Here is the word of one of the most respected atheist philosphers of the 20th century, revered by Dawkins et. al.
Though peculiarly he only attained this pre-eminence among atheists after he became a theist, before which neither you nor I nor anyone I know had ever heard of him, let alone "revered" him.
Yes, it's jolly nice for you that one atheist changed his mind (or Alzheimer's disease changed it for him) but don't exaggerate.
I don't go about pretending that John Loftus used to be the Pope.
As to his opinions ...
Flew states that he has left his long-standing espousal of atheism by endorsing a deism of the sort that Thomas Jefferson advocated ("While reason, mainly in the form of arguments to design, assures us that there is a God, there is no room either for any supernatural revelation of that God or for any transactions between that God and individual human beings."). [...] He supported the idea of an Aristotelian God with "the characteristics of power and also intelligence", stating that the evidence for it was stronger than ever before. He rejects the ideas of an afterlife, of God as the source of good (he explicitly states that God has created "a lot of" evil), and of the resurrection of Jesus as a historical fact.
Apparently there is only
one theological point you agree with him on, so I wouldn't make him your champion if I were you.
From Anthony Flew's "There is a God"
Well, no, not really. From Roy Varghese's "There Is A God". Let's be accurate. From the
New York Times:
As he himself [Flew]
conceded, he had not written his book.
This is really Roy’s doing, he said, before I had even figured out a polite way to ask. He showed it to me, and I said O.K. I’m too old for this kind of work!
When I asked Varghese, he freely admitted that the book was his idea and that he had done all the original writing for it. But he made the book sound like more of a joint effort slightly more, anyway. There was stuff he had written before, and some of that was adapted to this, Varghese said. There is stuff he’d written to me in correspondence, and I organized a lot of it. And I had interviews with him. So those three elements went into it. Oh, and I exposed him to certain authors and got his views on them. We pulled it together. And then to make it more reader-friendly, HarperCollins had a more popular author go through it.
So even the ghostwriter had a ghostwriter: Bob Hostetler, an evangelical pastor and author from Ohio, rewrote many passages, especially in the section that narrates Flew’s childhood. With three authors, how much Flew was left in the book? He went through everything, was happy with everything, Varghese said.
Cynthia DiTiberio, the editor who acquired There Is a God for HarperOne, told me that Hostetler’s work was limited; she called him an extensive copy editor. He did the kind of thing I would have done if I had the time, DiTiberio said, but editors don’t get any editing done in the office; we have to do that in our own time.
I then asked DiTiberio if it was ethical to publish a book under Flew’s name that cites sources Flew doesn’t know well enough to discuss. I see your struggle and confusion, she said, but she maintained that the book is an accurate presentation of Flew’s views. I don’t think Tony would have allowed us to put in anything he was not comfortable with or familiar with, she said. I mean, it is hard to tell at this point how much is him getting older. In my communications with him, there are times you have to say things a couple times. I’m not sure what that is. I wish I could tell you more. . . We were hindered by the fact that he is older, but it would do the world a disservice not to have the book out there, regardless of how it was made.
Flew's reasoning for deism is not clear from the excerpt you have posted, but he seems to have been bamboozled by the ID crowd concerning science, a subject on which he is inexpert.
Antony Flew Roy Varghese pretending to be Antony Flew writes:
Why do I believe this, given that I expounded and defended atheism for more than a half century? The short answer is this: this is the world picture, as I see it, that has emerged from modern science.
Then the obvious question would be: why haven't modern scientists noticed that this is the "world picture" that they have produced? I would suggest that it's because they know more about science than Flew and Varghese put together. This is not hard.
atheistism
Are you sure you've got enough suffixes there?
Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.
Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.
™ Version 4.2
