Tuesday 25 May, 2010

Science/Nature

One Flew out of the cuckoo’s nest: intellectual powerhouse Prof Anthony Flew, who renounced his lifetime of atheism due to the weight of scientific evidence for God

By Andrew Halloway

The man who was the world’s leading atheist philosopher for 50 years – yet changed his mind for the last six years of his life – died last month, aged 87.

Professor Antony Flew spent most of his life denying the existence of God but, in 2004, dramatically decided that he had been wrong. That takes honesty – and guts. And it must have been truly gutting to realise that his life’s work had been a pointless waste of time. Yet he bravely exposed his decision to the world. Why? Because he could not resist the implications of the latest scientific evidence any longer.

Flew made his name with his classic paper ‘Theology and Falsification’ in 1950, which, it is claimed, became the most frequently-quoted philosophical article of the latter half of the 20th century.

His ground-breaking argument was that, in any philosophical debate about the existence of God, the starting position must not be neutrality but disbelief in God, because the burden of proof lies with those who believe in him.

His reason? Because “it does not seem to us that there is any good evidence in reason to postulate anything behind or beyond this natural universe,” he said. The basis of his philosophy was that he must “follow the evidence, wherever it leads”.

What happens, then, when the evidence for God becomes much more convincing? Following his own logic, Flew had to follow the evidence and declare his unbelief in atheism. And that’s exactly what he did in 2004, after years of observing scientific discoveries in cosmology and biology.

Other leading atheists were of course shocked that their icon had suddenly swapped sides. But rather than take his arguments seriously, most simply denounced him. And in his usual crass style, the leader of the pack, Richard Dawkins, was the most insulting – claiming that old age had addled his brain.

But far from declining into obscurity as the ravages of senility took over, Flew demonstrated he still had a clear head by publishing a new book in 2007: ‘There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed his Mind.’

So what was the evidence that convinced him to overturn a lifetime of the best arguments for atheism?

Essentially, the evidence for an Intelligence behind both the cosmos and the fact of life on earth. He said: “Einstein felt that there must be intelligence behind the integrated complexity of the physical world. If that is a sound argument, the integrated complexity of the organic world is just inordinately greater – all the creatures are complicated pieces of design. So an argument that is important about the physical world is immeasurably stronger when applied to the biological world.”

Flew explained that research into DNA had “shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce life, that intelligence must have been involved”. In his book, ‘There is a God’, Prof Flew wrote: “The genetic message in DNA is duplicated in replication and then copied from DNA to RNA in transcription. Following this there is translation whereby the message from RNA is conveyed to the amino acids, and finally the amino acids are assembled into proteins. The cell’s two fundamentally different structures of information management and chemical activity are co-ordinated by the universal genetic code.” As all code is intelligence dependent, from Morse code to computer code, the code in DNA must point to a Supreme Intelligence.

And though he couldn’t make the quantum leap of giving up evolutionary explanations for the story of life’s development, Flew had become thoroughly convinced that science could not explain the origin of life: “I have been persuaded that it is simply out of the question that the first living matter evolved out of dead matter and then developed into an extraordinarily complicated creature.”

Flew also made a film about his U-turn called ‘Has Science Discovered God?’ which explained the latest discoveries pointing to a Mind behind the universe. The reason he made it, he confessed, was an attempt to bring those he had led astray back to the straight and narrow: “As people have certainly been influenced by me, I want to try and correct the enormous damage I may have done.”

The English philosopher was born in 1923 to a Methodist minister, but by the age of 15 had turned his back on Christianity. And despite his recovery of belief in God, he sadly never made the journey all the way back to his spiritual roots, as far as we know (only God knows what went on in Flew’s heart in his final hours).

But his great reputation combined with intellectual honesty has paved the way for other atheists to make their way to faith in stellar company. His conversion must surely make honest atheists reassess the evidence for design behind the world and for a ‘prime mover’ or ‘first cause’.

In an interview shortly after Richard Dawkins published his infamous ‘The God Delusion’ book, Flew summed up the evidence that swayed him to believe that atheism was the delusion: “There were two factors in particular that were decisive. One was my growing empathy with the insight of Einstein and other noted scientists that there had to be an Intelligence behind the integrated complexity of the physical universe.

“The second was my own insight that the integrated complexity of life itself – which is far more complex than the physical universe – can only be explained in terms of an Intelligent Source. I believe that the origin of life and reproduction simply cannot be explained from a biological standpoint despite numerous efforts to do so. With every passing year, the more that was discovered about the richness and inherent intelligence of life, the less it seemed likely that a chemical soup could magically generate the genetic code. The difference between life and non-life, it became apparent to me, was ontological and not chemical.

“The best confirmation of this radical gulf is Richard Dawkins’ comical effort to argue in ‘The God Delusion’ that the origin of life can be attributed to a ‘lucky chance’. If that’s the best argument you have, then the game is over. No, I did not hear a Voice. It was the evidence itself that led me to this conclusion.”

Flew was someone who couldn’t be accused of bias because of pre-existing religious beliefs – quite the opposite. He had been biased against belief in God, but because he was committed to ‘following the evidence’, he had to change.

By contrast, we have today’s leading promulgator of atheism – Richard Dawkins. Here is someone who knows the evidence, but refuses to follow it. So much so that Flew went so far as to call him a “bigot”.

Explaining this accusation, Flew said: “The fault of Dawkins as an academic was his scandalous and apparently deliberate refusal to present the doctrine which he appears to think he has refuted in its strongest form. Thus we find in his index five references to Einstein… But he makes no mention of Einstein’s most relevant report: namely, that the integrated complexity of the world of physics has led him to believe that there must be a Divine Intelligence behind it.”

Flew here puts his finger on the weakness of ‘The God Delusion’. It is filled with arguments that shoot down ‘easy prey’, but it resolutely avoids the arguments for faith that are more resistant. Flew continues: “An academic attacking some ideological position which s/he believes to be mistaken must of course attack that position in its strongest form. This Dawkins does not do in the case of Einstein and his failure is the crucial index of his insincerity of academic purpose and therefore warrants me in charging him with having become, what he has probably believed to be an impossibility, a secularist bigot.”

In other words, when Dawkins and his neo-atheist colleagues rant about being paragons of virtue as neutral scientists, surveying the evidence and only concluding the non-existence of God because the science compels them, they are being fundamentally dishonest. Instead, they only select the evidence and arguments that can be marshalled in their favour, and brush aside the evidence and arguments that might challenge their arrogant assertions.

At least Flew had the honesty to change his opinion in the light of the new evidence for design that has emerged in the last 30 years.

Perhaps God might look kindly on the repentant atheist’s faithfulness to the witness of God’s existence that shines through his creation, and welcome Flew into the embrace of his Son who died for him, because “the Lord is full of compassion and mercy” (James 5:11). Flew, in his last years, said he was open to the possibility that the abstract Creator he had come to believe in through science could have become flesh and blood in the person of Jesus.

After all, even though we have more scientific evidence to help us than those who lived in Bible times, it is still “by faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible” (Hebrews 11:3). And it is that faith that saves us.

Photo: deism.com