Former atheist argues for the existence of God

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iamnotaparakeet
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15 Jan 2010, 2:08 am

Former leading atheist argues for the existence of God

A review of There is a God: How The World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind by Antony Flew with Roy Varghese
Harper Collins, New York, 2007

reviewed by Lita Cosner


Skeptics often cite ‘testimonies’ of former professing Christians who ‘de-converted’ (apostatized) to atheism to show that Christianity is inherently unreasonable; sure, a person may be raised Christian, but once he is able to reason for himself, the light of rationality will wash away all that religious superstition. Of course, they often ignore or dismiss the conversion stories of former atheists. Antony Flew’s rejection of atheism is a nightmare for skeptics, because the most influential atheistic philosopher of the twentieth century is rather harder to dismiss out-of-hand. Flew documents this intellectual process in There is a God.

From Christianity to atheism

Flew begins the story of his rejection of atheism by explaining how he became an atheist in the first place. The son of a Methodist minister, Flew went to school as ‘a committed and conscientious, if unenthusiastic, Christian’ (p. 10), but during his studies began to question his faith. The problem of evil caused Flew to question the possibility of an omnipotent God. By the time he was 15, he considered himself an atheist (p. 15), although Flew admits that he ‘reached the conclusion about the nonexistence of God much too quickly, much too easily, and for what later seemed to me the wrong reasons’ (pp. 10–11).

Influential atheist works

Flew’s rejection of atheism would not be such a problem for atheists if he hadn’t been the foremost atheist thinker of the 20th century. In Oxford, Flew was part of the Socratic club, a forum for debate between atheists and Christians, of which C.S. Lewis was the president for over a decade. There he presented ‘Theology and Falsification’, a paper which argued that many theological statements have so many qualifications attached that they are essentially empty (pp. 43–44). However, he says, ‘I was not saying that statements of religious belief were meaningless. I simply challenged religious believers to explain how their statements are to be understood, especially in the light of conflicting data’ (p. 45). This 1950 paper sparked many responses, some decades after the paper was presented (p. 47).

In 1961, Flew published his next atheist work; God and Philosophy was Flew’s attempt to examine the basis for Christian theism. In a systematic argument for atheism, he contended that the ‘the design, cosmological, and moral arguments for God’s existence are invalid’ (p. 49). He argued that the concept of God must be sufficiently defined before God’s existence can be debated. He now considers this book to be ‘a historical relic’ (p. 52), and later in his current book advocates the design and cosmological arguments as valid evidence of God’s existence.

In 1971, Flew published The Presumption of Atheism. In his final work dealing with atheism, he argued that as the inherently more rational position, atheism should be presumed at the outset of any debate regarding God’s existence, and the burden of proof should be on the theist (p. 53). He notes that the ‘headiest challenge’ to this argument came from Christian logician Alvin Plantinga, who argued that the belief in God is ‘properly basic’ for believers (p. 55). He clarifies that ‘the presumption of atheism is, at best, a methodological starting point, not an ontological conclusion’, and that the presumption of atheism could be accepted by theists who have adequate grounds for believing in God (p. 56).

Indeed, atheism itself has a number of propositions that have to be accepted by faith, e.g. that something (the universe) came from nothing, non-living matter evolved into living cells by stochastic chemistry, complex specified information arose without intelligence, morality arose by natural selection, etc.

From atheism to theism

Flew concentrated on other philosophical areas for the next several decades, only revisiting atheistic topics to debate people based on his previous works. He took part in cordial debates with theists, which included one in 1985 with philosopher and theologian Dr Gary Habermas on the most important reported deed of all, the proposition that Jesus Christ conquered death itself.1 This debate was held in Dallas in front of a crowd of three thousand people. It was judged by two panels of experts from leading American universities: one panel comprised five philosophers who were asked to judge the content of the debate, and the other comprised five professional debate judges who were asked to judge the quality of the arguments.

Four of the five on the philosophers panel voted that Habermas had won, i.e. the case he made for the Resurrection was stronger than Flew’s attempts to refute it, and one scored it a draw. The panel of professional debate judges voted three to two to Habermas.

At the most recent debate in 2004, at New York University, he declared that he ‘now accepted the existence of a God’ (p. 74). In that debate, he said that he believed that the origin of life points to a creative Intelligence,

‘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’ (p. 75).

