Former atheist Antony Flew to author book on God as designer

Antony Flew, who became a deist on account of intelligent design, will apparently be authoring a book with HarperCollins (There Is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, October 23, 2007), his co-author being Roy Varghese
. This from the publisher:

For the first time, this book will present a detailed and fascinating account of Flew's riveting decision to revoke his previous beliefs and argue for the existence of God. Ever since Flew's announcement, there has been great debate among atheists and believers alike about what exactly this "conversion" means. There Is a God will finally put this debate to rest.
This is a story of a brilliant mind and reasoned thinker, and where his lifelong intellectual pursuit eventually led him: belief in God as designer.

Theology corner: Does God need a cause?

TotheSource ("Challenging Hardcore Secularism with Principled Pluralism") offers an interesting item on God as the "First Cause," taking issue with the claim of some atheists (principally Dawkins and Harris) that God must be an infinite regress of causes. (As in "What caused God?", for example, and then "What caused the thing that caused God?", and then "What caused the thing that caused the thing that caused God?".) Of course, even in this world, we encounter causes that cannot be regressed. For example, the facts of arithmetic are final causes as far as math is concerned. There is nothing to look behind for a further cause, though you can in fact surmise an infinite wisdom that creates these facts and holds all things in being. Eugene Wigner has written on the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics,

the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and that there is no rational explanation for it.

I think that by "rational" explanation, he means an explanation that appeals to other causes (chaos, a further regress, et cetera). Such si the temper of our times that laws that actually work are not considered a rational explanation.


Are you looking for one of the following stories?

My U of Toronto talk on why there is an intelligent design controversy, or my talk on media coverage of the controversy att he University of Minnesota.

A summary of tech guru George Gilder's arguments for ID and against Darwinism

A critical look at why March of the Penguins was thought to be an ID film.

A summary of recent opinion columns on the ID controversy

A summary of recent polls of US public opinion on the ID controversy

A summary of the Catholic Church's entry into the controversy, essentially on the side of ID.

O'Leary's intro to non-Darwinian agnostic philosopher David Stove’s critique of Darwinism.

An ID Timeline: The ID folk seem always to win when they lose.

O’Leary’s comments on Francis Beckwith, a Dembski associate, being granted tenure at Baylor after a long struggle - even after helping in a small way to destroy the Baylor Bears' ancient glory - in the opinion of a hyper sportswriter.

Why origin of life is such a difficult problem.

If you like this blog, check out my book on the intelligent design controversy, By Design or by Chance?. You can read excerpts as well.

Blog policy note:Comments are permitted on this blog, but they are moderated. Fully anonymous posts and URLs posted without comment are rarely accepted. To Mr. Anonymous: I'm not psychic, so if you won't tell me who you are, I can't guess and don't care. To Mr. Nude World (URL): If you can't be bothered telling site visitors why they should go on to your fave site next, why should I post your comment? They're all busy people, like you. To Mr. Rudeby International and Mr. Pottymouth: I also have a tendency to delete comments that are merely offensive. Go be offensive to someone who can smack you a good one upside the head. That may provide you with a needed incentive to stop and think about what you are trying to accomplish. To Mr. Righteous but Wrong: I don't publish comments that contain known or probable factual errors. There's already enough widely repeated misinformation out there, and if you don't have the time to do your homework, I don't either. To those who write to announce that at death I will either 1) disintegrate into nothingness or 2) go to Hell by a fast post, please pester someone else. I am a Catholic in communion with the Church and haven't the time for either village atheism or aimless Jesus-hollering.

Materialist nonsense watch: Gagarin probably never said "I don't see any God up here" - was likely a Christian

According to an ENI article by Jonathan Luxmoore,

The world's first person in space, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, publicly advocated rebuilding Moscow's destroyed Christ the Saviour basilica despite being depicted as a committed atheist by the Soviet regime, a former friend has revealed.

"Like every Russian, Gagarin was baptised - and, as far as I know, he was a believer," said Colonel Valentin Petrov, an associate professor at Russia's Gagarin Air Force Academy. "Gagarin's motive was very simple: patriotism cannot be promoted without knowledge of one's roots."

Most interesting is this comment:

"The cosmonaut was often quoted as stating "I don't see any God up here" after exiting the earth's orbit, although the remark did not appear in verbatim transcripts of his flight."

