Body: | Professor Antony Flew confesses his belief in a creator!
Author of "Theology and Falsification," and "Darwinian Evolution"
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Click to View "the most famous atheist in the academic world over the last half-century, Professor Antony Flew of England's University of Reading, now accepts the existence of God" (Dallas Morning News)
Click to View "Professor Antony Flew, a prominent British philosopher who is considered the world's best-known atheist, has cited advancements in science as proof of the existence of God." (Insight On The News)
Click to View "British professor Antony Flew, for decades one of the world's leading philosophers of atheism, publicly announced that he now affirms the existence of a deity." (Dallas Morning News)
Click to View "Now, in a remarkable reversal, Mr. Flew holds that the universe was brought into being by an infinite intelligence." (Dallas Morning News)
Click to View "This is comparable to Hugh Hefner announcing that he is becoming a celibate." (Insight On The News)
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Read the three Newspaper articles below:
"Former Atheist Says God Exists"
"An Atheist's Apostasy"
"Academics viewing the universe through a narrow scope should rethink assumptions"
Although Flew, for the moment rejects Christianity, he gives his personal
views in an interview:
"My one and only piece of relevant evidence [for an Aristotelian God] is
the apparent impossibility of providing a naturalistic theory of the origin
from DNA of the first reproducing species ... [In fact] the only reason
which I have for beginning to think of believing in a First Cause god is
the impossibility of providing a naturalistic account of the origin of the
first reproducing organisms." (private interview with Antony Flew, Dec
2004)
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Former Atheist Says God Exists
By: Cliff Kinkaid (Editor of the AIM Report)
Insight On The News
December 21, 2004
It didn't make news, on the front or back pages of leading American
newspapers, but Professor Antony Flew, a prominent British philosopher who
is considered the world's best-known atheist, has cited advancements in
science as proof of the existence of God. This is comparable to Hugh Hefner
announcing that he is becoming a celibate.
At a symposium sponsored by the Institute for Metascientific Research, Flew
said he has come to believe in God based on developments in DNA research.
Flew, author of the book, Darwinian Evolution, declared, "What I think the
DNA material has done is show that intelligence must have been involved in
getting these extraordinarily diverse elements together. The enormous
complexity by which the results were achieved look to me like the work of
intelligence."
Associated Press distributed a December 9 story by religion writer Richard
N. Ostling about Flew's conversion. Flew told AP that his current ideas had
some similarity with those of U.S. "intelligent design" theorists, who
believe the complexity of life points to an intelligent source of life,
rather than the random and natural processes posited by Charles Darwin's
theory of evolution.
Flew's statements have been covered in Britain, where he is a professor,
but we found nothing about his transformation in major American newspapers
such as USA Today, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. Ostling's
status as a religion writer may help explain why. The secular press
considers this a religion story.
To its credit, however, the Seattle Times permitted Jonathan Witt of the
Discovery Institute to write a column noting Flew's conversion in the
context of discussing the usually taboo subject of the holes in Darwinian
theory.
Witt noted that Darwin and his contemporaries thought a single cell was a
simple blob of protoplasm and that it wouldn't have been difficult for
nature to randomly produce something so simple. "In those days the cell was
a black box, a mystery. But in the 20th century, scientists were able to
open that black box and peek inside," he notes. "There they found not a
simple blob, but a world of complex circuits, miniaturized motors and
digital code. We now know that even the simplest functional cell is almost
unfathomably complex, containing at least 250 genes and their corresponding
proteins."
"Darwin's Black Box" is the title of Michael J. Behe's 1996 book. Behe, a
professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University, emphasizes the complexity
of molecular systems such as the bacterial flagellum. Identified by
electron microscopes, it is what Behe calls an "irreducibly complex system"
that is necessarily composed of at least three parts: a paddle, a rotor,
and a motor. He argues that Darwinian theory cannot account for it.
But those who believe in intelligent design or find gaping holes in the
theory of evolution frequently encounter a hostile press. The Discovery
Institute recently provided to Accuracy in Media a thick file of complaints
about the way their representatives have been treated by the media,
especially National Public Radio. The Discovery Institute focuses on the
issue of whether there is any evidence of design in nature, rather than
whether there is a designer. Still, its representatives tend to be
portrayed in religious terms by the media.
Such a tactic is common operating procedure by the ACLU, which is
determined to portray any alternative to evolution as religious and
therefore not allowed to be taught or even discussed in the public schools.
Back in 2001, when the Public Broadcasting Service aired the seven-part
series, Evolution, financed by Microsoft co-founder and billionaire Paul G.
Allen, it asked Discovery Institute scientists to appear on the last
segment dealing with God and religion. It was a trick. The institute
rejected this ploy, saying that its representatives had scientific
objections to evolution and that they should be included in the scientific
episodes.
PBS went ahead with its one-sided program anyway. In response, the
Discovery Institute produced a 152-page viewers guide, noting that the
series distorts the scientific evidence, ignores scientific disagreements
over Darwin's theory, and misrepresents the theory's critics. Because the
PBS series is still being marketed to high schools around the country, the
Discovery Institute critique continues to be helpful and relevant. You can
find it at: www.reviewevolution.com
PBS and the rest of the media would be well-advised to follow the lead of
Antony Flew, who said that his life has been guided by the principle of
Plato's Socrates: "Follow the evidence, wherever it leads." Journalists can
begin their investigation of the Socratic principle by simply reporting the
facts surrounding Flew's amazing evolution and the implications that his
statements have for a questionable theory that continues to be taught as
the Gospel in the public schools.
