Famous Atheist Now Believes in God

[DavidDvorkin]

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=315976

The theists will be crowing about this one, I suppose. I expect them to be surprised that other atheists don't immediately switch, too, not understanding that we don't care about authority figures they way they do.

[Goldmund]

1. I don't get this "unbelievable complexity" argument

We often hear it from creationists and deists of different stripes.

"Complexity" is an utterly subjective qualifier and has no place in philosophy or science. There is no such thing as "complexity". "Complexity" is what we call structures and concepts that stretch the limits of our cognitive abilities. Does that mean that monkeys, for example, would have a much clearer picture of god's existence -- if they only thought about it? After all, I'm sure the environment of the zoo they live in is full of what they would see as "unbelievable complexity". They don't need to look at DNA structure. In addition to that, the very comprehension of the universe we have -- and whose "complexity" we're judging -- is only a projection of its nature onto the plain of our consciousness. If we see "complexity", then it is one of our own making.

It strikes me as a very homo-centric way to think about the universe. And that is what I see as the main flaw of deism.

[DavidDvorkin]

2. Yeah, I'm surprised he fell for it

Perhaps he's losing his mental sharpness because of age.

[Karenca]

42. That's exactly what I was

thinking...He's 81 years old.
Maybe a little pre-senility dementia at work here.

[trotsky]

11. A.K.A. The "Watchmaker's Argument"

For those not familiar:

A person is walking on the beach and finds a watch. Inside are metal gears, springs, etc. The watch is so complex compared to its environment, it "proves" that it had a creator - someone made it. So, naturally, the universe and its physical laws are so intricate, so complex, that "proves" it must have a creator.

There are many flaws with this argument, the most blatant being that in the first part, the watch is "complex" compared to its environment (the universe), which is obviously implied to be NOT "complex." (Because that's what makes the watch stand out.) Yet then the analogy insists that the universe IS "complex" to infer that there is a creator.

81 years old, and he falls for this tired old argument?

[Goldmund]

12. Another flaw with that argument...

...is that while you're comparing the watch with the enviornment outside it, there's no such thing as "environment outside the Universe", by definition. It makes as much sense to call Universe stupifyingly simple as it does divinely complex.

[Philostopher]

3. Perhaps he had a stroke.

Hasn't there been some evidence that people who experience an injury to a certain lobe of the brain believe they've had a religious experience and even atheists describe it this way, when properly stimulated? I've read that some eplieptics who happen to have lesions in that part of the brain also believe they have had religious experiences or 'talked directly to God.' It's entirely possible he had an ischemic attack in this part of his brain and beleived, afterward, that he'd 'talked to' or 'been talked to by God.'

It's certainly a possibility!

[fshrink]

4. "A Methodist minister's son, Flew became an atheist at 15"

A big return to Daddy at an age where life becomes uncertain every day. The choice of ontology also evokes an active rebellion. By the way, it seems that choices based on mere rebellion wind up to square one down the road. The PNAC neo-nazis were Trotskyite in their youth, I gather.

[Tafiti]

5. Hmmm, Interesting.

My thoughts exactly fshrink. At 81, life becomes uncertain every day, but then again, he said he still doesn't believe in an afterlife, so perhaps that doesn't quite explain it.

For me, someone coming to the conclusion that there must have been an original force that created life, then let it evolve, is an absolute non-issue. What difference does it make? The crux of my atheism rests on the fact that there is no "higher power" that has any involvement, concern, etc. in the everyday lives of human beings.

If such a "God" exists, I think he'd understand why we're atheists, and perhaps even respect us for it.

[fshrink]

6. What difference does it make indeed!

It's fear. The only time in my life (I'm 52) where I longed for some sort of surnatural support was the time of my life where I was in the most desperate situation. That's when your fibers cry for a father. Only he can help you then. Lasted about 1 hour, but I felt the pull...

[geomon666]

7. I think you hit it on the head.

Sounds like fear to me. Fear of death, uncertainty, whatever.

[robbedvoter]

33. "There are no atheists in a fox hole"

[immoderate]

36. That's what my mother told me...

during Vietnam war.

