11.07
Dr. Antony Flew
Creation-Evolution Headlines linked to a very good article today about Antony Flew. If you don’t know, Flew was perhaps the most influential atheist of our day. He was the heir to the legacy of Bertrand Russell. I say “was” because in 2004 he told a colleague that he had been convinced by intelligent design that there had to be some sort of creator. He didn’t become a Christian by any means but just a theist. Lee Strobel interviewed him recently and has a great article detailing the interview. Here is the money quote:
“Einstein felt that there must be intelligence behind the integrated complexity of the physical world,” he said. “If that is a sound argument, the integrated complexity of the organic world is just inordinately greater — all the creatures are complicated pieces of design. So an argument that is important about the physical world is immeasurably stronger when applied to the biological world.”
He said in his opinion it was “just obvious that [this] argument is much stronger now” than ever before.
–Antony Flew, Interview with Lee Strobel
His comments are exactly what the current science establishment is so afraid of. He basically says that the intelligent design argument was the cause of his change of mind. The intelligent design argument, like so many others, is part science, and part philosophy. It starts with the philosophical idea that it’s simply impossible for something of vast complication and intricacy to arise by chance. It then goes on to give proofs of this impossibility by using scientific means. Antony Flew, the author of over 30 books defending atheism, never got past step one. He was convinced simply by the merit of the philosophical idea that intelligent design starts with. This is why the science “cartel” is fighting so hard to have ID silenced in the classrooms and universities. Because the argument is so powerful and self-evident.
Flew says as much when he says that it’s “just obvious”. The only problem is that it’s often times extremely difficult to argue on behalf of something that is “just obvious” or intuitional. For example, think of how hard it is to come up with an argument to prove that there is such a thing as the passage of time. Well, of course you probably could, but it would be extremly wordy and hard to explain. It’s supposed to be something that everybody just knows is true. When challenged on it, often times we are at a loss to explain it. I’ll put it this way: The fundementality of the argument is inversly proportional to the complexity of it’s proof. This is an idea that makes it hard to defend ID in short simple soundbite answers. It also makes it easy to take pot-shots at. But given time, careful thinkers like Antony Flew become convinced. That is the sign of a powerful idea.