Flew was particularly impressed with a physicist’s refutation of the idea that monkeys at typewriters would eventually produced a Shakespearean sonnet. The likelihood of getting one Shakespearean sonnet by chance is one in 10690; to put this number in perspective, there are only 1080 particles in the universe. Flew concludes:

‘If the theorem won’t work for a single sonnet, then of course it’s simply absurd to suggest that the more elaborate feat of the origin of life could have been achieved by chance’ (p. 78).

Flew was also critical of Dawkins’s ‘selfish gene’ idea, pointing out that ‘natural selection does not positively produce anything. It only eliminates, or tends to eliminate, whatever is not competitive’ (p. 78). He called Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene ‘a major exercise in popular mystification’, and argued that Dawkins made the critical mistake of overlooking the fact that most observable traits in organisms are the result of the coding of many genes (p. 79).

Fingerprints of a designer

Flew’s belief in God hinges on three aspects of nature: ‘The first is the fact that nature obeys laws. The second is the dimension of life … The third is the very existence of nature’ (p. 89).

The Laws of nature

Every scientist must assume that nature acts in certain predictable, measurable ways; this is what makes scientific discovery possible. Paul Davies argued that ‘science can proceed only if the scientist adopts an essentially theological worldview’ (p. 107). However, there is really no reason why nature should follow laws; the existence of such laws requires an explanation. Three questions must be answered: ‘Where do the laws of physics come from? Why is it that we have these laws instead of some other set? How is that we have a set of laws that drives featureless gases to life, consciousness, and intelligence?’ (p. 108). Flew argues along with many other classical and modern scientists that theism is the only serious answer.

When Flew was an atheist, he argued that the universe and its laws were themselves ultimate (p. 134). Every belief has some fundamental assumption; for theists, the existence of God is the fundamental assumption. Flew, however, took the universe and its most fundamental features as that assumption. The discovery that the universe was not infinite threw a wrench into this assumption; if the universe had begun to exist at some point in time, it was reasonable to assume something caused its beginning. Because it is more likely that God exists uncaused, rather than the universe, it is logical to argue for the existence of God from the existence of the universe (pp. 144–145).

The fine-tuning of the universe

Not only does our universe follow finely tuned physical laws, but laws which seem to be finely tuned to enable life to exist. The most common atheist answer is to assert that our universe is one of many others—the ‘multiverse’ speculation. It is interesting that atheists who refuse to believe in an unseen God, based supposedly on the lack of evidence for His existence, explain away the appearance of design by embracing the existence of an unknown number of other universes for which there is no evidence—or even any effect of their evidence. In any case, Flew argues that even if there were multiple universes, it would not solve the atheists’ dilemma; ‘multiverse or not, we still have to come to terms with the origin of the laws of nature. And the only viable explanation here is the divine Mind’ (p. 121).

The origin of life

The existence of physical laws which allow life to survive is necessary, but not sufficient by itself, for the existence of life. The question of the origin of life became much more complex with the discovery of DNA, a molecule comprising ‘letters’ that code for the instructions to build the machinery of life. A real vicious circle is that the instructions to build decoding machinery are themselves encoded on the DNA. That life is governed by a complex code leads to the question:

‘Can the origins of a system of coded chemistry be explained in a way that makes no appeal whatever to the kinds of facts that we otherwise invoke to explain codes and languages, systems of communication, the impress of ordinary words on the world of matter?’ (p. 127).

He pointed out that natural selection can’t explain the origin of first life. Ultimately, a vast amount of information is behind life, and in every other case, information necessarily points to an intelligent source, so it is only reasonable that there be a Source behind this information as well.

Flew’s God

As an atheist, Flew struggled with the idea of an invisible, omnipresent Person, and how such a person could be identified (p. 148). However, Flew was making embodiment part of his definition of a person, which isn’t justified. Philosopher Thomas Tracy defined persons simply as agents that are capable of acting intentionally (pp. 149–150). Although human persons are embodied, embodiment is not a necessary component for personhood. Flew admits that ‘At the very least, the studies of Tracy and Leftow show that the idea of an omnipotent Spirit is not intrinsically incoherent if we see such a Spirit as outside space and time that uniquely executes its intentions in the spatio-temporal continuum’ (pp. 153–154).

