Cosmic accident
Peter Mullen discovers why a radical atheist became convinced of the existence of God
14 March 2008

This is the most lucid and penetrative piece of philosophical theology to appear in years. "Notorious atheist" screams the title and indeed Flew does have form when it comes to being the enemy of God.

I am old enough to remember his collaboration with Alasdair McIntyre in New Essays in Philosophical Theology (1956) and Flew's dismissive and sardonic parable: "What's the difference between an invisible, intangible gardener, unsusceptible to electric shock and no gardener at all?" For "gardener" read "God" and you have a startling piece of positivist polemic.

But Flew has always promised to follow the argument wherever it might lead - and he was a member of C S Lewis's Socratic Club to prove it. He was actually present back in the 1940s when Elizabeth Anscombe reduced Lewis to tears by her dismissal of his theodicical arguments in The Problem of Pain. It is said that out of his distress Lewis subsequently incarnated Anscombe in the character of the White Witch in the Narnia stories.

In his new book, Flew does indeed follow the argument wherever it might lead, and he does so with such a relentless vigour that he is not so much following it as hunting it down. His target is the argument from design - the argument which he used so energetically to scorn. But now he says: "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." Atheists such as Dawkins deny the necessity of Original Intelligence and claim that the universe is a conglomeration of cosmic accidents, or even that there might be a multiplicity of universes. Flew, brandishing Occam's razor, quotes with approval Richard Swinburne's telling criticism of this view: "It is crazy to postulate a trillion (causally unconnected) universes to explain the features of one universe, when postulating one entity (God) will do the job." Incidentally, the multiverse theory was dismissed by St Augustine 1,500 years ago as "an Epicurean fantasy".

Flew next criticises the notion that mind and thought, rational creatures possessing language, arose out of inanimate matter. He asks how this could possibly come about and adds that no atheist has ever provided an even half-satisfactory explanation. A better conclusion is that rationality was present in the creation of life from the start; and of course this is a reiteration of the biblical doctrine of the creative Word of God in Genesis.

Did the universe come into being by chance? Flew examines the famous monkeys and typewriters argument, by which it is argued that, given an infinite supply of monkeys and an infinite supply of typewriters, they would together eventually produce the works of Shakespeare. Flew does the maths and demonstrates that "...if you took the entire universe and converted it to computer chips - forget the monkeys - if you turn the entire universe into these microcomputer chips and these chips were spinning a million times a second producing random letters, the number of trials you would get since the beginning of time would be 10 to the 90th trials. You will never get even a single sonnet by chance - let alone the complete works. The universe would have to be 10 to the 600th times larger. Yet the atheists think the monkeys can do it every time."

Flew also reveals the scandalous way in which ideological atheists systematically misrepresent the most eminent scientists by claiming them for the atheist camp. He quotes inter alia Newton, Maxwell, Hawking, Einstein, Heisenberg, Schrödinger and Planck's belief in the purposeful origin of the universe. He even quotes Darwin: "Reason tells me of the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capability of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting, I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man: and I deserve to be called a Theist."

Flew ends by reminding us that he has not become a Christian, but only a deist. He now believes in the God of the philosophers but not yet in the God and Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ. But his book ends with an illuminating epilogue by Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham, in which he presents a case for the Resurrection of Jesus as powerfully persuasive as anything produced by Flew in the area of natural theology.

This book is a hand grenade tossed into the foul nest of the duplicitous, conniving, unscientific, irrational contemporary atheists.

There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind by Antony Flew,
Harper £12.99