# Famous Atheist Now Believes in God...



## RickyReformed (Dec 10, 2004)

...more or less:

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=315976

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

The Associated Press

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. 










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## andreas (Dec 10, 2004)

***ABC News
Famous Atheist Now Believes in God 
One of World's Leading Atheists Now Believes in God, More or Less, 
Based on Scientific Evidence***


WHICH GOD? You do not believe in the true God because of scientific evidence.

andreas.


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## VirginiaHuguenot (Dec 10, 2004)

See this thread: http://www.puritanboard.com/forum/viewthread.php?tid=7631


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