One FLEW Out of the Cuckoo's Nest

"The kindly God who lovingly fashioned each and every one of us (all creatures great and small) and sprinkled the sky with shining stars for our delight—that God is, like Santa Claus, a myth of childhood, not anything a sane, undeluded adult could literally believe in. That God must either be turned into a symbol for something less concrete or abandoned altogether."
-Daniel C Dennett - Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Things

Foolish Folk like Dan Dennett have yet another reason to place their hand over their mouth, and this one comes out of the middle of their very own ideological camp - not three years ago, Anthony Flew, the world's foremost philosophical atheist, publicly recanted his atheism for a vague but strong form of deistic theism. After a lifetime of truth suppression he's relented, having lost the strength to continue the schizophrenic resistance of omnipresent evidences, but still has miles to go before he sleeps. Keep him in your prayers. Here's excerpts from an interview w/ him last week [tothesource.org]:


Q: In your"two decade migration," as you call it, God was the conclusion of a rather long argument, then. But wasn't there a point in the "argument" where you found yourself suddenly surprised by the realization that "There is a God" after all? So that, in some sense, you really did "hear a Voice that says" in the evidence itself " 'Can you hear me now?'"

Flew: There were two factors in particular that were decisive. One was my growing empathy with the insight of Einstein and other noted scientists that there had to be an Intelligence behind the integrated complexity of the physical Universe.

The second was my own insight that the integrated complexity of life itself – which is far more complex than the physical Universe – can only be explained in terms of an Intelligent Source. I believe that the origin of life and reproduction simply cannot be explained from a biological standpoint despite numerous efforts to do so. With every passing year, the more that was discovered about the richness and inherent intelligence of life, the less it seemed likely that a chemical soup could magically generate the genetic code. The difference between life and non-life, it became apparent to me, was ontological [relating to essence or being] and not chemical.

The best confirmation of this radical gulf is Richard Dawkins' comical effort to argue in The God Delusion that the origin of life can be attributed to a "lucky chance." If that's the best argument you have, then the game is over. No, I did not hear a Voice. It was the evidence itself that led me to this conclusion. ... I would add that Dawkins is selective to the point of dishonesty when he cites the views of scientists on the philosophical implications of the scientific data. ...

I accept the God of Aristotle who shares all the attributes you cite. Like C.S. Lewis I believe that God is a person but not the sort of person with whom you can have a talk. It is the ultimate being, the Creator of the Universe.