How the world's leading atheist changed his mind about God (2021-02-13) ​

0:00:01 in this video , I want to look at how the world's leading philosopher changed his mind about God .
0:00:09 Professor Anthony Flew is an English philosopher , most notable for his work related to the
0:00:15 philosophy of religion . during the course of his career he taught at the universities of Oxford , 0:00:20 Aberdeen (Scotland) , Keel , Reading and at York university in Toronto . for much of his career , Anthony Flew
0:00:27 was known as a strong advocate of atheism arguing that one should presuppose atheism until empirical
0:00:35 evidence of a god surfaces . he also criticized the idea of life after death , the free will defense to 0:00:43 the problem of evil and the meaningfulness of the concept of god . however in 2004 , he changed 0:00:51 his position , he changed his mind and stated that he now believed in the existence of an 0:00:58 intelligent creator of the universe . shocking his colleagues and fellow atheists . in order 0:01:05 to further clarify his personal concept of god , Anthony Flew openly made an allegiance to deism 0:01:12 more specifically a belief in the Aristotelian god which he will define in his book in a second . and 0:01:19 dismissed on many occasions any call to convert to christianity , islam or any other religion .
0:01:26 he stated that in keeping with his lifelong commitment to go wherever the evidence leads .
0:01:32 he now believed in the existence of a god . i just want to quote some passages from his last book 0:01:40 "THERE IS NO GOD" where the N has been crossed off gotten "THERE IS A GOD : how the world's most 0:01:47 notorious atheist changed his mind" by Anthony Flew . and I've read all this book and I wanted to
0:01:53 quote some of the juicier passages from it . in chapter four entitled "a pilgrimage of reason" 0:02:00 he writes : let us begin with a parable , imagine that a satellite phone is washed ashore on a 0:02:08 remote island inhabited by a tribe that has never had contact with modern civilization . the natives 0:02:16 play with the numbers on the dial pad and hear different voices upon hitting certain sequences .
0:02:23 they assume first that it's the device that makes these noises , some of the cleverer 0:02:29 natives , the scientists of the tribe assemble an exact replica and hit the numbers again .
0:02:37 they hear the voices again , the conclusion seems obvious to them . this
0:02:43 particular combination of crystals and metals and chemicals produce what seems like human 0:02:49 voices and this means that the voices are simply properties of the device . but the tribal sage 0:02:58 (by sage Flew probably means a philosopher) a tribal sage summons the scientists for a discussion .
0:03:05 he has thought long and hard on the matter and has reached the following conclusion : 0:03:10 the voices coming through the instrument must be coming from people like themselves , people
0:03:17 who are living and conscious although speaking in a different language . instead of assuming that the
0:03:24 voices are simply properties of the handset , they should investigate the possibility that through 0:03:30 some mysterious communication network they are in touch with other humans . perhaps further 0:03:36 study along these lines could lead to a greater understanding of the world beyond their island .
0:03:43 but the scientists simply laugh at the sage and say , look when we damage the 0:03:49 instrument the voices stop coming , so they're obviously nothing more than sounds produced by
0:03:56 a unique combination of lithium and printed circuit boards and light and missing diodes .
0:04:04 and a parable . in this parable we see how easy it is to let preconceived theories 0:04:12 shape the way we view evidence , instead of letting the evidence 0:04:16 shape our theories . a copernican leap may thus be prevented by a thousand ptolemaic epicycles .
0:04:26 defenders of ptolemy's geocentric model of the solar system resisted copernicus's heliocentric 0:04:33 model by using the concept of epicycles to explain away observations of planetary motion that 0:04:41 conflicted with their model . and in this it seems to me lies the peculiar danger , the endemic evil 0:04:50 of dogmatic atheism . (remember Anthony Flew was himself a dogmatic atheist) . take such utterances as quote :
0:04:59 we should not ask for an explanation of how it is that the world exists , it is here and that's all . or : 0:05:07 since we cannot accept a transcendent source of life , we choose to believe the impossible 0:05:15 that life arose spontaneously by chance for matter . or : the laws of physics 0:05:23 are lawless laws that arise from the void , end of discussion . these quotes look at first sight like 0:05:31 rational arguments that have a special authority because they have a no-nonsense 0:05:37 air about them . of course this is no more sign that they are either rational or arguments .
0:05:47 and then the next quote : as for my new position on the classical philosophical debates 0:05:55 about god , in this area i was persuaded above all by the philosopher David Conway's argument 0:06:02 for god's existence in his book "The Recovery of Wisdom : From Here to Antiquity in Quest of Sophia"
0:06:10 Conway is a distinguished British Philosopher at Middlesex University , who is equally at home 0:06:15 with classical and modern philosophy . the god whose existence is defended by Conway and myself (writes
0:06:23 Flew) is the god of aristotle .Conway writes : in sum , to the Being
0:06:33 whom he considered to be the explanation of the world and its broad form , Aristotle ascribed the
0:06:41 following attributes : immutability , immateriality , omnipotence , omniscience , oneness or indivisibility ,
0:06:50 perfect goodness and necessary existence . there is an impressive correspondence between this set of 0:06:58 attributes and those traditionally ascribed to god within the judeo-christian tradition ,
0:07:04 it is one that fully justifies us in viewing Aristotle as having had the same divine
0:07:11 being in mind as the cause of the world that is the object of worship of these two religions . end
0:07:18 quote . for some reason Flew doesn't even think about Islam but obviously this applies to Islam as well .
