[extropy-chat] just to add to the excitement

[Damien Broderick]

http://www.kniff.de/cgi-bin/cgiproxy/nph-proxy.cgi/010110A/http/www.guardian.co.uk/religion/Story/0,2763,1371641,00.html

Atheist finds 'God' after 50 years

Laura Smith
Saturday December 11, 2004
<http://www.kniff.de/cgi-bin/cgiproxy/nph-proxy.cgi/010110A/http/www.guardian.co.uk>The 
Guardian

A philosophy professor who has been a leading proponent of atheism for more 
than 50 years has decided that God may exist after all.

Antony Flew, 81, now believes scientific evidence supports the theory that 
some sort of intelligence created the universe. But he continues to reject 
traditional religious ideas of God and especially the idea of salvation 
after death.

He said: "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 still accepts Darwinian evolutionary theory but doubts it can explain 
the complexities of the origins of life.

Throughout his career, Flew has expounded the lack of evidence for the 
existence of God while lecturing at St John's College, Oxford and King's 
College, London. He said his change of heart had been a gradual process 
prompted by new scientific research.

Speaking in a new video, Has Science Discovered God?, Flew argues that the 
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."

The first indication of his about-turn came in a letter to Philosophy Now 
magazine, in which he said: "It has become inordinately difficult even to 
begin to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of 
that first reproducing organism."

Flew, who is writing an introduction of a new edition of his work, God and 
Philosophy, said: "My whole life has been guided by the principle of 
Plato's Socrates: follow the evidence, wherever it leads."