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In one of the biggest religion news stories of the new millennium, the Associated Press announced that Professor Antony Flew, the world's leading atheist, now believes in God. Flew is a pioneer for modern atheism. His famous paper, Theology and Falsification, was first presented at a meeting of the Oxford Socratic Club chaired by C. S. Lewis and went on to become the most widely reprinted philosophical publication of the last five decades. Flew earned his fame by arguing that one should presuppose atheism until evidence of a God surfaces. He now believes that such evidence exists, and There Is a God chronicles his journey from staunch atheism to believer. For the first time, this book will present a detailed and fascinating account of Flew's riveting decision to revoke his previous beliefs and argue for the existence of God. Ever since Flew's announcement, there has been great debate among atheists and believers alike about what exactly this "conversion" means. There Is a God will finally put this debate to rest. This is a story of a brilliant mind and reasoned thinker, and where his lifelong intellectual pursuit eventually led him: belief in God as designer.… (more)
Media reviews
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It is unclear whether Flew has lost the desire to reason effectively or whether he no longer cares what is published in his name. Either way, it seems that this lost sheep remains rather lost.
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Some of the attributes of the god that Flew acknowledges are also attributes of God, but Flew does not acknowledge the Trinity or Christ as the second Person of the Trinity, both of which are essential Christian doctrines. So although Flew’s deistic beliefs echo Christian belief in some areas, the god he accepts is not the same as the God of the Bible, although he professes to remain open to the evidence.
Flew never claims to be Christian; he is a self-identified deist who does not believe in an afterlife (p. 2). Nonetheless, he is charitable in his comments about the Christians he came in contact with, writing that his father, a Methodist minister, shared his ‘eagerness of mind’ even though their intellectual pursuits led them in different directions (p. 12). Flew concludes that he is ‘entirely open to learning more about the divine Reality, especially in the light of what we know about the history of nature’ and that ‘the question of whether the Divine has revealed itself in human history remains a valid topic of discussion. You cannot limit the possibilities of omnipotence except to produce the logically impossible’ (p. 157).
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Readers looking for an apologetic for Christianity will be disappointed, but the book is a good read. The book is powerful evidence that one can come to a belief in theism purely from the evidence. It is also a lesson that design alone is not enough for saving faith; that needs special revelation, which is likewise backed up by credible historical evidence as Habermas and Wright showed.
User reviews
"The nerve of the distinction between the movings involved in an action and the motions that constitute necessitated behavior is that the latter behavior is physically necessitated, wheras the sense, the direction, and the character of actions as such are that, as a matter of logic, they necessarily cannot be physically necessitated (and as a matter of brute fact, they are not)."
Huh?
In fact, the best reason to get hold of this book is for the appendix at the back in which New Testament scholar N.T. Wright answers the following questions: 1) What grounds are there for claiming, from the texts, that Jesus is God Incarnate? and 2) What evidence is there for the resurrection of Christ?
N.T. Wright's answers to these questions provide a neat and tidy summary of his general theological position, for which I happen to have a great deal of respect. So instead of wading through his books you could start right here. It is Wright who challenges me the most and I'd recommend this appendix for believers and non-believers alike.
Rather than exhibiting a loss of mental capabilities as charged
Lots of Science, lots of philosophy and a little bit of religion thrown in. I enjoyed it.