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this guy figured it out.
Topic Started: May 25 2009, 09:50 PM (336 Views)
the breeze
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God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind
by Rich Deem
IntroductionProfessor Antony Flew and co-author Abraham Varghese have written a book, There Is a God, describing Flew's "conversion" from atheism to deism. Although Flew grew up as the son of a preacher, the problem of evil and Flew's academic studies led him to disbelieve in God's existence.

Flew's early writingsMuch of the first few chapters of There Is a God examined Flew's philosophical writings for atheism and against the existence of God. For Flew, at the time, there just wasn't enough evidence in support of the existence of God. By default, he reasoned, atheism was the logical choice, and it was up to the theists to present the evidence supporting their case for the existence of God. In all Flew's writings, it is apparent that the existence of evil is still a problem for him, and that he considers this problem as eliminating the possibility of God being personal. Flew still insists that the free will defense argument does not exonerate God from the responsibility for the existence of evil. However, at this point, I think most theists acknowledge that God is ultimately responsible for evil, but that evil is required to fulfill the purpose for the creation of the universe.

Flew's "conversion"In Antony Flew's 2004 "coming out" debut, he admitted that the evidence for design (specifically in DNA) was responsible for his change of mind regarding the existence of a divine Designer:

"Yes, I now think it does... almost entirely because of the DNA investigations. What I think the DNA material has done is that it has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce (life), that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinary diverse elements to work together."
In other discussions, Flew admitted that he had a difficult time believing in any scientific theories that attempted to explain the origin of the first replicator. He also indicated that the Big Bang creation event had been a problem for his atheism "because it suggested that the universe had a beginning and that the first sentence of Genesis (In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth") was related to an event in the universe." Flew was uncomfortable with alternatives, saying, "I did not find the multiverse alternative very helpful. The postulation of multiple universes, I maintained, is a truly desperate alternative."

ControversiesThere has been some controversy about the nature of Flew's "conversion" and role in the writing of There Is a God, especially in light of his advanced age. However, in subsequent interviews, Flew has maintained that the book accurately represents his current thinking on the existence of God. According to a press release from Harper Collins (the publisher):

"My name is on the book and it represents exactly my opinions. I would not have a book issued in my name that I do not 100 percent agree with. I needed someone to do the actual writing because I'm 84 and that was Roy Varghese's role. The idea that someone manipulated me because I'm old is exactly wrong. I may be old but it is hard to manipulate me. This is my book and it represents my thinking."
The idea that Antony Flew is not a deist was thoroughly rebutted by himself in his review of Richard Dawkins's book, The God Delusion.1 In the review, Flew calls Dawkins a "secularist bigot" and chides him for failing to address Einstein's deism or even properly defining deism anywhere in his book. Such writings do not reflect those of a senile old man.

Conclusion The book, There Is a God is an interesting examination of how a long-time atheist could change his mind about the existence of God. The book seems to be an honest examination of what Flew has changed his mind about and where he is still convinced that God could not be personally involved in human lives. Will Antony Flew become a Christian? In the book, he indicates that he is still open to Christianity, although there are many issues to resolve before that becomes a possibility. The book is quite readable without being overly technical, so it is recommended for all readers of this site.

Read Antony Flew's book, There Is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind
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You, breeze, claim he is right.

You sure?

He didn't claim to accept theism, but deism. IOW, he accepted a god who is impersonal. But even this was based on faulty science, as Victor J. Stenger shows in Flew's Flawed Science
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The late-in-life “conversion” of philosopher Antony Flew from atheism to belief in God has been widely reported in the media.1 In a recent interview with Gary Habermas, misleadingly titled “My Pilgrimage from Atheism to Theism,” Flew explains his new position, which he identifies as deism rather than theism.2 Richard Carrier has also conducted a correspondence with Flew, which clarifies some of the issues.3

Flew has not changed his mind on the inadequacy of the various philosophical arguments for God, which he very ably covered in his classic work, God and Philosophy.4 For example, he still does not buy into the moral argument, and remains unimpressed by the kalâm cosmological argument.5 However, he says he is impressed by recent claims that science has discovered evidence for God, although he admits to Carrier that he has not kept up with the scientific critiques of those arguments.6

Flew does not completely reject the theistic revelation of scientific facts. As he tells Habermas, “ I am open to it, but not enthusiastic about potential revelation from God. On the positive side, for example, I am very much impressed with physicist Gerald Schroeder’s comments on Genesis 1. That this biblical account might be scientifically accurate raises the possibility that it is revelation.”

