Famous Athiest now believes in God

[Guest guest]

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.