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 based on scientific evidence, and he says so on a video released.
At age 81, after decades of insisting that belief is a mistake, the professor, 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.
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 first hint of Flew's turn was a letter in 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.
In 2009, Flew finished writing the first formal account of his new outlook for the introduction to a new edition of his "God and Philosophy".
Prometheus specializes in sceptical 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."
Flew said that his current ideas had some similarity with those of U.S. "intelligent design" theorists, who see evidence for a guiding force in the construction of the universe. He doubts that Darwinian evolution can explain the ultimate origins of life.
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