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An Atheist's Apostasy:
By: Editorial Board
Dallas Morning News
December 15, 2004
An intellectual bombshell dropped last week when British professor Antony
Flew, for decades one of the world's leading philosophers of atheism,
publicly announced that he now affirms the existence of a deity.
To be sure, Mr. Flew has not become an adherent of any creed. He simply
believes that science points to the existence of some sort of intelligent
designer of the universe. He says evidence from DNA research convinces him
that the genetic structure of biological life is too complex to have
evolved entirely on its own. Though the 81-year-old philosopher believes
Darwinian theory explains a lot, he contends that it cannot account for how
life initially began.
We (the Editorial Board of the Dallas Morning News) found this conversion
interesting in light of last year's controversy regarding proposed
revisions to the state's (Texas) high school biology textbooks. Our view
then was that while religion must be kept out of science classes,
intellectual honesty demands that when science produces reliable data
challenging the prevailing orthodoxies, students should be taught them.
We were bothered by Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin's statement that
for scientists, materialism must be "absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine
Foot in the door." That's called stacking the deck.
Mr. Flew may be dead wrong, but it's refreshing to see that an academic of
his stature is unafraid to let new facts change his mind. The philosopher
told The Associated Press that if admirers are upset with his about-face,
then "that's too bad. My whole life has been guided by the principle of
Plato's Socrates: Follow the evidence, wherever it leads."
If the scientific data are compelling enough to cause an atheist academic
of Antony Flew's reputation to recant much of his life's work, why
shouldn't Texas schoolchildren be taught the controversy?
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Academics viewing the universe through a narrow scope should rethink assumptions
Dallas Morning News
By Roy Abraham Varghese
December 15, 2004
Last week, The Associated Press broke the news that the most famous atheist
in the academic world over the last half-century, Professor Antony Flew of
England's University of Reading, now accepts the existence of God.
Mr. Flew's best-known plaint for atheism, "Theology and Falsification," was
delivered in 1950 to the Socratic Club, chaired by none other than C.S.
Lewis. This paper went on to become the most widely reprinted philosophical
publication of the last five decades and set the agenda for modern atheism.
Now, in a remarkable reversal, Mr. Flew holds that the universe was brought
into being by an infinite intelligence.
"What I think the DNA material has done is show that intelligence must have
been involved in getting these extraordinarily diverse elements together,"
he said. "The enormous complexity by which the results were achieved look
to me like the work of intelligence."
Given the conventional wisdom of some psychologists that people rarely, if
ever, change their worldview after the age of 30, this radical new position
adopted by an 81-year-old thinker may seem startling.
But Mr. Flew's change was consistent with his career-long principle of
following the evidence where it led him. And his newfound theism is the
product neither of a Damascus road experience nor of fresh philosophical
arguments, but by his sustained analysis of scientific data.
Mr. Flew's conclusion is consistent with the actual beliefs of most modern
scientific pioneers, from Albert Einstein to quantum physicists like Max
Planck and Werner Heisenberg. In their view, the intelligence of the
universe - its laws - points to an intelligence that has no limitation - "a
superior mind," as Einstein put it.
Not a few of our men and women of letters, it would seem, have been looking
for God in all the wrong places. Those who dismiss God as a product of
psychological conditioning or pre-scientific myth-making have not come to
terms with the essential assumptions underlying the scientific enterprise.
Science assumes that the universe follows laws, which leads to the question
of how the laws of nature came into being. How does the electron know what
to do? In A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking asks what breathes fire
into the equations of science and gives a universe for them to describe.
The answer to the question of why the universe exists, he concluded, would
reveal to us "the mind of God."
Last May, I helped organize a New York University symposium on religion and
science, with the participation of Mr. Flew and others. Our starting point
was science's new knowledge that the universe's history is a story of
quantum leaps of intelligence, the sudden yet systematic appearance of
intrinsically intelligent systems arranged in an ascending order.
Many people assume that the intelligence in the universe somehow evolved
out of nonintelligence, given chance and enough time, and in the case of
living beings, through natural selection and random mutation. But even in
the most hardheadedly materialistic scenario, intelligence and intelligent
systems come fully formed from day one.
Matter came with all its ingenious, mathematically precise laws from the
time it first appeared. Life came fully formed with the incredibly
intelligent symbol processing of DNA, the astonishing phenomenon of
protein-folding and the marvel of replication from its very first
appearance. Language, the incarnation of conceptual thought with its
inexplicable structure of syntax, symbols and semantics, appeared out of
the blue, again with its essential infrastructure as is from day one.
The evidence we have shows unmistakably that there was no progressive,
gradual evolution of nonintelligence into intelligence in any of the
fundamental categories of energy, life or mind. Each one of the three had
intrinsically intelligent structures from the time each first appeared.
Each, it would seem, proceeds from an infinitely intelligent mind in a
precise sequence.
We can, if we want, declare that there is no reason why there are
reasonable laws, no explanation for the fact there are explanations, no
logic underlying logical processes. But this is manifestly not the
conclusion adopted by Einstein, Heisenberg and, most recently, Antony Flew.
Roy Abraham Varghese of Garland is the author of The Wonder of the World: A
Journey from Modern Science to the Mind of God (Tyr Publishing). He helped
organize presentations by Antony Flew in Dallas on two occasions. Readers
may contact Mr. Varghese through tyrpublishing.com.
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