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"Pastor Andrew, your writings suggest that it's dumb to be an atheist!" No, no, that's not true at all. Some of the world's most profoundly gifted thinkers are people who believe there is no God. From geology to philosophy, professors who are convinced the universe came by accident staff earth's universities. I don't think lack of mental acumen is the common factor among atheists. I think they fall into one of three subsets. There are those who refuse to believe because their hearts are set on self-rule. Bernard Shaw once insisted: "I don't want there to be a God." His personal life was devoted to rebellion against all but that which pleased him. Then there's the stubborn who claim "my mind's made up about God so don't confuse me with any new facts." Lastly we have the Teachable Unbeliever who says, "Until now I have not seen any credible evidence for the existence of a Creator." Recently a retired Hunterdon County scientist, whose specialty was mitochondrial DNA, introduced me to a leader among the last category. Oxford University produced a formidable opponent to anyone believing in God. Anthony Flew is a leading English philosopher. His "principle of falsifiability," (similar to the positivists' verifiability criterion,) says that any statement with real content will, if true, make certain other statements false. For years his brilliant mind used this concept to decimate Christians in radio debates. Books by Flew include God and Philosophy and New Essays in Philosophical Theology. From 1970 to 1996 his influence went international. Here's Flew at his best (when showing how it's illogical to believe in eternal life): "To expect that after my death and dissolution such things might happen to me is to overlook that I shall not then exist. To expect such things, through overlooking this, is surely like accepting a fairy tale as history, through ignoring the prefatory rubric: Once upon a time, in world that never was." He was probably right in claiming: "My paper 'Theology and Falsification', has been the most widely read philosophical publication of the second half of the twentieth century." If you consider yourself an atheist and haven't studied Flew's work yet - get busy, you are still a lightweight! Committed as he is to following information to its conclusion he stated in 2001: " I recognize that developments in physics coming on the last twenty or thirty years can reasonably be confirmatory of a previously faith-based belief in god, even though they still provide no sufficient reason for unbelievers to change their minds. They certainly have not persuaded me." He was however hooked on more research. A few years later his letter to Britain's Philosophy Now magazine disturbed the Atheism community. He wrote: "It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism." Dec.2004 ended with his bombshell video interview. In it he concluded that some sort of intelligence must have created the universe. "Super-intelligence is the only good explanation for the origin of life and the complexity of nature." Atheism has lost one of its most endowed thinkers. He's not a Christian yet: "I'm thinking of a God very different from the God of the Christian and far and away from the God of Islam. Both are depicted as omnipotent Oriental despots, cosmic Saddam Husseins. It could be a person in the sense of a being that has intelligence and a purpose, I suppose." Mr. Flew, God isn't the despot that the failing religious side of Christianity has portrayed. Keep looking. God has promised to be near to the diligent searcher. Find someone as logic based as yourself who claims to have a relationship with God and humbly ask that they lead you into friendship with the Creator of the universe. |
