Antony Flew was one of the world's most famous atheists for the last 50 years, who taught at the
Among Flew's most influential works are his essays "Theology and Falsification" (in New Essays in Philosophical Theology) and "The Presumption of Atheism". He has also published a work on the possibility of an afterlife, first released under the title The Logic of Mortality but now available as Merely Mortal?
In 2004, Flew announced in a symposium on science and religion that the discoveries of modern science have led him to accept the existence of God.
He had meant to have spoken to the Oxford University Chabad Society on Wednesday, 7 November, to deliver the Baruch Samuel Brackman memorial lecture together with Dr. Gerald Schroeder but due to determination of his health had to unfortunately cancel. The following message is what he conveyed for the evening.
First let me make clear how sorry I am for not to have been able to speak tonight at the Oxford University Chabad Society, connected to the university of which I am my wife are both graduates
I am sorry first and mainly because the paper I was going to read is a refutation of the main thesis of the book The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. That book by Richard Dawkins is a book which I believe won some sort of prize for having sold over a million copies!
My first objection to the book which was certainly written while Dawkins was an academic employed by the University of Oxford is that in this book he systematically fails to follow the first principle of academic controversy: to attack the doctrine which you are attempting to refute in its strongest form.
He does so by not bothering to learn the meaning of the word Theism. He thus became when I was myself a secularist what secularists believed to be impossible: a secularist bigot.
I have just received a copy of a report of a debate held in
This report under the headline “Is Richard Dawkins still evolving?” leads me to believe that Dawkins has actually read my last paper and learnt from it the meaning of Theism. He is now, understandably, reluctant to confess that it was this paper, which taught him the meaning of that word.
I am now a person who is uncommon breed in this country. I was taken 3 times to
I have actually been at the demonstrations. More appalling, I saw in a public library a ruling that no books were to be lent to Jews. I was absolutely appalled. I then spent the war studying Japanese.
Regarding my views on science and religion, I never believed that science had anything to do directly with religion. I never believed they were incompatible.
The idea that led me to logically believe in Theism started with reading what Einstein said which led him to believe that the complexity of the physical was a reason to believe in God. If that was the reason then, just after Einstein won two Nobel prizes, then the fact that organic world is so infinitely more complicated that the physical world, leads a person to believe that there must be a G-d.