Flew has also warmed to contemporary design arguments: “I think that the most impressive arguments for God’s existence are those that are supported by recent scientific discoveries. However, I think the argument to Intelligent Design is enormously stronger than it was when I first met it.”

Is Genesis “Scientifically Accurate”?

In his 1998 book, The Science of God, and other works,7 Gerald Schroeder attempts to reconcile the Bible with modern science. I will only address the particular claim that Flew finds impressive, that our current cosmological understanding of the history of the universe was revealed in Genesis.8

Schroeder asserts that the six days of creation in the Bible really span 15.75 billion years of “cosmic time.” This he regards as a successful biblical prophecy, since it is a mere two billion years greater than the current best estimate of the age of the universe.

Let us see how Schroeder extracts this remarkable prophecy from Genesis. He obtains the cosmic time for creation by multiplying the six days of biblical time by the redshift of light at a moment in the early universe called “quark confinement.” The redshift tells us how much the frequency of a particular atomic spectral line decreases because of the expansion of the universe. That frequency, Schroeder argues, is the only proper clock for measuring cosmic time. At quark confinement, when atomic nuclei first form, the redshift is about a factor of a trillion.

Actually, Schroeder assumes a redshift factor of 9.5x1011. A more precise value, by current estimates, is 4.4x1012, which would have the six biblical days of creation last 72 billion years. So the biblical prophecy, by Schroeder’s own method of calculation, is over four times too high.

In any case, according to Schroeder’s choice of numbers, the first biblical day of creation is eight billion cosmic years long. Each succeeding day is half as long as the previous one in cosmic time, so, by the magic of the exponential function, we arrive at the time of Adam and Eve (plus or minus two billion years), at which moment conventional human time takes over. The 6,000 or so years from then to now, in human time, is insignificant on this scale, the last day of creation being 250 million cosmic years long.

As usual, prophecy is easy after the fact. Clearly, Schroeder played around with the numbers until he found that quark confinement gave him roughly the answer he wanted—and even then, he used the wrong number. But in any case, our universe did not begin at quark confinement. It actually began about a millionth of a second earlier, at the so-called Planck time. At this time, the redshift was 1.6x1030. If Schroeder had used this redshift for his calculation, the six days of creation would have lasted over 1028 cosmic years!

Schroeder claims he chose quark confinement since, in day one of Genesis, “light is separated from darkness.” But there was no light at quark confinement. It took about another 400,000 years for light to appear, when radiation finally “decoupled” from matter. If Schroeder had used the redshift at radiation decoupling for his calculation, the six days of creation would have lasted only 6,000 years (not to be confused with the 6,000 years since Adam and Eve).

When I first read The Science of God, I thought it was a clever spoof on religious apologetics. Come on, Gerald, admit you are pulling Antony’s leg!

In fact, the creation story in Genesis looks nothing like Big Bang cosmology—no matter how you spin it. In the Bible, the universe is a firmament and Earth is fixed and immovable (not to mention flat). In reality, the universe is expanding and Earth rotates about the sun. In the Bible, Earth is created in the first “day,” before the sun, moon, and stars. In reality, Earth did not form until nine billion years after the Big Bang and after the sun and many other stars.

Fine-tuning and Intelligent Design

Next, let me turn to the two other contemporary scientific claims that Flew finds impressive—fine-tuning and Intelligent Design. These are no more than modernized variations on the ancient argument from design, which can be simply stated: I cannot understand how the universe and the enormous complexity of living things we see around us can have come about naturally. Therefore, they must have been created supernaturally.

In 1802, William Paley could not understand how the human eye, so fine-tuned for the collection of light and formation of images, could have developed naturally. So, he concluded, it had to be designed by God. Now we understand how eyes evolved several times by natural selection.

Today, Antony Flew cannot understand how the universe, so fine-tuned for the manufacture of the materials needed for living organisms, could have happened naturally. So, he concludes, it most likely had to be designed by at least some kind of minimal deity.

