There is A God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind by Antony Flew

Jascha Heifetz playing Bach's Chaconne from Partita no. 2 in D minor.

Here's some paintings I created with acryllic on canvas.  I'm more about form and color than concrete subject matter, although I am trying to master watercolors by painting birds. I plan to turn them into post cards for my pen pal friends.

There Is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind by Antony Flew
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Philospher and former atheist Antony Flew set the agenda for modern atheism with his 1950 essay "Theology and Falsification" ...in his commitment to "follow the argument wherever it leads" led him to a belief in God as Creator. (From the back of the book)

I had heard of Flew a number years ago because of his radical turn from atheism to deism in his eighties. I love to hear people's arguments as to how they arrive at conclusions and this book does not disappoint. Imminently readable and coherent, this is an excellent book for those with questions about the existence of God, who believe in God and would like to hear intelligent reasons to believe, or people who do not believe in God but are curious as to how someone who was an atheist became convinced of an intelligent creator.

The first part of the book gives Flew's history and why he was an atheist. He comprehensively and clearly gives all the arguments he had for not believing in the existence of a Creator. He also provides other's arguments as well.

The second part discusses his change and the arguments in favor of a creator and the world being intelligently designed.

A couple of things. I thought it was interesting that his basic premise in his atheist years was that people who believe in God must prove there is a God, but no such responsibility rests on atheists to prove that there is no God.

He then provides several reasons how there must be a god, such as the human mind, intelligence and consciousness. The impossibility of evolution producing self-awareness or the ability to love or hate or enjoy our lives. To give it meaning and purpose.

He tackles evolution and points out the fallacy of believing something could come from nothing and imbue it with meaning and purpose. That if we are intelligent, we must have been created by an intelligent First Cause. He deals with the argument that if the universe had a beginning or a creator, than so must God. He shows that we know the universe has a beginning and it doesn't follow that God must have a beginning. There must be a first cause. He lists several laws of nature, such as Newton's first law of motion, namely that an objection at rest will stay at rest unless acted upon by an external and unbalanced force etc..

He argues that we can only exist by the laws that create the environment we live in. These laws had to be in place before we could exist. So how did the universe know that we were coming?

His best illustration involves an experiment a scientist made of monkeys. It was an actual experiment based on the hypothesis that given enough time monkeys would type out a Shakespearean sonnet. I suppose this was to support the idea that anything, no matter how intelligent, could happen by chance.

"A computer was placed in a cage with six monkeys. After one month of hammering away at it...the monkeys produced fifty typed pages-but not a single word (including 'I' or 'a')...

...If we take it that the keyboard has thirty characters...then the likelihood of getting a one-letter word is 30 times 30 times 30, which is 27,000. The likelihood of getting a one-letter word is one chance out of 27.000....

If you took the entire universe and converted it to computer chips...each one weighing a millionth of a gram and had each computer chip able to spin out 488 trials at, say, a million times a second; if you turned the entire universe into these microcomputer chips and these chips were spinning a million times a second random letters, the number of trials you would get since the beginning of time would be 10 to the 90th trials. It would be off again by a factor of 10 to the 600th. You will never get a sonnet by chance. The universe would have to be 10 to the 600th time larger. Yet the world thinks the monkeys can do it every time" (pg. 77)

In addition he points out that natural selection does not positively produce anything. It only eliminates, or tends to eliminate, whatever is not competitive. So how do you arrive at something to begin with through the process of elimination?

He tackles Richard Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" successfully and acutely.

"Dawkins...labored to discount..the upshot of fifty or more years' work in genetics-the discovery that the observable traits of organisms are for the most part conditioned by the interactions of many genes, while most genes have manifold effects on many such traits...

Then, after insisting that we are all the choiceless creatures of our genes, he infers that we cannot help but share the unlovely personal characteristics of those all-controlling monads."

There are many more arguments such as finding a marble table on the beach, no one would assume it "naturally developed there", or, after millions and millions of years would become conscious, much less self-aware, yet the simplest organism is more complex than a marble table and people believe the people who made the table were developed by chance.

Flew concludes with the perceptive statement that the driving motive behind adhering to evolution is to negate God.

I checked this book out of the library, but then bought it because I want to write in the margins and make highlights.

I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in this subject.


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Inquiring pigeons observing a photographer who was lying on his back to photograph the ceiling.