Posted on 12/09/2004 1:15:38 PM PST by ZGuy
NEW YORK - A British philosophy professor who has been a leading champion of atheism for more than a half-century has changed his mind. He now believes in God — more or less — based on scientific evidence, and says so on a video released Thursday.
At age 81, after decades of insisting belief is a mistake, Antony Flew has concluded that some sort of intelligence or first cause must have created the universe. A super-intelligence is the only good explanation for the origin of life and the complexity of nature, Flew said in a telephone interview from England.
Flew said he's best labeled a deist like Thomas Jefferson, whose God was not actively involved in people's lives.
"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," he said. "It could be a person in the sense of a being that has intelligence and a purpose, I suppose."
Flew first made his mark with the 1950 article "Theology and Falsification," based on a paper for the Socratic Club, a weekly Oxford religious forum led by writer and Christian thinker C.S. Lewis.
Over the years, Flew proclaimed the lack of evidence for God while teaching at Oxford, Aberdeen, Keele, and Reading universities in Britain, in visits to numerous U.S. and Canadian campuses and in books, articles, lectures and debates.
There was no one moment of change but a gradual conclusion over recent months for Flew, a spry man who still does not believe in an afterlife.
Yet biologists' investigation of DNA "has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce (life), that intelligence must have been involved," Flew says in the new video, "Has Science Discovered God?"
The video draws from a New York discussion last May organized by author Roy Abraham Varghese's Institute for Metascientific Research in Garland, Texas. Participants were Flew; Varghese; Israeli physicist Gerald Schroeder, an Orthodox Jew; and Roman Catholic philosopher John Haldane of Scotland's University of St. Andrews.
The first hint of Flew's turn was a letter to the August-September issue of Britain's Philosophy Now magazine. "It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism," he wrote.
The letter commended arguments in Schroeder's "The Hidden Face of God" and "The Wonder of the World" by Varghese, an Eastern Rite Catholic layman.
This week, Flew finished writing the first formal account of his new outlook for the introduction to a new edition of his "God and Philosophy," scheduled for release next year by Prometheus Press.
Prometheus specializes in skeptical thought, but if his belief upsets people, well "that's too bad," Flew said. "My whole life has been guided by the principle of Plato's Socrates: Follow the evidence, wherever it leads."
Last week, Richard Carrier, a writer and Columbia University graduate student, posted new material based on correspondence with Flew on the atheistic www.infidels.org Web page. Carrier assured atheists that Flew accepts only a "minimal God" and believes in no afterlife.
Flew's "name and stature are big. Whenever you hear people talk about atheists, Flew always comes up," Carrier said. Still, when it comes to Flew's reversal, "apart from curiosity, I don't think it's like a big deal."
Flew told The Associated Press his current ideas have some similarity with American "intelligent design" theorists, who see evidence for a guiding force in the construction of the universe. He accepts Darwinian evolution but doubts it can explain the ultimate origins of life.
A Methodist minister's son, Flew became an atheist at 15.
Early in his career, he argued that no conceivable events could constitute proof against God for believers, so skeptics were right to wonder whether the concept of God meant anything at all.
Another landmark was his 1984 "The Presumption of Atheism," playing off the presumption of innocence in criminal law. Flew said the debate over God must begin by presuming atheism, putting the burden of proof on those arguing that God exists.
Thanks for the ping to this very interesting thread. After reading through, I wonder how many non-believers will be changing their minds when they turn 81, LOL.
When I meet someone who is smarter than me I'm overjoyed. That's sort of how I face the question of who made God? Now, you're frustrated by that question. I'm delighted by it. It's the limit of the human mind. It's like an ant trying to comprehend driving a car. What was before the Big Bang? Was man seeded by aliens? Who made the aliens? There is no empiracle answer to that puzzle. We've hit the wall we cannot scale.
Now, you can drive youself nuts by banging your head against it. Or you can laugh with unrestrained mirth and be entertained. There is no way around it.