I said, "Atheists are too smart."

--IMM

[DavidDvorkin]

37. But there are coming out of foxholes

I don't have a link. My son, military vet and atheist, told me of a study he's seen that shows that war converts significant numbers of soldiers to atheism.

[Book Lover]

8. So a philosopher stares at DNA long enough

and convinces himself that it must have been twisted by hand... *big sigh*

[robbedvoter]

9. reminds me of a joke about the old Jew converting to Catholicism

on his deathbed. "We don't understand" the family objected. "let one of them die" said their dying father.

[fshrink]

10. Yes, I think it was Leibnitz, who also converted to whatever

on his death bed.

[BurtWorm]

13. Someone is crowing about it in Religion &Thelology already!

Claiming Flew is "da man" for atheists. I never heard of Flew until today, for one thing. And even if I had, do theists really believe atheists and free thinkers take their cues from a select "priesthood" of senior atheists? Well, yes, sadly, they probably do, as taking cues from "da man" is what a lot of theism is about.

[fshrink]

23. So you go behind the lines, uh?

[BurtWorm]

28. I saw it listed on the Latest page

and clicked out of curiosity. Usually I don't go in there.

[Beetwasher]

14. It's Comforting At 81 To Have "The Answer"

End of story. God did it. Now he doesn't have to think about it anymore.

[BurtWorm]

15. I hope he roasts in hell!

:evilgrin:

[Beetwasher]

16. LOL!

n/t

[trotsky]

17. LMAO

Good one, BW. :7

[progressoid]

18. Bleeech. Why is some guy's brain fart news?

:puke:

Must be a trend. Yesterday, at our public library and I saw this book on the new books shelf: The Twilight of Atheism : The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World by Alister McGrath.

From the publisher:

Atheism is one of the most important movements in modern Western culture. For the last two hundred years, it seemed to be on the verge of eliminating religion as an outmoded and dangerous superstition. Recent years, however, have witnessed the decline of disbelief and a rise in religious devotion throughout the world. In THE TWILIGHT OF ATHEISM, the distinguished historian and theologian Alister McGrath examines what went wrong with the atheist dream and explains why religion and faith are destined to play a central role in the twenty-first century.

A former atheist who is now one of Christianity’s foremost scholars, McGrath traces the history of atheism from its emergence in eighteenth-century Europe as a revolutionary worldview that offered liberation from the rigidity of traditional religion and the oppression of tyrannical monarchs, to its golden age in the first half of the twentieth century. Blending thoughtful, authoritative historical analysis with incisive portraits of such leading and influential atheists as Sigmund Freud and Richard Dawkins, McGrath exposes the flaws at the heart of atheism, and argues that the renewal of faith is a natural, inevitable, and necessary response to its failures.

THE TWILIGHT OF ATHEISM will unsettle believers and nonbelievers alike. A powerful rebuttal of the philosophy that, for better and for worse, has exerted tremendous influence on Western history, it carries major implications for the future of both religion and unbelief in our society.

I'LL SAY IT AGAIN :puke:

[Philostopher]

19. And, as someone pointed out upthread ...

why do any of them think non-believers have some overarching, organized non-theism like their overarching organized theism? It was the very organization of theism that discouraged and eventually convinced me that organized religion was really nothing more than an intermittently pleasant mind-control system. And the times it was pleasant all involved hubris -- thinking how great it was that I'd go to heaven when others would not.

I mean, for many people life is a tough slog for fourscore years, give or take -- but the fact that it was for some and wasn't for others, and that there was no logical explanation offered for why it was that way, and that by following what my particular church's dogma stated I was supposed to just accept that we'd all get the same thing 'in heaven,' I thought if the world had to be unfair, why should I believe something that might require me to pay for eternity in torment after having a shitty life, when somebody who had it easy for eighty years might go to heaven just because I'd made a few mistakes and they hadn't?

I'm sure it's quite easy to have a 'deathbed conversion' -- the Christians all seem to love the (apocryphal, from what I understand) story that Darwin had one of those. My question is why do they like that kind of story so much? Isn't that rather masochistic, to like that?