Flew identifies his god as the god of Aristotle, with the attributes of ‘immutability, immateriality, omnipotence, omniscience, oneness or indivisibility, perfect goodness and necessary existence’ (p. 92). He is adamant that his conversion to theism does not represent a paradigm shift, because his paradigm remains simply to follow the argument where it leads (p. 89).

Is Flew’s god the God of Scripture?

Some of the attributes of the god that Flew acknowledges are also attributes of God, but Flew does not acknowledge the Trinity or Christ as the second Person of the Trinity, both of which are essential Christian doctrines. So although Flew’s deistic beliefs echo Christian belief in some areas, the god he accepts is not the same as the God of the Bible, although he professes to remain open to the evidence.

Flew never claims to be Christian; he is a self-identified deist who does not believe in an afterlife (p. 2). Nonetheless, he is charitable in his comments about the Christians he came in contact with, writing that his father, a Methodist minister, shared his ‘eagerness of mind’ even though their intellectual pursuits led them in different directions (p. 12). Flew concludes that he is ‘entirely open to learning more about the divine Reality, especially in the light of what we know about the history of nature’ and that ‘the question of whether the Divine has revealed itself in human history remains a valid topic of discussion. You cannot limit the possibilities of omnipotence except to produce the logically impossible’ (p. 157).

A critique of ‘The New Atheism’

The first of two appendices in There is a God is a critique of the ‘New Atheism’ by co-author Roy Varghese. Varghese argues that there are some phenomena that are only explainable in terms of the existence of God (p. 161). His view is that atheism is a result of a deliberate refusal to look at the evidence, which is readily available in our immediate experience (p. 163).

First, Varghese argues that something had to always exist, either God or the universe (p. 165). He maintains that the theist argument is superior because the atheist says that the eternal existence of the universe is inherently unexplainable, but theists argue that the eternal existence of God is not inexplicable, just incomprehensible for humans (p. 165). The atheist view also fails to explain why something exists rather than nothing, and why the something that exists obeys the laws of nature (p. 171).

Second, Varghese contends that most of the ‘new atheists’ do not even address the origin of life. Only Dawkins attempts an explanation; he claims that ‘a chemical model need only predict that life will arise on one planet in a billion billion to give us a good and entirely satisfying explanation for the presence of life here’ (p. 173). Varghese criticizes this as ‘manifestly inadequate or worse’ (p. 172) and as ‘an audacious exercise in superstition’ (p. 173), and indeed not even such an inadequate model exists.

Third, atheists have to deal with consciousness. Although certain areas of the brain are associated with consciousness, they do not produce consciousness—a certain area of a person’s brain may show activity when thinking about a certain idea, but a neurologist cannot tell from that person’s MRI what he is thinking about. ‘Consciousness is correlated with certain regions of the brain, but when the same systems of neurons are present in the brain stem there is no “production” of consciousness’ (p. 174). Fourth, ‘beyond consciousness, there is the phenomenon of thought, of understanding, seeing meaning’ (p. 176). ‘At the foundation of all of our thinking, communicating, and use of language is a miraculous power. It is the power of noting differences and similarities and of generalizing and universalizing—what the philosophers call concepts universals, and the like. It is natural to humans, unique, and simply mystifying’ (pp. 176–177). The brain plays a part in this process, but there is clearly a non-physical part to it, as well. Varghese argues that ‘they are the acts of a person who is inescapably both embodied and “ensouled”’ (p. 178). Fifth, the atheists have to deal with the emergence of the self, which he calls ‘the most obvious and unassailable and the most lethal for all forms of physicalism’ (p. 181).

Did God become incarnate?

The second appendix contains a dialogue between Flew and New Testament scholar N.T. Wright on the subject of ‘The self-revelation of God in human history’. Flew begins with some very charitable remarks about Christianity, saying that ‘I think that the Christian religion is the one religion that most clearly deserves to be honoured and respected whether or not its claim to be a divine revelation is true. There is nothing like the combination of a charismatic figure like Jesus and a first-class intellectual like St. Paul. … If you’re wanting Omnipotence to set up a religion, this is the one to beat’ (pp. 185–186). However, he questions the reliability of the New Testament on the subject of the Resurrection, because the New Testament was written decades after the events they purport to describe, and the earliest of these, the Pauline letters, have little physical detail. Nevertheless, he acknowledges that ‘the claim concerning the resurrection is more impressive than by any by the religious competition’ (187).

