A friend of mine and I have been reading Antony Flew’s new book THERE IS A GOD. Flew had been the English-speaking world’s most prominent atheist until Richard Dawkins assumed that role. A few years ago, Flew announced his conversion to theism (though not full-blown Christianity). This caused a stir at the time, but true to their materialist bias, the academy and media quickly fluffed it off (“poor Antony — he’s just getting old and a bit soft in the head”). As the following excerpts (that my friend collected) attest, Flew knew exactly what he was doing in rejecting his lifelong commitment to atheism. Also, a refreshing feature of the book is Flew’s evident grace, good will, and sensitivity — the contrast with the boorishness of neo-atheists like Dawkins-Hitchens-Harris is stark.
>From p. 79 ff:
“For Dawkins, the main means for producing human behavior is to
attribute to genes characteristics that can significantly be
attributed only to humans. Then, after insisting that we are all the
choiceless creatures of our genes, he infers that we cannot help but
share the unlovely personal characteristics of those all-controlling
monads.
“Genes, of course, can be neither selfish nor unselfish any more than
they or any other nonconscious entities can engage in competition or
make selections. (Natural selection is, notoriously, not selection;
and it is a somewhat less familiar logical fact that, below the human
level, the struggle for existence is not “competetive” in the true
sense of the word.) But this did not stop Dawkins from proclaiming
that his book ‘is not science fiction; it is science …. We are
survival machines — robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the
selfish molecules known as genes.’ Although he later issued occasional
disavowals, Dawkins gave no warning in his book against taking him
literally. He added, sensationally, that ‘the argument of this book
is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes’ Read More ›