Atheist changes his mind - There is a God after all.
Atheist changes his mind
Tom Harpur
The Toronto Star
"There is a God, atheist believes." This pre-Christmas headline graced a story about the conversion to faith of one of the best-known British atheists of our time, Anthony Flew. God will not have been surprised - or even particularly moved - by this announcement, but thinkers and teachers in the English-speaking world will certainly sit up and pay attention.
Flew has been a leading warrior for atheism for more than 50 years with a flood of articles, debates, and books to his credit. Oddly enough, our paths crossed briefly during the stirring months after he first dropped his major bombshell, an article based upon a paper first read to the Oxford Socratic Club. It was called "Theology and Falsification" and argued that since the evidence for God can't be subjected to the kind of falsification which is always possible in the empirical realm of science (where you create a theory and then test it by the hard data of experimentation), it is virtually meaningless.
The Socratic Club, a weekly religious forum for debate and discussion, was chaired by C.S. Lewis and I had the privilege of becoming a member of it in the fall of 1951 during first term at Oxford. I remember Flew and his numerous cohorts who dominated philosophy at the time, including such worthies as A.J. Ayer, and the Logical Positivist, Professor Gilbert Ryle. Since my philosophy tutor, Richard Robinson, was also an atheist, it was an interesting atmosphere for candidates for "holy orders" like me to think and study in.
Flew campaigned for his initial "no-God" faith for half a century while holding teaching posts at several different British universities and by regular lecture tours in the United States and Canada. His essential argument remained the same: the "evidence" for God falls like a pack of cards under scientific scrutiny.
Now, at the age of 81, Flew has recanted. As the story announcing his change of heart put it: "He now believes in God, more or less, based upon scientific evidence." He says so in a new book, God and Philosophy, to be published next year and in a new video made for TV.
Flew first hinted at his seismic shift in a letter to the August issue of Britain's Philosophy Now Magazine. He wrote: "It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic (i.e. God-free) theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism."
In his video Has Science Discovered God? he clarifies this by saying that current investigations of DNA have shown "by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce (life), that intelligence must have been involved."
In other words, some kind of super-intelligence is, he now realizes, the only adequate explanation for the origins of life and the complex multiplicity of the natural world.
There is a slight catch, however, in the "more or less" part of this story. Orthodox believers in all faiths and camps will have to wait a long time before Flew comes knocking at their door seeking admission and acceptance.
He has said that he is probably best labelled as a deist like Thomas Jefferson, that is, one who believes in a God who creates the world and then lets it run much in the fashion of a clockmaker who sets things going and then leaves it alone. This is not a God who gets involved in people's lives or who is in the business of answering prayer.
The AP story, by religion specialist Richard Ostling, quotes Flew thus: "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, cosmic Saddam Husseins."
He went on to add, however - and this is quite significant in my view - that "it could be a person in the sense of a being that has intelligence and purpose, I suppose." He's not thinking of a person as we think of persons (God as the "Big-Guy-in-the-Sky"), but rather of a being who can best be described as trans-personal or meta-personal instead.
Theologians and philosophers in particular will await his book with some excitement. It will be interesting to see how far his "personalizing" of a Supreme Intelligence goes. Deism, itself, a sort of "natural religion," first came into fashion in the 17th and 18th centuries in England. The philosopher John Locke objected to being called a deist, but his book The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) profoundly influenced the movement.
The classical exposition of deism is J. Toland's Christianity Not Mysterious (finished at Oxford in 1696) in which he argued against the ideas of revelation and the supernatural altogether, maintaining instead belief in a God wholly comprehensible by human reason. He narrowly escaped prison over this and his books were burned in Ireland, his native land.
Tom Harpur
Atheist changes his mind
Tom Harpur
The Toronto Star
"There is a God, atheist believes." This pre-Christmas headline graced a story about the conversion to faith of one of the best-known British atheists of our time, Anthony Flew. God will not have been surprised - or even particularly moved - by this announcement, but thinkers and teachers in the English-speaking world will certainly sit up and pay attention.
Flew has been a leading warrior for atheism for more than 50 years with a flood of articles, debates, and books to his credit. Oddly enough, our paths crossed briefly during the stirring months after he first dropped his major bombshell, an article based upon a paper first read to the Oxford Socratic Club. It was called "Theology and Falsification" and argued that since the evidence for God can't be subjected to the kind of falsification which is always possible in the empirical realm of science (where you create a theory and then test it by the hard data of experimentation), it is virtually meaningless.
The Socratic Club, a weekly religious forum for debate and discussion, was chaired by C.S. Lewis and I had the privilege of becoming a member of it in the fall of 1951 during first term at Oxford. I remember Flew and his numerous cohorts who dominated philosophy at the time, including such worthies as A.J. Ayer, and the Logical Positivist, Professor Gilbert Ryle. Since my philosophy tutor, Richard Robinson, was also an atheist, it was an interesting atmosphere for candidates for "holy orders" like me to think and study in.
Flew campaigned for his initial "no-God" faith for half a century while holding teaching posts at several different British universities and by regular lecture tours in the United States and Canada. His essential argument remained the same: the "evidence" for God falls like a pack of cards under scientific scrutiny.
Now, at the age of 81, Flew has recanted. As the story announcing his change of heart put it: "He now believes in God, more or less, based upon scientific evidence." He says so in a new book, God and Philosophy, to be published next year and in a new video made for TV.
Flew first hinted at his seismic shift in a letter to the August issue of Britain's Philosophy Now Magazine. He wrote: "It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic (i.e. God-free) theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism."
In his video Has Science Discovered God? he clarifies this by saying that current investigations of DNA have shown "by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce (life), that intelligence must have been involved."
In other words, some kind of super-intelligence is, he now realizes, the only adequate explanation for the origins of life and the complex multiplicity of the natural world.
There is a slight catch, however, in the "more or less" part of this story. Orthodox believers in all faiths and camps will have to wait a long time before Flew comes knocking at their door seeking admission and acceptance.
He has said that he is probably best labelled as a deist like Thomas Jefferson, that is, one who believes in a God who creates the world and then lets it run much in the fashion of a clockmaker who sets things going and then leaves it alone. This is not a God who gets involved in people's lives or who is in the business of answering prayer.
The AP story, by religion specialist Richard Ostling, quotes Flew thus: "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, cosmic Saddam Husseins."
He went on to add, however - and this is quite significant in my view - that "it could be a person in the sense of a being that has intelligence and purpose, I suppose." He's not thinking of a person as we think of persons (God as the "Big-Guy-in-the-Sky"), but rather of a being who can best be described as trans-personal or meta-personal instead.
Theologians and philosophers in particular will await his book with some excitement. It will be interesting to see how far his "personalizing" of a Supreme Intelligence goes. Deism, itself, a sort of "natural religion," first came into fashion in the 17th and 18th centuries in England. The philosopher John Locke objected to being called a deist, but his book The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) profoundly influenced the movement.
The classical exposition of deism is J. Toland's Christianity Not Mysterious (finished at Oxford in 1696) in which he argued against the ideas of revelation and the supernatural altogether, maintaining instead belief in a God wholly comprehensible by human reason. He narrowly escaped prison over this and his books were burned in Ireland, his native land.
Tom Harpur
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