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."

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.

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

Flew said he's best labeled a deist like Thomas Jefferson, whose God was not actively involved in people's lives.

I used to consider myself a deist, but I am now agnostic.

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.

I spend a lot of time worrying about what is the proper null hypothesis concerning the existence of God.

Normally, the burden of proof rests on the one making a positive assertion about existence. Since one can't prove a negative, the null hypothesis is always that the being in question doesn't exist, i.e. it is reasonable to say with great assurance that unicorns don't exist and that the burden of proof lies with the person who says that they do. This line of thought suggests that atheism is the correct null hypothesis and the burden of proof lies with those who say that God does exist.

However, "God" is not simply a physical entity like a unicorn, implicit in the concept is the notion of process, i.e. an unmoved mover and an ultimate cause. If we believe that every event has a cause, then it's tempting to postulate an "unmoved mover" as the null hypothesis that needs disproof. Kant demolished this argument by saying that there is no way of deciding between an endless series of causes and effects and a starting point, which is true in the case of philosophy uninformed by science, but now that modern physics points to a Big Bang, I think that the Cosmological argument (and hence some form of deism) is back on the table as a null hypothesis.

Those who assert a God actively involved in human affairs, or even in the course that the universe took after its origin, still carry the burden of proof for their worldviews, however.

I would say that the default position in this matter would be agnosticism rather than atheism. it's a position I always found myself on, and neither atheists nor believers ever managed to influence me enough to change my views. I assume that's true for a lot of people.

So, Stan, you're an "agnostic catholic?" Does that mean a cultural catholic who doesn't pay attention to the theological stuff?

More or less. It's like those atheist jews who immediately defend judaism when someone starts bashing it (no jokes now please, I'm merely drawing a comparison here).

Did you read that Edana? Told ya there was no contradiction between being culturally catholic, jewish, etc. and non-theist. :D

So, Stan, you're an "agnostic catholic?" Does that mean a cultural catholic who doesn't pay attention to the theological stuff?
That statement describes me perfectly, though I was as of yet unaware that I shared this stance with Stan.

More or less. It's like those atheist jews who immediately defend judaism when someone starts bashing it (no jokes now please, I'm merely drawing a comparison here).

Theology is just a mythology that conveys the ethical system and cultural norms of a society in metaphor. The core of Judaism is not worship of Yahweh but extreme ethnocentrism and Jewish supremacism, therefore, an atheist Jew still practices "Judaism" as long as he is a tribalist.

Similarly, most of Roman Catholicism captures the values and ideals of Medieval European culture (with a great deal of Graeco-Roman influence, of course). To be "culturally Catholic" is in my opinion equivalent to being a "good European."

Did you read that Edana? Told ya there was no contradiction between being culturally catholic, jewish, etc. and non-theist. :D

I would not say he is actually Catholic.

- "Theology is just a mythology that conveys the ethical system and cultural norms of a society in metaphor."


That's a typically cynical unbeliever's viewpoint. Rodney Stark disputes this idea, popularized by a secular French Jew Emile Durkheim (who apparently reasoned that all religions were as calculating bunk as the Talmudic Judaism he himself knew), in his book "For the Glory of God"

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0691114366/qid=1102696932/sr=1-3/ref=sr_1_3/104-7702123-0847164?v=glance&s=books


From a book review:

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2003/128/51.0.html


Data trumps Durkheim

Stark's analysis is a curious blend of social science and history. One virtue of his social scientific approach is a hunger for data: thus his eager debunking of distortions and exaggerations by religion's ideological enemies.

Social science began with a misunderstanding of religion, and Stark is fighting an uphill battle. Social science pioneer Emile Durkheim believed that religion was not about God or the gods, but was about rituals that bound the individual to society. By putting ritual above beliefs about the supernatural, Durkheim started social science on a road that led from absurdity to absurdity. "Eventually this line of analysis 'bottomed out' in such silliness as Rodney Needham's denial of the existence of any 'interior state' that might be called religious belief and S.R.F. Price's claim that religious belief is a purely Christian invention, so that when 'primitives' pray for things, they don't really mean it."

"So, then," Stark concludes, "let us finally be done with the claim that religion is all about ritual. Gods are the fundamental feature of religions." This is a sociology of religion that takes seriously what people believe. Stark knows that beliefs have consequences. They can even change the course of history. And in the book's final sentence, Stark claims that in the ways he describes, "Western civilization really was God-given."


Petr

I would not say he is actually Catholic.He did. So do countless other Catholics who accept the cultural side but don't take the theology literally. So there. :D

This guy is such a famous atheist that I have never heard of him before.

This guy is such a famous atheist that I have never heard of him before.

Haha. :D

This guy is just getting senile. The complexity of DNA in no way proves God exists. I'm not saying God doesn't exist, as that would spur a debate that is both pointless and time consuming, but that this man's reasoning is severly flawed.

This guy is such a famous atheist that I have never heard of him before.

He's also now saying he never said he believes in God, but that his words were distorted.


http://www.rationalistinternational.net/archive/en/rationalist_2004/137.html

Sorry to Disappoint, but I'm Still an Atheist!

Prof. Antony Flew

C. Carrier, current Editor in Chief of the Secular Web, tells me that "the internet has now become awash with rumors" that I "have converted to Christianity, or am at least no longer an atheist." Perhaps because I was born too soon to be involved in the internet world I had heard nothing of this rumour. So Mr. Carrier asks me to explain myself in cyberspace. This, with the help of the Internet Infidels, I now attempt.

Those rumours speak false. I remain still what I have been now for over fifty years, a negative atheist. By this I mean that I construe the initial letter in the word 'atheist' in the way in which everyone construes the same initial letter in such words as 'atypical' and 'amoral'. For I still believe that it is impossible either to verify or to falsify - to show to be false - what David Hume in his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion happily described as "the religious hypothesis." The more I contemplate the eschatological teachings of Christianity and Islam the more I wish I could demonstrate their falsity.