Apparently, Flew is unaware that physicists and cosmologists are not as totally stumped by fine-tuning as he seems to be. While slight changes in the constants of physics could make life as we know it impossible, what about life as we do not know it? We have no reason to believe that our kind of carbon-based life is the only form that is possible under every possible variation in constants and the laws of physics. I have shown that long-lived stars, which are regarded as necessary for the building of the chemical elements that constitute living structures, can be expected for a huge range of physical constants.9 Similarly, Anthony Aguir[r]e examined the universes that result when six cosmological parameters are varied by orders of magnitude and found that they do not preclude the existence of intelligent life.10

Furthermore, modern cosmology indicates that multiple universes may exist with different constants and laws of physics. In that case, it is no more surprising that we live in a universe suited for us than it is that we live on the planet suited for us—Earth rather than Mars or Venus. The universe is not fine-tuned to life; life is fine-tuned to the universe.

Theists argue that the multiple universe hypothesis is nonparsimonious—a violation of Occam’s razor. On the contrary, multiple universes are implied by our best current knowledge. It takes an additional hypothesis, not required by the data, to rule them out—thus multiplying hypotheses beyond necessity. No one thinks the atomic model, which multiplied the entities we deal with in physics by a factor of 1024, violated Occam’s razor.

However, I must emphasize that the failure of the fine-tuning argument does not rest upon the existence of multiple universes. It fails even for a single universe, since some form of life might have developed in whatever way that lonely universe happened to come about. At least we do not currently have the knowledge to say otherwise.

Finally, Flew says, “the argument to Intelligent Design is enormously stronger than it was when I first met it.” I am surprised that such a noted philosopher cannot see the fatal flaws in the Intelligent Design argument, as exemplified by Michael Behe’s “irreducible complexity”11 and William Dembski’s “design inference.”12 They assert that a complex system can only arise out of something with high intelligence. Although complexity is difficult to define, we can reasonably expect a highly intelligent entity to be highly complex. Thus, it can only have arisen out of something even more intelligent and complex, in infinite regress. It’s Intelligent Designers all the way down, not Aristotle’s first cause, as Flew seems to think.

Fortunately, we can avoid an infinite regress. We can just stop at the world. There is no reason why the physical universe cannot be it’s own first cause. As we know from both everyday experience and sophisticated scientific observations, complex systems develop from simpler systems all the time in nature—with not even low intelligence required. A mist of water vapor can freeze into a snowflake. Winds can carve out great cathedrals in rock. Brontosaurs can evolve from bacteria.

And our relatively complex universe could have arisen out of the entity that is the simplest and most mindless of all—the void.

Notes

1. Associated Press, December 9, 2004.

2. Antony Flew and Gary Habermas, "My Pilgrimage from Atheism to Theism," Philosophia Christi (Winter, 2004), to be published on the Web at http://www.biola.edu/antonyflew/index.cfm (accessed December 12, 2004).

3. Richard Carrier, “Antony Flew Considers God … Sort Of," The Secular Web (October 10, 2004), http://www.secweb.org/asset.asp?AssetID=369 (accessed on December 13, 2004).

4. Antony Flew, God and Philosophy (New York: Dell, 1966).

5. William Lane Craig, The Kalâm Cosmological Argument, Library of Philosophy and Religion (London: Macmillan, 1979).

6. Victor J. Stenger, Has Science Found God? The Latest Results in the Search for Purpose in the Universe (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2003).

7. Gerald L. Schroeder, Genesis and the Big Bang: The Discovery of the Harmony between Modern Science and the Bible (New York: Bantam Books, 1992); The Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom (New York: Broadway Books, 1998); The Hidden Face of God, How Science Reveals the Ultimate Truth (New York: The Free Press, 2001).

8. I reviewed The Science of God in Victor J. Stenger, “Fitting the Bible to the Data,” Skeptical Inquirer 23, no. 4, (1999): 67. See also The Secular Web, http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/vic_stenger/schrev.html (accessed December 13, 2004) and Has Science Found God?, pp. 165–170. A detailed critique of Schroeder’s three books can be found in Perakh, Mark, “Not a Very Big Bang about Genesis,” Talk Reason (December 2001), http://www.talkreason.org/articles/schroeder.cfm (accessed December 15, 2004).

9. Victor J. Stenger, The Unconscious Quantum: Metaphysics in Modern Physics and Cosmology (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 1995), pp. 235–38; “Natural Explanations for the Anthropic Coincidences,” Philo 3, no. 2 (2001): 50–67.