Wright begins his rebuttal by showing that the evidence for Jesus’ historical existence makes Him one of ancient history’s most well-attested figures. He goes on to show that Jesus is depicted in the Gospels as acting in ways that are in accord with Jewish belief about God in the Second Temple period (188–92). He demonstrates that Christian beliefs about the resurrection differed radically from what pagans believed, and differed substantially from Second Temple Jewish belief about resurrection. Christian belief about the Resurrection is unanimous from the earliest traditions through the first four or five generations; Wright argues that for this to be the case, there had to be a historical Resurrection that would serve as the basis for this new belief. Wright contends that though the Gospels were written later than the Pauline letters, the accounts of the Resurrection seem to stem from an oral tradition going back much earlier. Flew is impressed with Wright’s argument, and re-states that ‘you cannot limit the possibilities of omnipotence except to produce the logically impossible. Everything else is open to omnipotence’ (213).

This of course underlies the importance of the Resurrection debate with Habermas cited earlier. Flew still has no good answers to the strong case for the Resurrection.

Controversy regarding authorship

In the wake of its release, some skeptics claimed that the ideas expressed in There is a God did not really reflect Flew’s position and that he was being used by evangelicals.2 First, Flew’s position is only close to the evangelical position in that deism is closer to evangelical Christianity than atheism; if evangelicals were trying to use Flew, they certainly did not do a very good job, as his book ends with him still questioning the reliability of the New Testament, the existence of an afterlife, and other core Christian concepts. The skeptics suggested that Varghese was the true author of the book, and that Flew was becoming mentally unstable in his advanced age. Flew does suffer from nominal aphasia, a condition which makes it hard to remember names, but denied all the allegations of ghost-writing and affirmed that the book was in line with his theistic views entirely.3

Indeed, these accusations also make little sense given the interview that Flew gave to none other than his former debate opponent, Gary Habermas.4

Conclusion

Many atheists say that religion is inherently unreasonable, and that if someone comes to faith in any deity, it is only because of a religious experience that is best unverifiable and at worst a form of delusion. However, Flew’s deistic argument is useful in that he, using arguments completely on the natural level, makes a powerful argument for God’s existence.

‘I must stress that my discovery of the Divine has proceeded on a purely natural level, without any reference to supernatural phenomena. It has been an exercise in what has traditionally been called natural theology. It has had no connection with any of the revealed religions. Nor do I claim to have had any personal experience of God or any experience that may be called supernatural or miraculous. In short, my discovery of the Divine has been a pilgrimage of reason and not of faith’ (p. 93).

Readers looking for an apologetic for Christianity will be disappointed, but the book is a good read. The book is powerful evidence that one can come to a belief in theism purely from the evidence. It is also a lesson that design alone is not enough for saving faith; that needs special revelation, which is likewise backed up by credible historical evidence as Habermas and Wright showed.

References

1. Habermas, G.R. and Flew, A.G.N., Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? The Resurrection Debate, Miethe, T.L. (Ed.), Harper & Row, San Francisco, CA, 1987.

2. For instance, Oppenheimer, M., ‘The Turning of an Atheist’, New York Times, 4 November 2007, <www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/magazine/04Flew-t.html>.

3. See Varghese’s response at <blog.christianitytoday.com/ctliveblog/archives/2007/11/doubting_antony.html>.

4. My Pilgrimage from Atheism to Theism: an exclusive interview with former British atheist Professor Antony Flew by Gary Habermas, Philosophia Christi, Winter 2005; <www.illustramedia.com/IDArticles/flew-interview.pdf>.

Link: http://creation.com/review-there-is-a-g ... ntony-flew



Awesomelyglorious
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15 Jan 2010, 3:29 am

And, of course, some people consider Antony Flew likely to be senile, and the book to likely be the product of Roy Varghese, and maybe they are wrong, but whatever.

There is an NY Times article on the matter here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/magaz ... ref=slogin

And of course, a number by Richard Carrier

http://richardcarrier.blogspot.com/2007 ... -book.html

http://richardcarrier.blogspot.com/2007 ... noyed.html

http://secweb.infidels.org/?kiosk=artic ... mber2007-2

http://secweb.infidels.org/article369.html


At this point, I pretty much consider the matter irrelevant. People both don't exist, and are crazy. This includes Antony Flew.



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15 Jan 2010, 4:16 am

‘The first is the fact that nature obeys laws.

