, Oxford from 1949 to 1950, and followed this with four years as a lecturer at the University of Aberdeen, and twenty years as Professor of Philosophy at the University of Keele. Between 1973 and 1983 he was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading, and on his retirement took up a half-time post for a few years at York University, Toronto.
In his 1975 book Thinking about Thinking, he developed the No true Scotsman fallacy.
Political commitments
Flew has a long history of involvement in conservative politics. In the late 1980s he became an active vice-president of the Western Goals Institute, a pressure group opposed to immigration and free trade, and supportive of apartheid. Flew was also a committee member of Majority Rights, alongside Ray Honeyford and Tim Janman, MP.
He sits on the management committee of The Freedom Association, and has contributed to Right Now! magazine, the Salisbury Review, and publications of the Libertarian Alliance, the Social Affairs Unit, the Society for Individual Freedom and the Institute of Economic Affairs.
Professor Flew is a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association.
Atheism and Deism
While an undergraduate, Flew attended the weekly meetings of C. S. Lewis's Socratic Club fairly regularly. Although he found Lewis to be "an eminently reasonable man" and "by far the most powerful of Christian apologists for the sixty or more years following his founding of that club," he was not persuaded by Lewis's argument from morality as found in Mere Christianity. Other philosophical proofs for God's existence also fail, according to Flew. The ontological argument in particular is false because it is based on the premise that the concept of Being can be derived from the concept of Goodness. Only the scientific forms of the teleological argument impress Flew as being decisive.[1]
In God and Philosophy (1966) and The Presumption of Atheism (1984), Flew earned his fame by arguing that one should presuppose atheism until evidence of a God surfaces. He still stands behind this evidentialist approach, though he has been persuaded in recent years that such evidence in fact exists, and his current position appears to be deism. In a December 2004 interview[2], he said: I'm thinking of a God very different from the God of the Christian and far and away from the God of Islam, because both are depicted as omnipotent Oriental despots, cosmic Saddam Husseins.
On several occasions, apparently starting in 2001, rumours circulated claiming that Flew had converted from atheism. Flew refuted these rumours on the Secular Web website.[3] In 2003, he signed the Humanist Manifesto III.
In December 2004, an interview with Flew conducted by Flew's friend and philosophical adversary Gary Habermas was published in Biola University's Philosophia Christi, with the title Atheist Becomes Theist - Exclusive Interview with Former Atheist Antony Flew. Flew agreed to this title.[4] According to the introduction, Flew informed Habermas in January 2004 that he had become a deist [5], and the interview took place shortly thereafter. Then the text was amended by both participants over the following months prior to publication. In the article Flew states that he has left his long-standing espousal of atheism by endorsing a deism of the sort that Thomas Jefferson advocated ("While reason, mainly in the form of arguments to design, assures us that there is a God, there is no room either for any supernatural revelation of that God or for any transactions between that God and individual human beings."). Flew states that certain philosophical and scientific considerations had caused him to rethink his lifelong support of atheism. However, it is clear from the interview that Flew is not comfortable with either Christianity or Islam.
Flew's conception of God as explained in the interview is limited to the idea of God as a first cause, and he rejects the ideas of an afterlife, of God as the source of good (he explicitly states that God has created "a lot of" evil), and of the resurrection of Jesus as an historical fact. He is particularly hostile to Islam, and says it is "best described in a Marxian way as the uniting and justifying ideology of Arab imperialism."[6]
Flew has subsequently made contradictory statements to those given in the Habermas interview as justification for his endorsing of deism. In October 2004 (before the December publication of the Flew-Habermas interview), a letter written to Richard Carrier of the Secular Web, stated that he was a deist and also said that "I think we need here a fundamental distinction between the God of Aristotle or Spinoza and the Gods of the Christian and the Islamic Revelations."[7]. Flew also said: My one and only piece of relevant evidence [for an Aristotelian God] is the apparent impossibility of providing a naturalistic theory of the origin from DNA of the first reproducing species ... [In fact] the only reason which I have for beginning to think of believing in a First Cause god is the impossibility of providing a naturalistic account of the origin of the first reproducing organisms.
In an another letter to Carrier of 29 December 2004 Flew went on to retract his statement "a deity or a 'super-intelligence' [is] the only good explanation for the origin of life and the complexity of nature." "I now realize that I have made a fool of myself by believing that there were no presentable theories of the development of inanimate matter up to the first living creature capable of reproduction." wrote Flew. He blames his error on being "misled" by Richard Dawkins, claiming Dawkins "has never been reported as referring to any promising work on the production of a theory of the development of living matter". (Dawkins has - in "Evolutionary Chemistry: Life in a Test Tube," published in the 21 May 1992 issue of Nature, with Laurence Hurst.) The work of physicist Gerald Schroeder had been influential in Flew's new belief, but Flew admitted to Carrier that he had not read any of the scientific critiques of Schroeder that Carrier referred him to.
