A journey of reason

Atheist looks at science, decides there is a God

Excerpt:

We are often told that belief in God is simply a matter of personal faith, perhaps even a leap in the dark. We are entitled to our religious beliefs, but we are not intellectually justified in holding them.

The distinguished octogenarian British philosopher Anthony Flew will have none of this. His journey has been one of reason, not faith. Although recent best-selling books that promote atheism, such as "The God Delusion," by Richard Dawkins, claim that belief in God is positively irrational and retrograde, Flew disagrees.

For the vast majority of his life, Flew was an outspoken and well-respected atheist, publishing numerous books and articles and participating in debates with Christians. But Flew claims that he has always tried to follow Socrates' advice "to follow the evidence wherever it leads." In 2004, Flew revealed that the evidence from science had convinced him that there is a God who designed and created the universe.

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1. First, he takes the consistent and rational laws of nature to indicate a divine mind that created and orchestrated them. He cites a number of modern physicists who, in their study of the universe, have discerned regularities that are "mathematically precise, universal, and tied together." That is, they are designed and not accidental.
   
2. Second, Flew points out that the universe is "fine-tuned" for sustaining life. A large number of factors are balanced on a razor's edge to make it so. Without these "just so" arrangements, there would be no life in the universe.
   
3. Third, recent discoveries in biology regarding the vast complexity and information-rich nature of life pose a serious challenge to the atheistic account of life's origin, which grants no designing intelligence, but only unthinking matter. Flew asks, "How can a universe of mindless matter produce beings with intrinsic ends, self-replicating capabilities, and 'coded chemistry' "?
   
4. Fourth, Flew is impressed with the evidence for the Big Bang, which indicates that the universe came into existence out of nothing billions of years ago. If so, the only possibilities to explain this are that it came into existence without a cause or that there was a cause outside of the universe that brought it into reality. But, in the words of an old song, "Nothing comes from nothing. Nothing ever could." Thus, God is the best explanation.
   

Comment: There Is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, by Antony Flew