... No, it doesn't. There aren't actually laws that nature is following, we just see patterns that hold true for most of what we experience. More and more we are finding anomalous circumstances anyway. In order for a law to be obeyed there must be something doing the obeying, I don't think its reasonable to say that electrons think, at least with what we know. The point of a god anyway is that there would be no predictable laws because everything would be that god's will - otherwise the god is unnecessary and therefore not a god.

The second is the dimension of life

Life isn't a dimension, its just a particular quality some arrangements of chemicals are said to have when they meet some requirements such as having a metabolism. Just like time, life isn't really there - without an observer it doesn't exist.

… The third is the very existence of nature’ .

The first point would make this obsolete, if nature had laws it would have to exist - presumably part of the law would be that it existed.

None of the three main points deal with perfection, which is the key point for a god. This whole argument deals with the idea of a demiurge.

Every theist is an ex-atheist.



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15 Jan 2010, 9:07 am

TheOddGoat wrote:
‘The first is the fact that nature obeys laws.

... No, it doesn't. There aren't actually laws that nature is following, we just see patterns that hold true for most of what we experience. More and more we are finding anomalous circumstances anyway. In order for a law to be obeyed there must be something doing the obeying, I don't think its reasonable to say that electrons think, at least with what we know. The point of a god anyway is that there would be no predictable laws because everything would be that god's will - otherwise the god is unnecessary and therefore not a god.

The second is the dimension of life

Life isn't a dimension, its just a particular quality some arrangements of chemicals are said to have when they meet some requirements such as having a metabolism. Just like time, life isn't really there - without an observer it doesn't exist.

… The third is the very existence of nature’ .

The first point would make this obsolete, if nature had laws it would have to exist - presumably part of the law would be that it existed.

None of the three main points deal with perfection, which is the key point for a god. This whole argument deals with the idea of a demiurge.

Every theist is an ex-atheist.



For your first point, you are making science invalid. For your second and third point, you are arguing mere semantics.



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15 Jan 2010, 8:43 pm

iamnotaparakeet wrote:
For your first point, you are making science invalid. For your second and third point, you are arguing mere semantics.

How is his first point making science invalid, exactly?



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15 Jan 2010, 10:57 pm

As AG has already pointed out there is a far bit of controversy surrounding Flews belief in a God. I would suggest that if you think Flew's change of belief is ground breaking and of great importance, then you should read some of the articles AG has posted.

People change their philosophical beliefs all the time, so what. If a formally prominent atheist has purportedly changed his mind who cares, unless of course this change of thought has come about through research which objectively supports the existence of a god, that would indeed be ground breaking. Religious people lose their faith all the time, and [in the case of this forum at least] I have not seen anyone parading the fallen god botherers as proof of gods non existence.


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16 Jan 2010, 2:05 am

Lecks wrote:
iamnotaparakeet wrote:
For your first point, you are making science invalid. For your second and third point, you are arguing mere semantics.

How is his first point making science invalid, exactly?


Because if there aren't any laws which govern the physical universe, but only arbitrary patterns we pretend have meaning, then there can be no scientific knowledge. Having any knowledge would be a non feasible matter also. And our ability to perceive should also be nonexistent. However, I think that since we are all using computers that it should be self evident that at least Ohm's law is valid.



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16 Jan 2010, 8:26 am

iamnotaparakeet wrote:
Lecks wrote:
iamnotaparakeet wrote:
For your first point, you are making science invalid. For your second and third point, you are arguing mere semantics.

How is his first point making science invalid, exactly?


Because if there aren't any laws which govern the physical universe, but only arbitrary patterns we pretend have meaning, then there can be no scientific knowledge. Having any knowledge would be a non feasible matter also. And our ability to perceive should also be nonexistent. However, I think that since we are all using computers that it should be self evident that at least Ohm's law is valid.


Not really. The patterns we see do have meaning because they have implications for how nature works on a fundamental level. They are not laws in the same way the laws of a country are laws. It's just how nature works but it is us who make up the laws based on what we observe in nature. This actually does not mean that there can be no scientific knowledge, but it can mean that our knowledge is only approximate and accumulates as more discoveries come along. For example, Newton's second law of motion appears to be violated when you're talking about objects traveling at near the speed of light relative to each other. However, the new law that describes this still reduces to Newtons second law at the low velocities that we commonly experience. So this discovery does not actually invalidate Newton's second law of motion.



