Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Ongoing ...

... to say the least: The Great Debate. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

But this was not [Antony] Flew's final word. Two years later, There Is a God (written with Roy Abraham Varghese, a longtime interlocutor) was released. This helps clarify Flew's positions and why he holds them. He begins with his intellectual autobiography and does not commence to defend his new views until page 88. But it is worth the wait, because Flew is willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads. He no longer takes the idea of God as a disembodied agent to be problematic, and he presents four reasons why he now embraces theism: the consistent and rational laws of nature, the fine-tuning of the universe, the origin of the universe at the Big Bang, and the organized, information-rich nature of life. Flew rejects the multiverse theory he toyed with in the new introduction to God and Philosophy as extravagant and desperate. He rejects atheistic accounts of the Big Bang as less rational than the theistic explanation that God was the creator. Flew argues that naturalism faces an insuperable philosophical problem in trying to coax life from non-life without a designing mind.

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