One of World's Leading Atheists Now Believes in God, More or Less, Based on Scientific Evidence

NEW YORK Dec 9, 2004 — 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.

-- R. Pereira (generra@hotmail.com), December 12, 2004

Answers

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-- R. Pereira (generra@hotmail.com), December 12, 2004.

I'm always amazed by the men who breathlessly proclaim to be atheists and "scientists" or professors of some sort as though their profession means they are wise men or something.

To arrive at the knowledge that God exists seems like one of the easiest things to do, given what we know, how we know and who (and what) we are who know things.

I don't pooh pooh those who believe in God but don't quite know what to do with Jesus or Judaeism. That's understandable as revelation by definition isn't something men can arrive to unaided.

But outright atheism?

-- Joe (joestong@yahoo.com), December 15, 2004.

It hardly needs to be pointed out that ANthony Flew and many atheists are exceptionally wise men. Im completley staggered by this, really blown away. This man has had a huge influence, his introductory philosophy text is pretty much regarded as the "Bible" in some cicrles and is one of the more demanding and complete introductions to the subject Ive ever read . Wow.

-- Kiwi (csisherwood@hotmail.com), December 15, 2004.

Exceptionally wise men or merely exceptionally well liked and fairly well read men?

Hegel was also well liked, and he preached a philosophy which praised the current regime...and viola! was made chair of the department of philosophy in Berlin. Did that make Hegel's system of philosophy right or anything like a realistic exposition of reality? NO.

Marx was revered as a great thinker and economist - his whole theory is based on several posits that he could not prove. But the writing was nice and it fit the mood of the times and viola, his work became famous. But wise?

Wise men are actually RIGHT about things. Clever scribblers who have friends in high places are just that. Not wise, just popular.

The history of philosophy is not a linear one wherein each new theory trumps the old...it's far more sociological than logic. The best theory in the world can be trumped by politics, morals of the age, and world events. In North Korea the only philosophy is "Junche" self- sufficency of Kim Il Sung on steroids. But this hasn't been matched with say, Personalism and found to be superior.

Rarely do philosophers have to compete with their foes for funding and support. If they did then we'd have a massive lay off of professors who've written 1000 page tomes on the thought of a German philosopher whose entire corpus could be burnt with zero loss to the intellectual patrimony of the world.

-- Joe (joestong@yahoo.com), December 21, 2004.