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16 Jan 2010, 8:36 am

meh, the guy just wants to get the Templeton Award. it's twice as big as the Nobel Prize so don't blame him :P


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16 Jan 2010, 9:22 am

iamnotaparakeet wrote:
However, I think that since we are all using computers that it should be self evident that at least Ohm's law is valid.


Only within a certain range of voltages and in certain temperature ranges. Very cold stuff has zero resistance. Ohm's law is a heuristic. It is NOT a fundamental law of physics. It is a handy, dandy rule of thumb.

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16 Jan 2010, 9:47 am

Science, more or less, looks at the universe and proposes how it is. Religion looks at the universe and, more or less, tells us the way it should be. Neither are completely successful but science, in general, does a better job.



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16 Jan 2010, 11:04 am

May the force back off topic

I have always found it extraordinarily deplorable that theists (recent converts or from time immemorial) to argue for the existence of God as the creator of all things. Faith in such and such does not have to be continually rammed home to make a point. if you are comfortable in your belief, so be it, atheistic, nontheistic or theistic, then "so beitstic". I have always been rather skeptical of those who try to ram their beliefs down my throat as the only way. For all we know, there may be something else that may turn out to be more plausible, but for now, i will opt for my own eclectic system, and forgo the politics of purists like Flew, Dawkins, etc. :roll:


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16 Jan 2010, 12:43 pm

Awesomelyglorious wrote:
And, of course, some people consider Antony Flew likely to be senile, and the book to likely be the product of Roy Varghese, and maybe they are wrong, but whatever.

That allegation was reported in the article.
Lita Cosner wrote:
The skeptics suggested that Varghese was the true author of the book, and that Flew was becoming mentally unstable in his advanced age. Flew does suffer from nominal aphasia, a condition which makes it hard to remember names, but denied all the allegations of ghost-writing and affirmed that the book was in line with his theistic views entirely.

Nice of you though, to give this explanation to atheists who didn't bother reading it.


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16 Jan 2010, 6:00 pm

iamnotaparakeet wrote:
Lita Cosner wrote:
In that debate, he said that he believed that the origin of life points to a creative Intelligence,

‘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’ (p. 75).

Either Flew's argument is disappointingly ignorant, or the quote is selective and makes him look ignorant. Whether Flew intends to discuss the origin of life or the origin of adaptations, the whole point is to find ways other than just chance. If he really believes an atheist view of life (which necessarily must rely on a scientific approach, having ruled out the supernatural) posits that either life or species or adaptations are the result of pure chance, then he is so ignorant that he has nothing to say on the subject that is worth hearing.

Some people try to make a more sophisticated argument, saying that the known evolutionary processes run up against an inherent limit that makes them too weak to explain the variation we see in biology. That is more respectable than the rubbish quoted here. I hope that Flew's complete argument is more sophisticated than this quote suggests.

Lita Cosner wrote:
Flew was particularly impressed with a physicist’s refutation of the idea that monkeys at typewriters would eventually produced a Shakespearean sonnet. The likelihood of getting one Shakespearean sonnet by chance is one in 10690; to put this number in perspective, there are only 1080 particles in the universe. Flew concludes:

‘If the theorem won’t work for a single sonnet, then of course it’s simply absurd to suggest that the more elaborate feat of the origin of life could have been achieved by chance’.

That doesn't look promising. I tried to reconstruct the calculation behind the numbers. I found a random sonnet and found it has 619 characters, including spaces. For a first approximation I ignore the difference between upper case and lower case letters. Then with 26 letters, the space and the five types of punctuation in the sonnet, there are 32 characters. If I ignore letter frequencies and assume each character is equally probable, I have a probability for each of 1/32 = 10^-1.5. I multiply that by the 619 characters of the sonnet, and I get 10^929.5 possible combinations of characters. The inverse of that would be the probability of any one set of characters forming the original sonnet by chance if we used random, equiprobable selection. I repeated the calculation with the letter frequencies quoted in wikipedia, and got 10^-800.4. If I ignore spaces and punctuation I get 10^-668 if I assume all letters are equiprobable and 10^-592 if I use the letter frequencies in English. So the 10^-690 Flew quotes looks about right for a completely random selection of each letter. That he used this moronic analogy doesn't look good.

