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Cassius

Philosopher says scientific evidence changed his mind

The Associated Press
Updated: 6:04 p.m. ET Dec. 9, 2004
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6688917/

NEW YORK - 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 he says so on a video released Thursday.

At age 81, after decades of insisting that belief is a mistake, the professor, 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.

Cassius: It sounds like conjecture to me. First of all, why does the only good explanation now become the correct one? Occam's Razor has led to as many fallacies as it has truths. Also, why does the intelligence have to be super-intelligent? Isn't it possible that we created ourselves and removed all memory of the creation?

Flew said he was 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.”

Cassius: I'm glad he doesn't go so far as to endorse any modern religion.

A gradual conversion
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 the 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.

He held fast to atheism for what... 66 years? And a few months convinces him he was wrong his entire life? Doesn't sound to me like he reached any "scientific" conclusion, or he would have reached it much earlier in his life. Sounds to me more like he was converted. I bet there is something going on behind the scenes here.

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?”

I'd be interested to see his reasoning for drawing this conclusion. Surely he realizes that the universe existed long, long before homo sapien did. It's not possible that the necessary arrangements occurred after billions upon billions of years of trying other arrangements, as Darwin would suggest? Trillions of years, perhaps?

The video draws from a discussion last May in New York 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 the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

‘Follow the evidence, wherever it leads’
The first hint of Flew’s turn was a letter in 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.

No more difficult, I would think, than constructing a supernaturalistic theory.

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 Books.

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.”

Discussion among the unfaithful
Last week, Richard Carrier, a writer and Columbia University graduate student, posted new material based on correspondence with Flew on the atheistic Web page Infidels.org. Carrier reassured atheists that Flew accepted only a “minimal God” and believed in no afterlife.

If it's so "minimal", why does it need to be called "God"? The fact is, the only thing you've said about this entity thus far is that it must have been intelligent in order to create the conditions necessary for life (a conclusion I'm not sure I follow). Even so, we are intelligent, yet we are not Gods. We have no such omnipotence, omniscience, or omnipresence. Yet all these things are suggested when you call this entity "God". Is it not possible that another race, very similar to ours, set events in motion that created our universe billions of years ago? There are a thousand, a million, nearly infinite possibility of what the "first cause" actually was -- why do you seek to purport the name "God" for this entity when you know virtually nothing about it? This entity could be malicious for all we know. This entity could be DEAD, for all we know. Am I wrong? Is there anything to suggest that this "first cause" that happened so very, very long ago STILL exists, today?

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.”

Because he's getting senile and jumping to conclusions because he's nervous about the end of his life... you mean. I think we've got a case of Pascal's Argument, here.

Flew told The Associated Press that his current ideas had some similarity with those of U.S. “intelligent design” theorists, who see evidence for a guiding force in the construction of the universe. He accepts Darwinian evolution but doubts that it can explain the ultimate origins of life.

Flew, the son of a Methodist minister, 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.

Rightly so. When you persist in answering all the unanswerable questions of your life with "God", the only thing you end up with is a God that you know nothing about except that he "works in mysterious ways." God is such an all-encompassing term that it means nothing at all except to people who are afraid to live a life not knowing what the purpose is or if there is one at all. Me, I'd rather be honest with myself and say that I don't know the answers, rather than making up some "God" who does everything that I have no other explanation for, and who has only my best interests at heart and will one day let me live eternally in a land where no one is sad or sick.

Another landmark was his 1984 article “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 existed.

Then follow your own advice, professor. Don't just say "I think there's a God because it's too hard to explain the universe without him." You're not even defining what "he" is, so you're not explaining the universe at all! You're just taking all the hard questions in life and scribbling out "unknown" as the answers to replace them with "God". What does that accomplish, and what justifies such a conclusion -- that all the answers, independently, refer to the same being?

So follow your own advice. The burden of proof is on you. Don't just suggest that it's too hard to come up with a naturalistic explanation for the origin of life. Proof that no such explanation exists. Then I'll believe you.

© 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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HappyMan

not enough for me to juimp on the band wagon........

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pipehitter

Doing the rounds at the moment is this, seen on a few newsgroups:

Top atheist and professor Anthony Flew has finally admitted the obvious--that life is too complex to have arisen by natural causes. He now believes in the essentials of Intelligent Design theory and a "limited God", based on scientific evidence.

The greatest scientific deceit in history has been dealt a serious blow.

Rubbish. Flew's deism is antithetical to Christian and Islamic theism, for a start (Flew says as much) and all he is claiming is Spinoza's god - the distant and first causing god who has no personal agenda or relationships. And his reason is surprisingly weak - he cannot conceive how DNA got going.

Now I think there is a flaw here. It is often said (for example by Dawkins) that evolution got going when the first molecule acquired (by "chance") the property of being able to replicate itself. So for evolution to begin there had to be, it is said, a first replicator.

But this is a mistake - replicators are a sufficient cause of evolution, but they are not, in my opinion, necessary for it. And if they are not necessary for it (and in particular not necessary for natural selection) then they can themselves evolve using ordinary Darwinian processes of optimisation of fidelity of reproduction by selection.