Why do they like thinking that they've lived a tough life, given up and refused things because they were wrong by the bible, while somebody else has lived the life s/he wanted any way s/he wanted, and didn't believe in a higher power until, at death's door, they said 'oops! I was wrong!' and are allowed entered into the same heaven as rank and file Christians who sacrificed to meet up to their God's standards and believed in all along?

[BurtWorm]

20. And this guy isn't even giving them the pleasure of scientifically valid-

ating their Christianity for them. He's yea-saying Deism, not Christianity.

[Philostopher]

21. I got that impression, too.

All he's saying is 'yeah, maybe there was something at some point that started all this,' and while I don't have any great feeling for Deism on the whole, I do find it's somewhat more rationally based than what passes for Christianity with the fundies and evangelicals.

I think it's about as close as I get to any variety of theism, myself. I can say, perfectly comfortably, 'sure, I guess it's not impossible,' which is why I call myself agnostic not atheist. I don't know why that's supposed to be some great coup for evangelicals, though -- he didn't say he believed anything like what they do, now did he?

[fshrink]

24. As far as we know,

pretty much everything is possible depending on the circumstances... And I'm talking about scientific knowledge. So the question becomes, and as far as I'm concerned that's the only one, why requiring an explanation, and why choose the most completely absurd explanation and cling to it claw and teeth.

[progressoid]

22. Yes, I'm sure this is quite reassuring for them. This type of story is a

great support for the "flock". It's very emotion driven so any logic related questions are lost on them.

I suppose I shouldn't get so worked up about it. I should just see it as another human interest story, like the girl in the well or the two legged dog. It's been a long week.

[Tafiti]

25. From the same thread in Religion & Theology:

http://www.secweb.org/asset.asp?AssetID=138

Sorry to Disappoint, but I'm Still an Atheist!
by Antony Flew

Richard C. Carrier, current Editor in Chief of the Secular Web, tells me that "the internet has now become awash with rumors" that I "have converted to Christianity, or am at least no longer an atheist." Perhaps because I was born too soon to be involved in the internet world I had heard nothing of this rumour. So Mr. Carrier asks me to explain myself in cyberspace. This, with the help of the Internet Infidels, I now attempt.

Those rumours speak false. I remain still what I have been now for over fifty years, a negative atheist. By this I mean that I construe the initial letter in the word 'atheist' in the way in which everyone construes the same initial letter in such words as 'atypical' and 'amoral'. For I still believe that it is impossible either to verify or to falsify - to show to be false - what David Hume in his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion happily described as "the religious hypothesis." The more I contemplate the eschatological teachings of Christianity and Islam the more I wish I could demonstrate their falsity.

I first argued the impossibility in 'Theology and Falsification', a short paper originally published in 1950 and since reprinted over forty times in different places, including translations into German, Italian, Spanish, Danish, Welsh, Finnish and Slovak. The most recent reprint was as part of 'A Golden Jubilee Celebration' in the October/November 2001 issue of the semi-popular British journal Philosophy Now, which the editors of that periodical have graciously allowed the Internet Infidels to publish online: see "Theology & Falsification."

<snip>

[Beetwasher]

26. LOL! Oopsy! Theists Victory Dances Are Premature!

Is that hissing the air coming out balloons? Thanks for posting this!

The journalist who wrote the original article should be fired. Seriously. That's one helluva sloppy job of "reporting", but I guess it's the type of thing we should expect nowadays from our "free press".

[BurtWorm]

27. Unfortunately, the "Flew converted" genie has been let out of the bottle

and we'll never get it back in, just as, as Democrats, we've not been able to get the "Gore invented the Internet" genie back in its bottle.

[Beetwasher]

29. Indeed...So Sad

From now on Flew will be brought up time and again by believers as some proof of something...What I don't know...:shrug:

[Tafiti]

30. Alright, sorry, not so fast.

The article that flew around in the other thread was apparently old (2001). The recent rumblings about his "conversion" so-to-speak are recent, and accurate.

