AN ATHEIST RECONSIDERS

A Great Re-Thinker !

Professor Antony Flew is a British philosopher who for most of his academic life has been a prominent atheist. While an undergraduate at Oxford he regularly attended C.S.Lewis’s Socratic Club but was unconvinced by Lewis’s morality argument for the existence of God as outlined in his book of Christian apologetics ‘Mere Christianity’ Although he found Lewis to be "an eminently reasonable man" and "by far the most powerful of Christian apologists for the sixty or more years following his founding of that club," Flew pursued his own ideological path presenting his atheism finally in the 1966 published book ‘God and Philosophy‘. In this and subsequent works he maintained that one should presume atheism until evidence for God surfaces. In an interview in 2004 he said that such evidence had now emerged as far as he was concerned and that he had become a deist, although emphatically pointing out that he was not a Christian believer. He clarified these views in the 2007 book ‘There Is A God’. This turn around by such a leading figure in the atheist movement caused huge consternation amongst his former colleagues, some even accusing Flew of mental ineptitude because of his age (he was born in 1923). Here are a few remarks made by Antony Flew since his revised view on the existence of God… ~GOSh.~

GOD'S DESIGN

.... " Well, I don’t believe in the God of any revelatory system, although I am open to
that. But it seems to me that the case for an Aristotelian God who has the characteristics of power and also intelligence, is now much stronger than it ever was before. And it was from Aristotle that Aquinas drew the materials for producing his five ways of, hopefully, proving the existence of his God. Aquinas took them, reasonably enough, to prove, if they proved anything, the existence of the God of the Christian revelation. But Aristotle himself never produced a definition of the word 'God' which is a curious fact. But this concept still led to the basic outline of the Five Ways...
I think that the most impressive arguments for God’s existence are those that are
supported by recent scientific discoveries. I’ve never been much impressed by the kalam cosmological argument, and I don’t think it has gotten any stronger recently. However, I think the argument to Intelligent Design is enormously stronger than it was when I first met it…
It seems to me that Richard Dawkins constantly overlooks the fact that
Darwin himself, in the fourteenth chapter of The Origin of Species, pointed out that his whole argument began with a being which already possessed reproductive powers. This is the creature the evolution of which a truly comprehensive theory of evolution must give some account. Darwin himself was well aware that he had not produced such an account. It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design…
The greatest thing is their (John and Charles Wesley) tremendous achievement of creating the Methodist movement mainly among the working class. Methodism made it impossible to build a really substantial Communist Party in Britain and provided the country with a generous supply of men and women of sterling moral character from mainly working class families. Its decline is a substantial part of the explosions both of unwanted motherhood and of crime in recent decades. There is also the tremendous determination shown by John Wesley in spending year after year riding for miles every day, preaching more than seven sermons a week and so on. I have only recently been told of John Wesley’s great controversy against predestination and in favour of the Arminian alternative. Certainly John Wesley was one of my country’s many great sons . "

Professor Antony Flew