10. Anthony Aguir[r]e, “The Cold Big Bang Cosmology as a Counter-example to Several Anthropic Arguments,” Physical Review D64 (2001): 083508.

11. Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York: The Free Press, 1996).

12. William A. Dembski, The Design Inference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).


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Not doing your homework, breeze, makes you look foolish.

Antony Flew Considers God...Sort Of
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...The fact of the matter is: Flew hasn't really decided what to believe. He affirms that he is not a Christian--he is still quite certain that the Gods of Christianity or Islam do not exist, that there is no revealed religion, and definitely no afterlife of any kind (he stands by everything he argued in his 2001 book Merely Mortal: Can You Survive Your Own Death?). But he is increasingly persuaded that some sort of Deity brought about this universe, though it does not intervene in human affairs, nor does it provide any postmortem salvation. He says he has in mind something like the God of Aristotle, a distant, impersonal "prime mover." It might not even be conscious, but a mere force. In formal terms, he regards the existence of this minimal God as a hypothesis that, at present, is perhaps the best explanation for why a universe exists that can produce complex life. But he is still unsure. In fact, he asked that I not directly quote him yet, until he finally composes his new introduction to a final edition of his book God and Philosophy, due out next year. He hasn't completed it yet, precisely because he is still examining the evidence and thinking things over. Anything he says now, could change tomorrow....

Update (December 2004)

Flew has now given me permission to quote him directly. I asked him point blank what he would mean if he ever asserted that "probably God exists," to which he responded (in a letter in his own hand, dated 19 October 2004):

I do not think I will ever make that assertion, precisely because any assertion which I am prepared to make about God would not be about a God in that sense ... I think we need here a fundamental distinction between the God of Aristotle or Spinoza and the Gods of the Christian and the Islamic Revelations.

Rather, he would only have in mind "the non-interfering God of the people called Deists--such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin." Indeed, he remains adamant that "theological propositions can neither be verified nor falsified by experience," exactly as he argued in "Theology and Falsification." Regarding J. P. Moreland using Flew in support of Moreland's own belief in the supernatural, Flew says "my God is not his. His is Swinburne's. Mine is emphatically not good (or evil) or interested in human conduct" and does not perform miracles of any kind. Furthermore, Flew took great care to emphasize repeatedly to me that:

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.

He cites, in fact, the improbability arguments of Schroeder, which I have refuted online, and the entire argument to the impossibility of natural biogenesis I have refuted in Biology & Philosophy.

So what of the claim that Flew was persuaded by the Kalam Cosmological Argument? Flew "cannot recall" writing any letter to Geivett claiming "the kalam cosmological argument is a sound argument" for God but he confesses his memory fails him often now so he can't be sure. Nevertheless, I specifically asked what Antony thought of the Kalam, to which he answered:

If and insofar as it is supposed to prove the existence of a First Cause of the Big Bang, I have no objection, but this is not at all the same as a proof of the existence of a spirit and all the rest of Richard Swinburne's definition of 'God' which is presently accepted as standard throughout the English speaking and philosophical world.

Also, regarding another rumor that Flew has been attending Quaker meetings, Antony says "I have, I think, attended Quaker meetings on at least 3 or 4 occasions, and one was at the wedding of a cousin," and thus hardly a religious statement on his part but a family affair. Nevertheless, for him and his family generally, he says "I think the main attraction" of Quakerism has been "the lack of doctrines." On the whole God thing, though, Flew is still examining the articles I sent him, so he may have more to say in the future....

Much more follows.

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ngc1514
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Millions of scientists around the world and one changes his mind and the fundies whoop and holler!

This does not represent a success for creationism (which Flew does NOT support wholeheartedly as Chris pointed out in his reference) but an abysmal failure. The fact that a single scientist changed his mind and now holds to deism (not fundamentalist biblical inerrancy) shows that the claims of the fundamentalist remain unconvincing. It's seen as a victory because it happens so rarely, while you'd expect it to be a more common occurrence *IF* the creationists were offering a valid scientific theory.

They are not. The creationist camp - including the Intelligent Designers - have never offered a testable, refutable scientific theory. If you read their stuff, all they ATTEMPT to do (with no success) is tear down evolution and the Big Bang while refusing to acknowledge (through willful ignorance) that their success in this endeavor will not bolster their own views.

As the Robin Ince says... "A magic man done it."

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