If the original protobiological reactions generated copies of themselves, there will be differences in the stability and fidelity of copying for the different elements of that reaction cycle. Variants that are more stable will generate more copies, and variants that are more high fidelity than others will generate more copies like themselves. Selection will do the rest, and the end product will be replicators (RNA initially, followed by DNA). So there is a (feasible) argument that accounts for the evolution of replicators before there were any. Hence, the conclusion is based on an argumentum ad ignoratium.

There is no logical conundrum here. It concerns me that Flew does not see this, but then he is only following the standard opinion of hard selectionists like Dawkins. But his argument is an argument from ignorance. He may find it compelling personally, but it is not compelling logically.

Cassius

Agreed. It strikes me as odd, though, that someone who refutes their own lifetime of work based on such flimsy reasoning and a few months of frustration could ever have been a "top scientist" of anything. I mean, this strikes me as totally weak, and I'm a layperson, not a real scientist. I wonder what his peers think of his change of heart?

The more I think about this whole thing, the more I think the mistake lies in the fact that this individual seems to be teetering between theism and atheism. Whenever one becomes frustrating for him, he abandons all fervence for that cause and switches to the other side.

You know... there is a third alternative. It's called AGNOSTICISM, genius. Ever think that maybe the existence of God cannot be proved or disproved at all? Did you consider that when the frustrations of determining a naturalistic explanation overwhelmed you, or did you jump straight to the Bible Belt?

Personally, I think agnosticism is the only belief system that logic supports, and I think that because I happen to think that religions (especially modern religions) define "God" vaguely -- and quite on purpose. How can you prove or disprove the existence of a being that is labelled as responsible for all questions to which no answer is currently known?

Higher Logic

I would consider myself nonthestic also, or rather agnostic; I cannot assert or deny the existence of a God. This article made me think of that movie "Mars" (I think that's it), where the astronauts go to Mars and find out how life was started. Something along the lines of Mars was hit by a giant meteor millions or billions of years ago, the creatures there left spreading out over the entire universe, and one left and went to Earth where "it" left its DNA signature in the water, thus creating the first organisms that later evolved and adapted into modern humans. It was interesting because that "view" (or theory if you want to think of it like that) is just as feasible as every other theory out there.

And I like your explanation of God, or reason, that goes along with the above movie: what if another race created us long ago, setting the "tumbling ball" for our evolution, and meanwhile left us no memory or record of it.

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Cassius

Don't you agree it's a little odd though that a scientist would throw out the window everything he's done his whole life after a mere few months of frustration?

It's akin to Darwin, when he was getting near publication of his Theory of Evolution, saying "Man, this thing is too hard to finish, it's just a theory and doesn't prove anything anyway, no one'll believe it -- I think I'll just give up, I guess Adam and Eve existed after all."

Higher Logic

Well once I saw his age, 80 something, I immediately figured it's because of his irrational fear of death. That's my theory on this whole thing at least. But he's more than welcome to change his mind. It only took 1 puff of cannabis for me to change my mind on something that I held opposite to believe for 18 years.

Zosohero

probably just becouse he is dieng or old that he started to bilieve

Wormbag

[quote=Cassius]Philosopher says scientific evidence changed his mind

The Associated Press
Updated: 6:04 p.m. ET Dec. 9, 2004
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6688917/

NEW YORK - 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 he says so on a video released Thursday.

At age 81, after decades of insisting that belief is a mistake, the professor, 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.



Humm... I think the problem is with Associated Press... Flew doesn't say that "scientific evidence changed his mind" as in "I've actually found scientific evidence that a god of a certain type exists"... rather, than the lack of scientifical evidence (ie better explanation) makes he thinks that "A super-intelligence is the only good explanation for the origin of life".

Can't explain rain... guess the gods sent it...

Cassius

Regarding the lack of a "better explanation", consider this...

Go backwards in time. As you go back, mankind has discovered fewer and fewer things, knows fewer and fewer things about science, technology, medicine, art, etc etc. Knowledge dwindles as you go back in time. Eventually, you pass the discovery of fire, to a time when man knew almost nothing about the world around him.

At that time, nearly EVERY scientific question could be met with the response "well there's a lack of evidence, lack of a better explanation... therefore it must be GOD causing it!!"

In fact I bet that has been said COUNTLESS times on any number of subjects throughout history, when we didn't have a scientific explanation for it.

Now go forward through time again -- slowly. We make one discovery at a time. And guess what each discovery reveals about the "God hypothesis"? That's it's wrong, in every single case!!!

The sum of human knowledge, throughout recorded history, has never ONCE shown that the "explanation", once discovered, had ANYTHING to do with a supernatural being. I.e., there's been a NATURAL explanation, every single time. We just have to wait for it.

This is no different. Just because we won't have the answers within our lifetime doesn't mean that postulating that "God" is the answer makes any damn sense at all to an objective mind.

The problem, I guess, is that people are rarely objective.