There Is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind

There Is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind | Antony Flew, Roy Abraham Varghese | Excellent Book, worthy of group study

books:

There Is a God: Ho...

	There Is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind Antony Flew, Roy Abraham Varghese HarperOne, 2007 - 222 pages average customer review:based on 61 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

A good read

Five stars for logic and reasoning upkept with honesty and integrity. It's good to see people admit when they have to change their mind based on new information and arrive at the conclusion of a Creator. Seven years ago I came to that conclusion myself, and I find that new "converts" make for some of the deepest discussions we can have. I liked reading this because though I am a Christian, I don't think its necessary to use the bible to "prove there is a God." Logic will deduce that for us. Great work, Flew.

"My name is on the book and it represents exactly my opinions. I would not have a book issued in my name that I do not 100 percent agree with. I needed someone to do the actual writing because I'm 84 and that was Roy Varghese's role. This is my book and it represents my thinking." - Flew

for more information click here

Excellent Book, worthy of group study

This book is an extremely fluid, easy to read story of the transformation of one of the worlds most notorious atheists changed his mind. It is rather unfortunate and ridiculous that there are those who say that flew has succumed to senility or fear of death(he still maintains there is no afterlife). Would you say the same about Billy Graham if he rejected his faith and became atheist? Probably not, you would say he finally came to his senses, even if the book he wrote about it was merely the incoherent ramblings of a crazed man.

The Modest Volume that Unleashed a Storm of Controversy

Antony Flew's "There Is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind" is a quiet and brief book that has generated a hornet's nest of controversy.

Antony Flew is an English philosopher and the son of a Methodist minister. He was born in 1923; this book was published in 2007. Flew's advanced age has become the focus of those attacking the book. Flew was educated at Cambridge and attended the meetings of Christian author CS Lewis' Socratic Club. With the publication of the 1966 book "God and Philosophy," Flew became a prominent atheist philosopher.

In a 2004 interview with Gary Habermas, Flew said he had come to believe in God. "There Is a God" expands on Flew's conversion. Flew believes in the God of Aristotle. This God is typified by "immutability, immateriality, omnipotence, omniscience, oneness or indivisibility, perfect goodness and necessary existence" (92).

"There Is a God" begins with a reserved account of Flew's life. For this reader the most intriguing portion was Flew's report that, though he had since abandoned his father's Christianity, he judged pre-marital sex as morally wrong (26). Like many readers, I find the personal and concrete more captivating than discussion of competing philosophical schools. Like a Jane Austen novel, though, Flew's book scurries past intimate detail.

Subsequent chapters summarize the evidence that prompted Flew to come to believe in an Aristotelian God: the universe's fine tuning that renders it hospitable to life, and the questions of life's origin, existence, and complexity. Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, George Wald, David Berlinski, etc, are quoted. Flew does make a good point about the unique gifts philosophy brings to bear when discussing scientific questions (89-91).

It is true that this portion is not original; one can easily find similar arguments on the web. One can easily find these arguments because so many world class scientists have made them. World class scientists and thinkers endorse Flew's take on scientific questions; their endorsements can be found on the back cover and inside front cover of the book. In short, New Atheists' insistence that Flew's take on science is flawed is belied by the many scientists whose views parallel his.

"There Is a God" closes with two appendices; one written by science and religion writer Roy Abraham Varghese, and the other by Bishop N. T. Wright. Varghese addresses perceived flaws in the arguments of New Atheist authors including Richard Dawkins. N. T. Wright offers a brief for the divinity of Jesus.

In November, 2007, The New York Times published Mark Oppenheimer's, "The Turning of an Atheist," an article that, without evidence but rich with catty innuendo, insinuated that Flew was feeble with Alzheimer's disease, that nothing that Flew said could be believed, and that a cabal of conspiratorial Christians, exercising a Svengali-like power and sociopathic lack of conscience, knowingly manipulated and exploited Flew

For a moment, let us leave aside, as Oppenheimer does, all questions of decency and good taste. Question: Does Antony Flew suffer from Alzheimer's, and is disease the cause of Flew's belief in God? New Atheists will insist on this; to them, faith is evidence of low IQ and/or mental illness.

Answer: no one knows. Even if it were proved that Flew has Alzheimer's, it could not be proved that Alzheimer's caused him to believe in God. Further, people who work with the elderly know that we humans do lose predictable cognitive skills as we age. We also, often, gain much: wisdom, patience, perspective. To a casual observer, an elderly person can appear demented. Often, though, what appears to be dementia is not. Rather, the elderly person still has the ability to think deep thoughts, but lacks some abilities that younger people can display readily. This is not just true of the elderly. Often deaf people are wrongly assumed to be stupid, people with Parkinson's are wrongly assumed to be drunk, etc.

Antony Flew was a champion of atheism for many decades. Many New Atheists are, now that he is old, dragging his name through the dirt. The revolution eats its young. If their arguments against God are as ironclad as New Atheists insist, they need not calumniate an elderly man who was once their champion. Once again we see that, in its shrillness and ethical bankruptcy, the New Atheism is not just anti-God, it is anti-human.

for more information click here

A good, but technical, look at a change of mind

This is a good overview of Flew's change of mind from atheism to deism over the course of his lifetime. However, there are two things to note that may dissuade the casual reader. First, this is NOT a story of a journey from atheism to Christianity, like some like to portray it as: Flew accepts that there is a God, now, but makes no allowances for what that God is like, nor does he believe in a heaven, hell, or any other sort of an afterlife. So, the average Christian reader will not find what he or she is expecting in this book. Second, Flew is a first class philosopher, and his arguments and evidences are largely based on philosophy and other forms of logic and reasoning. These explanations can be wordy and hard to follow for someone not used to this type of thinking. Overall, this is a very good book, but possibly not for every typical reader.

for more information click here