When asked in December 2004 by Duncan Crary of Humanist Network News if he still stood by the argument presented in The Presumption of Atheism, Flew replied he did but he also restated his position as deist: "I'm quite happy to believe in an inoffensive inactive god". When asked by Crary whether or not he has kept up with the most recent science and theology, he responded with "Certainly not", stating that there is simply too much to keep up with. Flew also denied that there was any truth to the rumours of 2001 and 2003 that he had abandoned his atheism or converted to Christianity.[8]
A letter on Darwinism and Theology which Flew published in the August/September 2004 issue of Philosophy Now magazine left the world hanging when it closed with, "Anyone who should happen to want to know what I myself now believe will have to wait until the publication, promised for early 2005, by Prometheus of Amherst, NY of the final edition of my God and Philosophy with a new introduction of it as ‘an historical relic’."[9]
But in 2005, when God and Philosophy was republished by Prometheus Books, the new introduction failed to conclusively answer the question of Flew's beliefs. The preface says the publisher and Flew went through a total of four versions (each extensively peer-reviewed) before coming up with one that satisfied them both. The result is an introduction, written in a distinctly detached third-person context, which raises ten matters that came about since the original 1966 edition. Flew refrains from personally commenting on these issues, and basically says that any book to follow God and Philosophy will have to take into account these ideas when considering the philosophical case for the existence of God.
1. A novel definition of "God" by Richard Swinburne.
2. The case for the existence of the Christian God by Swinburne in the book Is There a God?.
3. The Church of England's change in doctrine on the eternal punishment of Hell.
4. The question of whether there was only one big bang and if time began with it.
5. The question of multiple universes.
6. The fine-tuning argument.
7. The question of whether there is a naturalistic account for the development of living matter from non-living matter.
8. The question of whether there is a naturalistic account for non-reproducing living matter developing into a living creature capable of reproduction.
9. The concept of an Intelligent Orderer as explained in the book The Wonder of the World: A Journey from Modern Science to the Mind of God by Roy Abraham Varghese.
10. An extension of an Aristotelian/Deist concept of God that can be reached through natural theology, which was developed by David Conway.
In an interview with Joan Bakewell for BBC Radio 4 in March 2005[10], Flew rejected the fine-tuning argument, and retracted his earlier claims that the origins of DNA could not be explained by naturalistic theories. However, he restated his deism, with the usual provisos that his God is not the God of any of the revealed religions:
Q And certainly in America where you've been to lecture...
A Oh America, this is a very real phenomenon - oh yes. Part of Bush's second election success is due to this. And the unbelievers are absolutely furious, not believing that anyone with any intelligence could be anything but a Democratic voter.
Q What view do you take of what is happening in America - where presumably you're being hailed now as ... one of them?
A Well, too bad (laughs). I'm not 'one of them'.
Good isn't good if it doesn't punish evil. It is neutral.
ping!
another educated mind dumps atheism
Wow.
"...The rocks cry out," and I think someone is finally listening.
This story does my heart good. Just when I think this world should go to hell via the fastest express elevator, something like this pops up. If an 83-year old die-hard athiest can have a gradual change of heart, then maybe there's hope for us yet.
This man deserves prayer. I think I understand his struggle, a few gentle words from the great I AM could give him peace.
"Blah blah blah blah.."
I have always felt that Hell was to die, suddenly realizing you had been a baseturd most of your life.
interesting...
Worthy thread...
So we are too complex to have not had a creator, but God himself is not? Who created God, who is more complex than we?
I aways saw Hell as a loss of God in which God tells those bound for it that they hated Him in life so He's going to give them what the want, namely a place where He's not.
And with billions of souls all convinced of their own supremacy, and all equal in power, and none with a chance to appeal to a benevolent moderator, well, it's not a place I want to end up.
I imagine it as the Soviet Union, or any atheist state, to an infinite power.
Top Atheist?? There is a top atheist? Are there also middle atheists and bottom atheists. And if he's no longer an atheist, who's on top now?
Ping 4 Later
"If the Christian God exists," I said, "What would he have to do to convince you?"
....
I asked whether it would require an encounter with God for him to believe in Christianity. "Well, yes, it would, but until you’ve had that experience, I think it’s impossible to believe it...."
His biggest barrier to Christianity, he said, is the doctrine of hell.
....
I mentioned to him that my book The Case for Faith includes an interview with Christian philosopher J. P. Moreland on the rationality of hell. Flew said he would be willing to read the chapter if I sent it to him.
A few minutes later, as we were saying goodbye in the lobby of the hotel where the interview had taken place, someone came up to me with a copy of The Case for Faith and asked if I would sign it.
Instead, I promised to send the person another copy—and promptly took the book, marked the chapter on hell, and gave it to Flew.
.......
Hopefully this encounter will help Flew connect the dots.
It reminds me of the joke with the guy stranded and God telling him "I sent a raft, a boat and a helicopter".
I find it interesting when reading Stephen Hawking that a man, paralyzed for life and yet exceptionally brilliant, has clearly come to understand that God created it all.
I watched a debate with him and Gary Habermas on the John Ankerberg show. He seemed like a really nice guy and not one of these atheist who look down on everyone and have a big ego because they are educated.
God is in the mind of the beholder.
How does one get to be the top athiest ?