Assuming this checks out, and I don't know a good reason to doubt it, as the entire Soviet regime was built on lies, it's going to take a long time, I suspect, to dematerialize our culture. So much that we think we know probably AIN'T so.

This just in from evolutionary psychology: Hardwired to believe in God - part zillion and three

According to the Dallas Morning News, a recent experiment in the British University of Newcastle psychology department tells us great stuff about how we come to believe in God.

"I had been looking after the coffee and tea in our department for ages," she said.
A sign set the prices for tea, coffee and a bit of milk – 30, 50 and 10 pence.

In January, without telling anyone, Dr. Bateson and her colleagues added one feature to the payment sign: They put up a picture of eyes for five weeks, alternating with a picture of flowers for five weeks.

When the eyes were posted, payments averaged 2.76 times larger than the weeks with the flowers.

The experiment confirmed two earlier studies, including one run by Dr. Fessler and a colleague, that used eyes or faces on computer screens. In all three experiments, people faced by even a hint of a face tended to act nicer.

So, putting the links together:

Our ancestors were hard-wired to pay attention to faces and to change behaviors if they were being watched. They were also inclined to believe in supernatural beings.

And they seem to have been programmed to subconsciously respond to the concept of an immaterial supernatural observer as if it were another person – which is what the break room experiment demonstrated.

Note that marvelous expression, "putting the links together ... " Somewhat the way the consiprazoid puts the links together and discovers that no celebrity from Marilyn Monroe onward died of causes other than murder...

Having decided at the outset that belief in spiritual occurrences must be the result of a psychological disposition and not the result of experience, the evo psycho Melissa Bates goes on to build a whole theory out of, essentially thin air. In fact, even Jeffrey Weiss, who is in her camp, admits

A few last-minute caveats: Every link in this chain is controversial. Behaviorists, psychologists and biologists have alternate theories about why humans cooperate and practice religion. Even those who agree on the broad outlines disagree about important details.

I'll bet. As a matter of fact, the best explanation for the improved collection record has nothing to do with belief in the supernatural at all, but with the - well-justified - suspicion that the picture of the eyes meant that one's petty pilfering had come to the notice of the coffee convenor ...

It never seems to occur to evo psychos and similar folk that, given that they are most unlikely to have a genuine spiritual experience, they are actually in a much poorer position than most people are to understand or comment lucidly on such experiences. They stand in about the same relation to spiritual experiences as the blind do to art or the deaf to music. Thus they are suckers for any fool theory that comes along. And some journalists are no better.

If you like this blog, check out my book on the intelligent design controversy, By Design or by Chance?. You can read excerpts as well.

Are you looking for one of the following stories?

A summary of tech guru George Gilder's arguments for ID and against Darwinism

A critical look at why March of the Penguins was thought to be an ID film.

A summary of recent opinion columns on the ID controversy

A summary of recent polls of US public opinion on the ID controversy

A summary of the Catholic Church's entry into the controversy, essentially on the side of ID.

O'Leary's intro to non-Darwinian agnostic philosopher David Stove’s critique of Darwinism.

An ID Timeline: The ID folk seem always to win when they lose.

O’Leary’s comments on Francis Beckwith, a Dembski associate, being denied tenure at Baylor.

Why origin of life is such a difficult problem.

Blog policy note:Comments are permitted on this blog, but they are moderated. Fully anonymous posts and URLs posted without comment are rarely accepted. To Mr. Anonymous: I'm not psychic, so if you won't tell me who you are, I can't guess and don't care. To Mr. Nude World (URL): If you can't be bothered telling site visitors why they should go on to your fave site next, why should I post your comment? They're all busy people, like you. To Mr. Rudeby International and Mr. Pottymouth: I also have a tendency to delete comments that are merely offensive. Go be offensive to someone who can smack you a good one upside the head. That may provide you with a needed incentive to stop and think about what you are trying to accomplish. To Mr. Righteous but Wrong: I don't publish comments that contain known or probable factual errors. There's already enough widely repeated misinformation out there, and if you don't have the time to do your homework, I don't either. To those who write to announce that at death I will either 1) disintegrate into nothingness or 2) go to Hell by a fast post, please pester someone else. I am a Catholic in communion with the Church and haven't the time for either village atheism or aimless Jesus-hollering.