Craigg's Corner: May

Synopsis of “There is a God: How the world’s most notorious atheist changed his mind” by Antony Flew

Craigg McRae serves as our representative to a monthly apologetics forum where strategies and information is discussed in order to engage our culture with the Gospel. Each month he's sharing a summary with us about what was discussed.

Antony Flew was raised in a Christian household and his father was a Wesleyan Methodist minister. He even attended Kingswood School in Bath, England which was founded by John Wesley for the education of the sons of preachers. He entered this school as a “committed and conscientious, if unenthusiastic, Christian.” He was never as excited by faith and religion as he was by politics, history or science. His faith waned especially as he struggled to understand how an omnipotent God could allow the evil he was witnessing in the rise to World War II. By the age of 15, he considered himself to be an atheist but in later life he concluded that he came to this decision far too easily and for the wrong reasons.

Flew went on to Oxford and joined the Socratic club, an organization which encouraged debate between Christians and nonbelievers and with which C. S. Lewis was its president. Flew started writing atheistic works which eventually would elevate him to the status of being one of the most prominent and well-read atheists, if not the most prominent atheist in the twentieth century. In his writings, he contended that “the design, cosmological, and moral arguments for God’s existence are invalid.” After seeing the advancements in science, especially in the field of DNA research, he would use this same statement to argue for the existence of God. He states on page 75 that ‘almost entirely because of the DNA investigations. 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 the enormous subtlety of the ways they work together. The meeting of these two parts at the right time by chance is simply minute. It is all a matter of the enormous complexity by which the results were achieved, which looked to me like the work of intelligence.’

One study by the British National Council of Arts that convinced Flew of the highly unlikely chance that random selection could explain us as living organisms was a study whereby six monkeys were put in a cage with a type writer and the assumption was that with enough time, even monkeys could produce a Shakespearean sonnet. After one month of the monkeys hammering away at the

typewriter as well as using it for many other purposes, not even one word was produced and that includes words such as A or I. The chances of DNA being put together by random chance are incredibly minute and clearly display the work of a creative designer.

Flew was starting to see that the spectrum with which he was viewing the world was incorrect and too concrete. Where he had issues with an invisible, omnipotent God in the past, he concluded that this being could embody the idea of personhood if viewed as “outside space and time that uniquely executes its intentions in the spatio-temporal continuum. Flew’s God has the attributes of “immutability, immateriality, omnipotence, omniscience, oneness or indivisibility, perfect goodness and necessary existence.” Flew states that he did not shift his paradigm but rather simply followed the argument to its natural conclusion.

While Antony Flew turned the atheistic world on its head with his pronouncement of his belief in a God, he never embraced the Christian doctrine of the trinity or belief in Christ as the second person. He is sympathetic and charitable to Christians in their belief of the resurrection but he remained unconvinced, even though he could pose no argument against the assertions.

We Christians are increasingly presented with demands for proof of God and His assertions in the Bible. We don’t have to back down from the argument because the fight has been going on for centuries. If the world’s most notorious atheist can change his mind about aspects of our faith, our mission is to show other non-believers the light of God’s Word.