0:07:24 so that clarifies Flew's own concept of god that he embraced after leaving atheism .
0:07:33 and now some of the reasons , the scientific reasons why he began to embrace theism or belief in god
0:07:40 and he quotes Paul Davis the famous astrophysicist : Paul Davis highlights the
0:07:45 same problem he writes . he observes that most theories of biogenesis (biogenesis is the idea
0:07:53 of life just coming about , apparently out of nowhere) most theories of biogenesis
0:07:58 have concentrated on the chemistry of life . but life is more than just complex chemical reactions .
0:08:06 the cell also is an information storing processing and replicating system . we need to explain the
0:08:15 origin of this system , of this information and the way in which the information processing machinery
0:08:22 came to exist . he emphasizes the fact that the gene is nothing but a set of coded instructions
0:08:30 with a precise recipe for manufacturing proteins . most important these genetic instructions are
0:08:38 not the kind of information you find in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics
0:08:43 rather they constitute semantic information . in other words , they have a specific meaning .
0:08:52 these instructions can be effective only in a molecular environment capable of interpreting the
0:08:59 meaning in the genetic code . the origin question of biogenesis rises to the top at this point ,
0:09:08 the problem of how meaningful or semantic information can emerge spontaneously from a
0:09:14 collection of mindless molecules subject to blind and purposeless forces present a deep 0:09:21 conceptual challenge . there's the end of that quote . so you can see some of the reasons why Flew in the
0:09:29 light of modern science abandoned atheism . and the last quote here because there are so many .
0:09:39 is again to do with the origin of life , so how do we account for the origin of life
0:09:43 (professor Flew asks) the nobel prize winning physiologist George Wald
0:09:52 once famously argued that we choose to believe the impossible that life arose spontaneously by chance .
0:10:01 now of course this is what Flew himself believed , this is what atheists believe .
0:10:06 this Noble prize winning scientist says : in later years however , he concluded that a pre-existing 0:10:13 mind which he posits as the matrix of physical reality compose the physical universe that breeds
0:10:20 life. then he quotes the nobel prize-winning professor 0:10:28 who says as follows : how is it that with so many other apparent options
0:10:35 we are in a universe that possesses just that peculiar nexus or properties that breeds life .
0:10:43 it has occurred to me lately i must confess with some shock at first to my scientific sensibilities
0:10:50 that both questions might be brought into some degree of congruence .
0:10:55 this is with the assumption that mind rather than emerging as a late outgrowth in the evolution of
0:11:02 life has existed always as the matrix the source and condition of physical reality 0:11:11 that the stuff of which physical reality is constructed is mind stuff . it is mind that has
0:11:19 composed a physical universe that breeds life . so eventually evolves creatures that know and create
0:11:28 science , art , technology making creatures . that's the end quote there . and then Flew says :
0:11:35 this too is my conclusion , the only satisfactory explanation for the origin of such 0:11:42 end directing self-replicating life as we see on earth is an infinitely intelligent 0:11:49 Mind (with a capital M) . and of course we call that mind "God" .
0:11:57 so there we go , that's the book . it's very interesting his arguments are based he says 0:12:04 his whole position has not really changed , he only goes where the evidence leads so he says 0:12:10 that in his earlier career he didn't see any good evidence for the existence of god he says 0:12:15 but now with the advent of the discovery of DNA and the role of genes and producing proteins and
0:12:22 this the semantic nature of genes requiring a meaningful understanding of the 0:12:29 whole process of producing genes and life .   this goes way beyond atheism and this suggests
0:12:35 intelligence , it suggests mind and thus it's just God not just the DNA but a whole host of other 0:12:42 scientific discoveries lead professor Flew to abandon atheism and embrace this belief in god .
0:12:50 so i think this is a great story , a great story of a man who had the courage to admit that he
0:12:56 was wrong . here's a man who was the world's most notorious atheist , he spent decades arguing against 0:13:02 believers in god , ridiculing their beliefs , refuting them philosophically , he came to believe 0:13:08 that was wrong in fact god does exist because the evidence he says led him to believe that .
0:13:15 so there we go , that's the story of how the world's most notorious atheist changed 0:13:21 his mind and to my knowledge he never actually converted to any other religion i 0:13:26 think he was warming towards the christian faith given his own cultural background 0:13:32 but i don't think he ever converted to any other religion and let's hope , let's pray 0:13:36 that he found a merciful god who accepted him into paradise . till next time