Lita Cosner wrote:
Flew was also critical of Dawkins’s ‘selfish gene’ idea, pointing out that ‘natural selection does not positively produce anything. It only eliminates, or tends to eliminate, whatever is not competitive’.

That's why evolutionary theory is based on the idea of the combination of chance mutation and natural selection. If Cosner fairly represents Flew, the argument is that chance alone can't account for the variation we see, selection alone can't account for the variation we see, so evolution can't account for the variation we see. That's rather like saying hydrogen alone can't account for water, oxygen alone can't account for water, so chemistry can't account for water.

Lita Cosner wrote:
First, Varghese argues that something had to always exist, either God or the universe (p. 165).

Really? I would think that is a question best left to cosmologists. I don't see it as a self evident truth.

Lita Cosner wrote:
He maintains that the theist argument is superior because the atheist says that the eternal existence of the universe is inherently unexplainable

Really? Is that what atheists do say, or is that what Varghese thinks atheists must say to be consistent?

Lita Cosner wrote:
but theists argue that the eternal existence of God is not inexplicable, just incomprehensible for humans

How does he distinguish between the two? If something is incomprehensible for humans, how does Varghese know that it can be explained?

Lita Cosner wrote:
The atheist view also fails to explain why something exists rather than nothing

In God: The Failed Hypothesis Stenger, a physicist and atheist, offers an explanation for just that. Strictly speaking, it is true that it is not the religious opinion of atheism that offers an explanation why something exists rather than nothing, it is a scientific theory coming out of physics. The theory just happens not to need a creator god. In the same sense atheism doesn't explain variation in the biological world, what does offer an explanation is a theory that happens not to include a creator god. In that sense, atheism doesn't explain a whole lot, but that is a pretty trivial sense.

Lita Cosner wrote:
Second, Varghese contends that most of the ‘new atheists’ do not even address the origin of life.

Most of the 'new atheists' are not active in research on abiogenesis, so I wouldn't expect them to address that scientific question.

Lita Cosner wrote:
Third, atheists have to deal with consciousness. ...
Varghese wrote:
At the foundation of all of our thinking, communicating, and use of language is a miraculous power. It is the power of noting differences and similarities and of generalizing and universalizing—what the philosophers call concepts universals, and the like. It is natural to humans, unique, and simply mystifying’ (pp. 176–177).

That doesn't sound like Varghese has any explanation either. I don't see calling something miraculous and mystifying as an explanation.

Varghese wrote:
The brain plays a part in this process, but there is clearly a non-physical part to it, as well.

Before I can even consider whether that is clear, I need to know what is meant by non-physical. Is that non-physical as in prime number or as in algorithm, or is that non-physical as in transcendent, like an immortal soul that is neither matter nor energy?

Lita Cosner wrote:
Varghese argues that ‘they are the acts of a person who is inescapably both embodied and “ensouled”’ (p. 178).

And if we were told what that means, how an ensouled entity can be distinguished from one that isn't then we could perhaps test the claim. (AG asked that question in a recent thread, and he hasn't yet gotten an answer.)

Lita Cosner wrote:
Fifth, the atheists have to deal with the emergence of the self, which he calls ‘the most obvious and unassailable and the most lethal for all forms of physicalism’ (p. 181).

And why would that be? This is not an argument, it is merely a claim.

I hope the book itself has better arguments than are quoted in the review, but I don't think I'll invest the time to check something that contains that stupid a version of the argument from design. That doesn't make me expect much from the rest.



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17 Jan 2010, 2:33 am

NobelCynic wrote:
Awesomelyglorious wrote:
And, of course, some people consider Antony Flew likely to be senile, and the book to likely be the product of Roy Varghese, and maybe they are wrong, but whatever.

That allegation was reported in the article.
Lita Cosner wrote:
The skeptics suggested that Varghese was the true author of the book, and that Flew was becoming mentally unstable in his advanced age. Flew does suffer from nominal aphasia, a condition which makes it hard to remember names, but denied all the allegations of ghost-writing and affirmed that the book was in line with his theistic views entirely.

Nice of you though, to give this explanation to atheists who didn't bother reading it.

I read the allegation in the article, I also still provided the explanation. I don't really care that much about Anthony Flew's beliefs, but I do find the argument for his instability to be relatively strong. Certainly stronger than could be demolished by the simple statements in Lita Cosner's article. Once again, "maybe they are wrong, but whatever".