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God to Man; "About Face!"
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| NeoPhono |
I have no comment on this one, it seems to speak for itself. Not that I'm trying to say one way is more right over the other. I just thought it was interesting.
| quote: | Famous Atheist Now Believes in God
NEW YORK Dec 9, 2004 — A British philosophy professor who has been a leading champion of atheism for more than a half-century has changed his mind. He now believes in God more or less based on scientific evidence, and says so on a video released Thursday.
At age 81, after decades of insisting belief is a mistake, Antony Flew has concluded that some sort of intelligence or first cause must have created the universe. A super-intelligence is the only good explanation for the origin of life and the complexity of nature, Flew said in a telephone interview from England.
Flew said he's best labeled a deist like Thomas Jefferson, whose God was not actively involved in people's lives.
"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 said. "It could be a person in the sense of a being that has intelligence and a purpose, I suppose."
Flew first made his mark with the 1950 article "Theology and Falsification," based on a paper for the Socratic Club, a weekly Oxford religious forum led by writer and Christian thinker C.S. Lewis.
Over the years, Flew proclaimed the lack of evidence for God while teaching at Oxford, Aberdeen, Keele, and Reading universities in Britain, in visits to numerous U.S. and Canadian campuses and in books, articles, lectures and debates.
There was no one moment of change but a gradual conclusion over recent months for Flew, a spry man who still does not believe in an afterlife.
Yet biologists' 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," Flew says in the new video, "Has Science Discovered God?"
The video draws from a New York discussion last May organized by author Roy Abraham Varghese's Institute for Metascientific Research in Garland, Texas. Participants were Flew; Varghese; Israeli physicist Gerald Schroeder, an Orthodox Jew; and Roman Catholic philosopher John Haldane of Scotland's University of St. Andrews.
The first hint of Flew's turn was a letter to the August-September issue of Britain's Philosophy Now magazine. "It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism," he wrote.
The letter commended arguments in Schroeder's "The Hidden Face of God" and "The Wonder of the World" by Varghese, an Eastern Rite Catholic layman.
This week, Flew finished writing the first formal account of his new outlook for the introduction to a new edition of his "God and Philosophy," scheduled for release next year by Prometheus Press.
Prometheus specializes in skeptical thought, but if his belief upsets people, well "that's too bad," Flew said. "My whole life has been guided by the principle of Plato's Socrates: Follow the evidence, wherever it leads."
Last week, Richard Carrier, a writer and Columbia University graduate student, posted new material based on correspondence with Flew on the atheistic www.infidels.org Web page. Carrier assured atheists that Flew accepts only a "minimal God" and believes in no afterlife.
Flew's "name and stature are big. Whenever you hear people talk about atheists, Flew always comes up," Carrier said. Still, when it comes to Flew's reversal, "apart from curiosity, I don't think it's like a big deal."
Flew told The Associated Press his current ideas have some similarity with American "intelligent design" theorists, who see evidence for a guiding force in the construction of the universe. He accepts Darwinian evolution but doubts it can explain the ultimate origins of life.
A Methodist minister's son, Flew became an atheist at 15.
Early in his career, he argued that no conceivable events could constitute proof against God for believers, so skeptics were right to wonder whether the concept of God meant anything at all.
Another landmark was his 1984 "The Presumption of Atheism," playing off the presumption of innocence in criminal law. Flew said the debate over God must begin by presuming atheism, putting the burden of proof on those arguing that God exists. |
From http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=315976 |
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| Renegade |
| One word: senility. |
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| Yoepus |
Heh, one could easily quib "there are no atheists in the foxholes",
but I too was once and atheist, born-again(:p) deist (and at age 20 not 80!) so I can see validity of his turn. I wonder what brought it about for him though. |
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| Renegade |
| quote: | Originally posted by Yoepus
Heh, one could easily quib "there are no atheists in the foxholes" |
Yeah but all that demonstrates is the desperation and fear involved in theistic (or deistic) belief, especially the desperation and fear concerning our own mortality. It doesn't assist the case for God at all and I'm not sure why theists are so fond of employing it.
(That was a general statement, not really directing it at you.) |
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| occrider |
| I'm pretty drunk right now, but I think this thread is going to be fun tomorrow ... I can't wait. Renegade, stop being a and start participating once again :D. Opus has supplanted your rational authorative position but even he has been slacking as of late when it comes to the daily grunge or dismissing utter bull. What have you been up to? |
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| Renegade |
Well after the Australian and American elections I've mostly just been sitting in a corner, rocking backwards and forwards while weeping quietly to myself. I haven't been following politics that closely lately (party through disillusionment, partly because - between uni and work - I haven't really had the time) and without speedracer around to boil up my blood, I haven't really had much to say.
