Anthony Flew

Associated Press Report, December 9, 2004

In interview, asserts that biologist's investigation of DNA "has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce life, that intelligence must have been involved."

My Pilgrimage from Atheism to Theism: A Discussion between Antony Flew and Gary Habermas

"It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and powerful argument to design."

Philosophia Christi 6, no.2 (2004):197-211, http://epssociety.org/library/articles.asp?pid=33&ap=1.
Cited by Neil Thomas, "Taking Leave of Darwin", p99.

There Is a God

New York: Harper One, 2007.

Flew is a world authority on Hume, but has radically revised his assessment of Hume and says his own book on Hume should be rewritten "in the light of my new-found awareness that Hume was utterly wrong to maintain that we have no experience, and hence no genuine ideas, of making things happen and preventing things from happening, of physical necessity and physical impossibility. Generations of Humeans have ... been misled into offering analyses of causation and of natural law that have been far too weak because they had no basis for accepting the existence of either cause and effect or natural laws ... Hume's scepticism about cause and effect and his agnosticism about the external world are of course jettisoned the moment he leaves his study." p 57-58.

Lennox cites this quote in God's Undertaker, p 193, in making his case against Hume's materialism. He also cites it on p123 of Cosmic Chemistry.

"What I think the DNA material has done is that it has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce life, that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinarily diverse elements to work together." p75

"I must stress that my discovery of the Divine has proceeded on a purely natural level, without any reference to supernatural phenomena. It has been an exercise in what is traditionally called natural theology. It has had no connection with any of the revealed religions. Nor do I claim to have had any experience of God or any experience that may be called supernatural or miraculous. In short, my discovery of the Divine has been a pilgrimage of reason and not of faith." p85
This passage cited by Neil Thomas, "Taking Leave of Darwin", p101.

Flew was certainly denounced by unbelievers for his statements:
"I have been denounced by my fellow unbelievers for stupidity, betrayal, senility and everything you could think of, and none of them have read a word that I have ever written." [Quoted by Edward Feser in The Last Superstition.]

Cited by Frank Turek in "Stealing from God", pg 73

"Science cannot discover the self; the self discovers science." p182

Cited by Frank Turek in "Stealing from God", pg 52

Encyclopedia of Philosophy

ed Paul Edwards, Macmillan, New York, 1967.

"the proposition reporting the (alleged) occurrence of the miracle will be singular, particular and in the past tense." He deduces that, since in any case propositions of this sort cannot be tested directly, the evidence for them will always be immeasureably weaker in logical strength, than the evidence for general and repeatable propositions.
Lennox responds to this in God's Undertaker, p 204.

Flew "There Is a God" Flew's Reasons


Windows of Creation
Evidence from nature Is the universe designed?
Reasonable faith
  Reasonable Faith Go Back