Concerning the indecipherability of the Powers that Be, I agree that reason fails. However, if this Power choses to make itself understandable it can certainly do so. I believe it has through the Holy Spirit and through Jesus as recorded in the Bible.
Why the Bible and not the Koran or some other book or tradition?
I think that, to a degree, that question can be answered through reason. Compare the lives of those who followed the one and others. Investigate via standard scholarship the claims. Look at the moral code that, I believe, is hardwired into every human heart and see what belief most reflects it.
Of course it will ultimately hinge on faith but that's true of any attempt to resolve the issue whether it's by the Resurrection or other dimensions.
Nothing, unless you do understand it.
FWIW, I twas smited about ten years ago and three years later found myself that Easter being confirmed in the Church.
My avowed affiliation line runs: Lutheran - Methodist - Baptist - Agnostic - Atheist - Smitten - Buddhist - Catholic.
There is a Compassion that suffuses the cosmos and we can experience this as connected to our being. (The latin "religio" mean "re-bind.") It pursued itself within me all my life. But I don't think that, for everyone, it means "choosing to believe." Some, like me, are hard-headed, and it takes time and much Grace 'til we surrender and come home again for the first time.
Thanks very much for the discussion.
Even in a theoretical perfect vacuum, the laws of the universe are present - awaiting matter. This "nothing" is not nothing, only devoid of matter. Some might phrase this as "nothingness." Not nothing.
"First there was nothing, then there was existence"
Have you ever heard of "Vacuum Genesis"?
Poor guy has found the road but he's still a little lost.
I'm sure the shaved typing monkeys will show up soon.
". . . they are proposing that which cannot be disproved, namely; that intelligent design alone explains complexity . . . "
/////////////////////
I have seen displays which show the radical difference between organic and inorganic chemistry. The structure of the molecules of inorganic chemistry is a pattern repeated over and over again. This holds for molecules consisting of elements throughout the periodic table. However, with inorganic chemistry the molecules do not form any consistant repeated pattern. Its sort of like the difference between rational and irrational numbers.
The point is that life on the smallest scale looks very different from mere matter--and yet the overwhelming balance of stuff in the universe is matter/energy/space. What's the evidence of God when adam and eve are in the garden of eden. The answer is the Garden. I think a similiar arguement is being made for all life.
Space is something so a theoretically perfect vacuum is not what I was referring to.
I do agree with you that it is not biologists who have raised the issue but mathematicians. However, I do not believe the issue of complexity was raised primarily from looking at probabilities but rather in response to the von Neumann challenge with the emphasis on cellular automata (self-organizing complexity).
Uncertainty, Entropy, and Information - Tom Schneider
A Mathematical Theory of Communication - Claude Shannon
Randomness in Arithmetic - Chaitin
Yes; the argument is being made, but it's not a scientific one, remember the original quote was that "bilogists" had found evidence of complexity that suggested intelligent design, because scientific arguments can be disproven through testing and observation with rigorous application of scientific method. The intelligent design theory does not fit into this standard.
///////////////////////////
true but in order to make this clear you have to also make clear that evolution does not prove by means of the scientic method--that a.)natural selection is random b.)there is no God.
further you have to mention that in greek terms say, the scientific method has been designed for aristotles creatures and not plato's creator.
Thanks for the ping. Bookmarked for later.
Unless I read more about what Flew actually thought, and the path of reasoning that led him to his current belief in God (of some sort), I can only take his words at face value*. And your idea goes along with what is stated in the article.
Basically there are two kinds of people {those who divide people into two kinds, and those who don't}...
No, really - these two kinds:
1. Those who have a certain set of beliefs, want to continue believing, and therefore only allow information which supports these beliefs into the purview of their mind's acceptance.
2. Those who want to know that the Truth with a capital T is, and follow the search wherever it leads, not thinking that they know the destination before they arrive.
Unfortunately, group (1) is very numerous. But group (2) is the only one to be in to achieve the actual goal of human life.
*And being the uneducated fool that I am, I probably wouldn't understand his writings even if I tried.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.