AND YOU HAD TO IGNORE PHYSICS TO MAKE IT TO THE '80s:

Where the Evidence Leads: a review of There Is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind by Antony Flew with Roy Abraham Varghese (Logan Paul Gage, 5/29/2008, The American Spectator)

Unlike dramatic religious conversions, Antony Flew's change of heart seems based on sober assessment of science's advance over his lifetime. As he puts it, his is "a pilgrimage of reason and not of faith." "This is the world picture, as I see it, that has emerged from modern science."

By the 1980s, philosophy of religion was moving beyond discussing the meaningfulness of theological claims and the coherence of the concept of God, beyond discussing the burden of proof. The hot topic became the implications of Big Bang Cosmology. In 1976 Flew breezily declared, "I myself am inclined to believe that the universe was without beginning and will be without end." But as the 20th century came to a close this grew increasingly difficult. Alternate cosmological models attempting to explain away the evidence for a beginning to the universe, such as the Steady State Model, repeatedly failed.

In biology, Flew is little impressed with Dawkins's selfish gene theory -- that "we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes" and so we should "teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish." Replies the philosopher, "If any of this were true, it would be no use to go on.... No eloquence can move programmed robots. But in fact none of it is true -- or even faintly sensible. Genes.... do not and cannot necessitate our conduct."

Nor is Flew satisfied with zoologists like Desmond Morris who, in The Naked Ape and The Human Zoo, gives "a systematic denial of all that is most peculiar to our species.... He ignores or explains away the obvious differences between human beings and other species."

But Flew thinks intelligence most evident in DNA. As he said in his first appearance as a deist, a 2004 symposium at NYU:

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 extraordinarily diverse elements to work together. It's the enormous complexity of the number of elements and the enormous subtlety of the ways they work together. The meeting of these two parts at the right time by chance is simply minute...which looks to me like the work of intelligence.

Also important to Flew's transformation were arguments against the unaided emergence of the first self-replicating life forms (including their encoded information and nano-scale information processing systems) and the design displayed in the laws of nature that allow for complex life.

The genesis prolem is the point at which both Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett cop to being Designists. From there it's just a question of aesthetics.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 1, 2008 8:29 PM