Antony Flew Quotes

Science spotlights three dimensions of nature that point to God. The first is the fact that nature obeys laws. The second is the dimension of life, of intelligently organized and purpose-driven beings, which arose from matter. The third is the very existence of nature. But it is not science alone that guided me. I have also been helped by a renewed study of the classical philosophical arguments.

If you had an equation detailing the probability of something emerging from a vacuum, you would still have to ask why that equation applies. Hawking had, in fact, noted the need for a creative factor to breathe fire into the equations.

Just ten years ago, probably the most prominent atheist of the twentieth century, Antony Flew, concluded that a God must have designed the universe. It was shocking news and made international headlines. Flew came to believe that the extraordinarily complex genetic code in DNA simply could not be accounted for naturalistically. It didn’t make logical sense to him that it had happened merely by chance, via random mutations. It is a remarkable thing that Flew had the humility and intellectual honesty to do a public about-face on all he had stood for and taught for five decades.

we have all the evidence we need in our immediate experience and that only a deliberate refusal to “look” is responsible for atheism of any variety.

Gerald Schroeder points out that the existence of conditions favorable to life still does not explain how life itself originated. Life was able to survive only because of favorable conditions on our planet. But there is no law of nature that instructs matter to produce end-directed, self-replicating entities.

No mainstream philosopher has developed the kind of systematic, comprehensive, original, and influential exposition of atheism that is to be found in Antony Flew’s fifty years of antitheological writings.

McGrath briefly notes Bertrand Russell's Why I am not a Christian, and J. J. C. Smart gets a single mention, as does Adolf Grünbaum, but the other major defenders of philosophical atheism of the last half-century do not even merit a nod. His index contains no listings for Antony Flew, Wallace Matson, Kai Nielsen, Richard Gale, William L. Rowe, Michael Martin, J. L. Mackie, Daniel Dennett, Evan Fales, Michael Tooley, Quentin Smith, Jordan Howard Sobel, Robin Le Poidevin, Theodore Drange, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Nicholas Everitt, J. L. Schellenberg, or Graham Oppy.

Sir Antony Flew was probably a deist. The deist is a rather curious figure in the atheist spectrum, for the fundamental reason that he is not an atheist at all.  Yet you will find several members of the internet-based new atheist movement who will do everything in their power to lay claim to a select

Buckley goes on to declare: "What keeps Christians afloat is the buoyant knowledge that no devastating damage has in fact been done to Christian doctrine" (N 55). Ah, blessed Bill! - how strong a shield your ignorance must be! I suppose one should not be surprised at Buckley's staggering ignorance of science, ancient and modern, but one might expect him to have a slightly better notion of the scientific and philosophical implications of many of the Christian doctrines in which he professes to believe. And although he claims to have read much in the area of Catholic apologetics, he seems wondrously unaware of the multitude of skeptical tracts that have, for many intellectuals, shattered the foundations of religious belief, whether it be Robert G. Ingersoll's Some Mistakes of Moses (1879) or Joseph Wheless's Is It God's Word? (1926) or Bertrand Russell's Religion and Science (1935), all the way down to Antony Flew's Atheistic Humanism (1993), Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World (1995), and beyond.

Prior to Flew, major apologies for atheism were those of Enlightenment thinkers (David Hume, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Friedrich Nietzsche). Major philosophers of Flew’s generation who were atheists: W. V. O. Quine and Gilbert Ryle. But none took the step of developing book-length arguments to support their personal beliefs. In later years, atheist philosophers who critically examined and rejected the traditional arguments for God’s existence: Paul Edwards, Wallace Matson, Kai Nielsen, Paul Kurtz, J. L. Mackie, Richard Gale, Michael Martin. But their works did not change the agenda and framework of discussion the way Flew’s innovative publications did.

renowned British philosopher, Antony Flew, announced that he had repudiated a lifelong commitment to atheism, citing, among other factors, evidence of intelligent design in the DNA molecule.6

Virtually no major scientist today claims that the fine tuning was purely a result of chance factors at work in a single universe.

In 2004, the atheist world was shocked when famed British atheist Antony Flew announced that he believed in the existence of God. For decades he had heralded the cause of atheism. It was the incredible complexity of DNA that opened his eyes: In a recent interview, Flew stated, “It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design.” Flew also renounced naturalistic theories of evolution: “It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism.

Islam is best described in a Marxian way as the uniting and justifying ideology of Arab imperialism.

This fallacy was coined by Antony Flew in his book Thinking about Thinking.

Just ten years ago, probably the most prominent atheist of the twentieth century, Antony Flew, concluded that a God must have designed the universe.

concluded from its surveys that in essence what you believe by the time you are thirteen is what you will die believing.

among this pool are these: (a) explanatory power, (b) explanatory scope, (c) plausibility, (d) degree of "ad hoc-ness" and (e) conformity with other beliefs. The more explanatory power and scope and the more plausibility and conformity with other beliefs an explanation has, the better it is. The less ad hoc (adjusted, contrived, artificial) the explanation, the better as well. The trick is to subject all explanation options to these