...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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