LOGAN PAUL GAGE: Where the Evidence Leads
Varghese, Antony Flew and Roy Abraham
Where the Evidence Leads b o o K s I n R e V I e w A ” . e c n e i c n s r e d o m m o f r e h a f s ’ w e l , a g a n e t t u , y a s t r e t i n i m ist. T s hat m o ay be b an...
...senator to write Living History, I will think its analysis more objective...
...In 1976 Flew breezily declared, “I myself am inclined to believe that the universe was without beginning and will be without end...
...T d e c i t o n e b o t n i r o t e p o r u n a he d C E ontrast is b o etW st ee k n i ng the o U t nited State o s The great Upheaval: america and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788–1800 By Jay Winik (HaRpeR, 659 pages, $29.95) Reviewed by Joseph a. Harriss While America got on with the unprecedented task of peacefully transferring executive power and “ that typically understated comment by George Washington in the earliest, uncertain days of our republic, one can only add a fervent, “thank God for the difference...
...The meeting of these two parts at the right time by chance is simply minute…which looks to me like the work of intelligence...
...But if you are looking for an explanation of Flew’s nuanced views or his original contribution, you will find this book wanting...
...But Flew thinks intelligence is most evident in DNA...
...Joseph a. Harriss is a Paris-based American writer whose latest book is About France (iUniverse...
...Unlike dramatic religious conversions, Antony Flew’s change of heart seems based on sober assessbeyond discussing the meaningfulness of theological claims and the coherence of the concept of God, beyond discussing the burden of proof...
...Flew opted for an atheism that stood on its own two feet, an atheism of reason and evidence...
...but he does not believe in revealed religion or an afterlife...
...Lurching from one vicious bloodletting to another, they shot, slashed, and eviscerated each other with glorious abandon as centuries of feudal brutality and institutionalized murder came to a frenzied head...
...b o o K s I n R e V I e w the enormous subtlety of the ways they work together...
...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...
...And his The Presumption of Atheism logan Paul gage is a policy analyst with the Discovery Institute in Washington, D.C...
...Flew merely seems to Flew’s critics claim he is merely afraid of hellfire in his old age...
...He recounts all this, along with co-author Roy Abraham Varghese, in There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind...
...Genes….do not and cannot necessitate our conduct...
...Flew, who began his career at Oxford, rejected the smug atheism of logical positivism that blithely dismissed all theological statements a priori as meaningless— neither true nor false...
...If you are seeking to understand how many 20th-century intellectuals—from scientists like Paul Davies to philosophers like Alvin Plantinga—can embrace a mind-before-matter universe in a scientific age, you’ve come to the right place...
...When the New York Times Magazine prints an exposé determining that Hillary Clinton did not take months off her first term as U.S...
...The greatest untold story of our age is the return of metaphysics to respectability among academic philosophers...
...Lewis’s Oxford Socratic Club just after WWII, is the most widely reprinted philosophical piece of the 20th century...
...Smith, editor of the atheist philosophy journal Philo, laments the fact that just when academia was thought reliably atheistic, theism “became, almost overnight, ‘academically respectable.’” In fact, he notes, a perusal of the Oxford University Press catalogue for 2000-2001 shows that of the 96 books on philosophy of religion, 94 advanced theism while 2 presented both sides...
...This is regrettable, as the cobbled-together nature of this volume does make it appear that Varghese collected and synthesized Flew’s views...
...Despite the aforementioned untoward charges, There Is a God is a most valuable and readable overview of the many evidential changes of landscape that 20th century science is furnishing to the oldest question in Western civilization: Is there a God...
...Too bad for them that Flew doesn’t think there is a Hell of which to be afraid...
...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...
...Still others, including the New York Times, allege that evangelicals tricked him into writing this book...
...Where the Evidence Leads b o o K s I n R e V I e w A ” . e c n e i c n s r e d o m m o f r e h a f s ’ w e l , a g a n e t t u , y a s t r e t i n i m ist...
...There Is a god: How the World’s Most Notorious atheist Changed His Mind By Antony Flew with Roy Abraham Varghese (HaRpeRone, 256 pages, $24.95) Reviewed by logan Paul gage impressed with Richard Dawkins’s selfish gene theory—that “we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes” and so we should “teach generosity and altru ism, because we are born selfish...
...The hot topic became the implications of Big Bang cosmology...
...From his positions at Oxford, Aberdeen, Keele, and Reading, Antony Flew literally set the agenda for philosophical atheism in the latter half of the 20th century...
...But as the 20th century came to a close this belief grew increasingly difficult to maintain...
...But in fact none of it is true—or even faintly sensible...
...Still, it is sad that the lack of authentic first-person narrative transforms what could have been an excellent work into a merely good primer on how science has changed philosophy of religion...
...As Varghese puts it in his introduction, “it was his reinvention of the frames of reference that changed the whole nature of the discussion...
...Also telling is that Flew’s replacement at the University of Keele was none other than Richard Swinburne, an ardent theist, now at Oxford...
...6 8 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R M a y 2 0 0 8 Present at the Creation Tby even the most superficial observer...
...In fact, his first paper, “Theology and Falsification,” delivered at C.S...
...Unfortunately, at times these chapters read like a laundry list of quotations by famous scientists and philosophers...
...That subtitle may seem presumptuous, and Flew would have you know it was the publisher’s idea, but rest assured that it is accurate...
...T s hat m o ay be b an o h dd thing in fo F r the son t of a “ r This is the world picture, as I see it, that has emerge . h t a f t o d n n o s a e f e g a i r l i a s s i , t i s t p ntony fleW has long been my favorite athem u en t o h f sc i ie “ nc p e’s g ad m vance o o r ver his a life n tim o e. f A i s h d e ” was a minister also...
...In God and Philosophy, he disputed the coherence of the very concept of an omnipresent, omniargued that in an evidential tie, atheism should win by default...
...Replies the philosopher, “If any of this were true, it would be no use to go on….No eloquence can move programmed robots...
...In “Theology and Falsification,” Flew challenged believers to not qualify their religious statements to death...
...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 M a y 2 0 0 8 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R 6 7 say that this is a cumulative case argument, and in his lifetime he saw theists take the lead in a conversation —which will continue—about the origin of life, the universe, and the laws of nature...
...Rather, he improvised like a jazz musician, challenging theism with whole new lines of thought...
...In biology, Flew is little scient being...
...This erudite, eclectic, and eminently readable look a s a s e t t n d d w o cr t the e m i om o en h tou la s t ev ye en r ts of the 18th century leaves one overarching impression: Lord, how those people in Europe could hate...
...Alter nate cosmological models attempting to explain away the evidence for a beginning to the universe, such as the steady-state model, repeatedly failed...
...But this is not the first book with a co-author— and at least Varghese is named...
...Retaining his individualist philosophy and his Socratic commitment to “follow the evidence wherever it leads,” Antony Flew declared his “conversion” to deism in 2004...
...Unlike many atheist philosophers of the previous century—such as Bertrand Russell—Flew did more than write a few essays on his personal atheism...
...That is, he now believes in an “infinite Intelligence,” the source of life and the universe...
...For more than 60 years, Flew has By the 1980s, philosophy of religion was moving been a bugbear, a sort of John McCain maverick, defying theists and atheists alike...
...If that seems unduly churlish toward our European friends, then I invite you to dip into Jay Winik’s latest book...
...Prominent atheist philosophers like Quentin Smith have taken note, even if the mass media has not...
...Flew didn’t even mention molecular machines found within cells and the increasing scientific consensus that the Earth is a rare, hospitable place indeed...
Vol. 41 • May 2008 • No. 4