I'll start participating again soon (not this weekend though, I don't intend to be sober for much of the next 48 hours) and I guess the first people on my headcracking agenda will be the conspiracy nuts that have started posting on here recntly for some reason. Get ready boys, not even your tinfoil hats will protect you from my bludgeoning hammer of "rational authoritativeness"... apparently. :cool: |
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| DrUg_Tit0 |
| quote: | Originally posted by Renegade
One word: senility. |
Hehe, you took the words out of my mouth :) |
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| NeoPhono |
Hello Renegade,
I suppose much like Yoepus, and as we've discussed before, I'd fall into the deist category. I followed much the same logic as Flew did when reaching his "new found" spirituality; I need an explaination for the beginning and for complexity.
To expand, and maybe it's just my feeble mind at work, I need something to satisfy my need for a "beginning." I'm a very linear being and for me, something had to be there at time = 0 to get things started. The idea of a constantly exploding and imploding universe for all of infinity is not a satisfactory answer for me. All the "stuff" around us (matter, energy, etc.) needs to have come from somewhere (again for my feeble mind to continue along it's blissful linear existance). Nature doesn't like vacuums and I don't like infinity.
Secondly, and as a bi-product of my biology/medicial education, I also have a desire to explain the complexity yet beauty of life and its physiology, down to the smallest of scales. Looking at the way in which DNA works, along with enzymes and other biological functions, the complexity yet beauty (subjective term, I know) is absolutely incredible to me. And no, evolution is not a good enough explaination for me at that level. On the macro level I have no problem with it, although scientifically it is actually facing many challenges in its current form, but at the microscopic level the amount of "prep-work" in terms of evolutionary history to develop functions of such complexity would be astounding.
That being said I also don't take the traditional religious view that god or (God) is around us 24/7 throwing little monkey wrenches into the cogs or our daily routines. He's not giving people cancer, causing plagues and floods or letting the occasional lucky dude win the lottery. If anything, he started things, gave a few nudges and sits back and watches the universe unfold via the fundamental laws of science and math.
Well, all the atheists probably think I'm just another nut job now, and all the religous folk think I'm blasphamous, so have at it boys. |
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| TruffleShuffle |
| quote: | Originally posted by occrider
I'm pretty drunk right now, but I think this thread is going to be fun tomorrow ... I can't wait. Renegade, stop being a and start participating once again :D. Opus has supplanted your rational authorative position but even he has been slacking as of late when it comes to the daily grunge or dismissing utter bull. What have you been up to? |
Even when you're drunk you manage to type so legibly and without grammar or spelling errors |
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| occrider |
Ooofff ... it's bad when I have to check the timestamp of my last post to discern what time I went to bed. Work is going to be brutal ...
| quote: | Originally posted by TruffleShuffle
Even when you're drunk you manage to type so legibly and without grammar or spelling errors |
Thanks but despite my years of practice "authorative" isn't a word, I have no idea why it's bolded, and I think it's a run-on sentence. Not too bad though ... you'll know when I'm plastered to the point of incomprehension when I start confusing "its" with "it's". :p
Oh yes, and as for the topic ... at 81 the guy is just trying to cover his bases. :)
Out of curiosity, why does time need an origin or a zero-point? Time and matter are inexorably linked as evidenced by Einstein, therefore if time cannot exist without matter, how can you conclude that there was a point in time where there was nothing and all of a sudden something was created? |
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| NeoPhono |
| quote: | Originally posted by occrider
Out of curiosity, why does time need an origin or a zero-point? Time and matter are inexorably linked as evidenced by Einstein, therefore if time cannot exist without matter, how can you conclude that there was a point in time where there was nothing and all of a sudden something was created? |
Time needs a zero point for me, because I like to think of the universe as linear, primarily because I myself am linear. Sure, I could say that "things have just been around forever," but that is not a satisfactory answer for me. I aknowledge the space-time continuum, but I still need to know where that space-time came from. For some people I realize that passing it off to eternal existance is sufficient, but I need something more concrete. I just find it hard to comprehend linear beings living in an infinite universe. Show me the beginning.
I know that if you don't have matter (space) you don't have time, so if infact the universe is not infinite (time-wise), we don't need to worry about time before matter came into existance, but how and when did it, if that is the case. How did matter arise to begin time, or time to begin matter? |
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| occrider |
| quote: | Originally posted by NeoPhono
I know that if you don't have matter (space) you don't have time, so if infact the universe is not infinite (time-wise), we don't need to worry about time before matter came into existance, but how and when did it, if that is the case. How did matter arise to begin time, or time to begin matter? |
What is the edge of the Earth? What is the edge of the Earth before the Earth formed? What you're asking is non-existant because there is no concept of "before" and then "after" with respect to time when time does not exist. If you want to embrace time as an absolute concept, such that there would be a discernable "before" and "after" to your question, than one can logically conclude that matter is absolute and infinite as some would describe that god guy. |
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