Look here: http://www.secweb.org/asset.asp?AssetID=369

However, as I have posted in the other thread, it makes no difference. In my view, he's still pretty much an atheist. He merely entertains the possiblity of a creative force, but still resists the idea of a personal God or an afterlife.

[Philostopher]

31. Right -- from the initial post ...

I gathered that he was admitting to a grudging Deism, which isn't Christianity by a long shot. It sounds like his definition of atheism was more what we would call agnosticism anyway -- and it's an important distinction, I guess. Flew uses the word atheism as a combination of 'a' and 'theism' -- just like amoral means not having any convictions about morality either way, he means he has no religious convictions either way. Which, to me, sounds like what I understand is meant by agnostic, not atheist.

I don't know -- the terms have definitions, but it sounds to me like Flew just made up his own for atheism and it happens to coincide with the current conception of agnosticism. He's over 80 years old -- perhaps the definitions have changed or become more specific over time, I don't know.

[Beetwasher]

32. Yeah, That's What It Seems To Me

n/t

[muriel_volestrangler]

43. An update at that web site

Update (January 2005)

Antony Flew has retracted one of his recent assertions. In a letter to me dated 29 December 2004, Flew concedes:

I now realize that I have made a fool of myself by believing that there were no presentable theories of the development of inanimate matter up to the first living creature capable of reproduction.

He blames his error on being "misled" by Richard Dawkins because Dawkins "has never been reported as referring to any promising work on the production of a theory of the development of living matter," even though this is false (e.g., Richard Dawkins and L. D. Hurst, "Evolutionary Chemistry: Life in a Test Tube," Nature 357: pp. 198-199, 21 May 1992) and hardly relevant: it was Flew's responsibility to check the state of the field (there are several books by actual protobiologists published in just the last five years), rather than wait for the chance possibility that one particular evolutionist would write on the subject. Now that he has done what he was supposed to do in the first place, he has retracted his false statement about the current state of protobiological science.

Flew also makes another admission: "I have been mistaught by Gerald Schroeder." He says "it was precisely because he appeared to be so well qualified as a physicist (which I am not) that I was never inclined to question what he said about physics." Apart from his unreasonable plan of trusting a physicist on the subject of biochemistry (after all, the relevant field is biochemistry, not physics--yet it would seem Flew does not recognize the difference), this attitude seems to pervade Flew's method of truthseeking, of looking to a single author for authoritative information and never checking their claims (or, as in the case of Dawkins, presumed lack of claims). As Flew admitted to me, and to Stuart Wavell of the London Times, and Duncan Crary of the Humanist Network News, he has not made any effort to check up on the current state of things in any relevant field (see "No Longer Atheist, Flew Stands by 'Presumption of Atheism'" and "In the Beginning There Was Something"). Flew has thus abandoned the very standards of inquiry that led the rest of us to atheism. It would seem the only way to God is to jettison responsible scholarship.

[Beetwasher]

44. LMAO!!! Ooops!

Guess he's still an atheist after all! Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy...

What nerve to blame Dawkins!

[fshrink]

35. You know, now that I think of it, I wonder

why we couldn't do the same thing. Just propagate falsities. Or rather why not? Seriously.

[Endangered Specie]

34. Coward.

True Atheists/Agnostics hold till the end.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

40. Like Carl Sagan. Why didn't HE convert?

Perhaps he had a BRAIN?

[GOPFighter]

38. So what?

Every day more former believers turn atheist than former atheists turn believers. Hell, ol' Mr. Flew is welcome to his own opinion in his old age, but I don't see what the big deal is....

[Carl Brennan]

39. Quitter, or

maybe he got whacked upside the head too hard.

[gollygee]

41. I think when people get close to death they start thinking differently

My grandma started going to church at 85 just before she died after a life as an athiest. Maybe it's a "what if i'm wrong" thing?

[Az]

45. Encroaching mortality creates a shift in the emotional balance

And with such shifts come shifts in belief. Its simply the nature of belief. It is the balance of emotional positions maintained by the brain. Cranking up the concern about passing of existance is often a suitible emotional lever to change the balance.