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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."

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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.

On the Net:

Varghese page:

Infidels on Flew:

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This
material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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