Antony Flew – How An Atheist Changed His Mind
For the last half of the twentieth century, Antony Flew (1923-2010) was the world’s most famous atheist. Long before Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris began taking swipes at religion, Flew was the preeminent spokesman for unbelief. However in 2004, he shocked the world by announcing he had come to believe in God. While never embracing Christianity, Flew only believed in the deistic, Aristotelian conception of God, he became one of the most high-profile and surprising atheist converts. In 2007, he recounted his conversion in a book titled “There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind”. Some critics suggested Flew’s mental capacity had declined and therefore we should question the credibility of his conversion. Others hailed Flew’s book as a legitimate and landmark publication.
A couple months before the book’s release, Flew sat down with Strange Notions contributor Dr. Benjamin Wiker for an interview about his book, his conversion, and the reasons that led him to God :
Dr. Benjamin Wiker : You say in your book “There is a God” that “it may well be that no one is as surprised as I am that my exploration of the Divine has after all these years turned from denial…to discovery.” Everyone else was certainly very surprised as well, perhaps all the more so since on our end, it seemed so sudden. But in your book “There is a God” we find it was actually a very gradual process, a “two decade migration” as you call it. God was the conclusion of a rather long argument, then. But wasn’t there a point in the “argument” where you found yourself suddenly surprised by the realization that “There is a God” after all? So that, in some sense, you really did “hear a Voice that says” in the evidence itself “‘Can you hear me now?’”
Antony Flew : There were two factors in particular that were decisive. One was my growing empathy with the insight of Einstein and other noted scientists that there had to be an intelligence behind the integrated complexity of the physical Universe. The second was my own insight that the integrated complexity of life itself, which is far more complex than the physical Universe, can only be explained in terms of an intelligent source. I believe that the origin of life and reproduction simply cannot be explained from a biological standpoint despite numerous efforts to do so. With every passing year, the more that was discovered about the richness and inherent intelligence of life, the less it seemed likely that a chemical soup could magically generate the genetic code. The difference between life and non-life, it became apparent to me, was ontological and not chemical. The best confirmation of this radical gulf is Richard Dawkins’ comical effort to argue in “The God Delusion” that the origin of life can be attributed to a “lucky chance.” If that’s the best argument you have, then the game is over. No, I did not hear a voice, it was the evidence itself that led me to this conclusion.
