By way of Shamrocks, we discover that Antony Flew has now become a deist. Well known for his atheist view points over the past half century, this conversion of sorts may be a shock to some.
According to this ABC News report, Flew says, “My whole life has been guided by the principle of Plato’s Socrates: Follow the evidence, wherever it leads.” His evidence for a God appears to be through he investigation of DNA, which Flew comments on: “has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce (life), that intelligence must have been involved.”
This is interesting to me personally, as I’ve read some of Flew’s work in the past, although casually and not always understanding everything. I did a bit more research after reading the ABC News article, and found another article on The Secular Web where Richard Carrier quotes Flew. For those who are looking to Flew for evidence of a personal God, you won’t find it here. Instead, Flew apparently is comparing himself to the Jeffersonian type of Deism. When asked if he ever “asserted that “probably God exists,”” Flew replies:
“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.”
Which is interesting to me. Some may know that although I was brought up in an Evangelical family, I have had some important (to me) philosophical problems with the teachings of Judaeo-Christianity regarding theology. On the other hand, I do have a difficult time with the concept that everything “is,” by random chance. In that regard, I still consider myself a theologian – perhaps not as defined as Christians, but I am interested in knowing more about the existence or perhaps, previous existence, of a God.
I have my own thoughts which I would ask you to not offer up proofs for, as I don’t have any. My own thoughts are simply ideas, which seem to make sense to me after looking at various religions and philosophies, and motivated by the book by Frank Tipler entitled The Physics of Immortality : Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead.
But anyhow, the idea of Antony Flew modifying his beliefs about intelligent design are interesting to me.