I Am No Longer An Atheist

I Am No Longer An Atheist

 

MUKUL SHARMA tells us what turned a renowned atheist into a believer

 

In December 2004, at the age of 81, Anthony Flew declared that he had become a believer. The announcement came as a huge shock to the whole world’s rationalists, non-believers and secularists alike.The reason was simple: Professor Anthony Flew, a very well-known British philosopher, author and lecturer at several principal universities, had been regarded till then as one of the 20th century’s leading atheists, who from the age of 15 had shunned and advocated against the idea of any divine Creator.

 

In a letter to The Sunday Telegraph of London, he said later:“The God in whose existence I have belatedly come to believe is most emphatically not the eternally rewarding and eternally torturing God of either Christianity or Islam but the God of Aristotle that he would have defined — had Aristotle actually produced a definition of his (and my) God — as the first initiating cause of the universe.”

 

While his peers and protagonists who had long regarded him as one of their foremost champions were still reeling in disbelief, he further announced that although he had not become a Christian in any sense of the word, he now thought that there had to be a powerful intelligent designer behind the whole façade of existence.

To The New York Times he explained that he now believed in a supreme intelligence, removed from human affairs but responsible for the intricate workings of the universe. A key principle of his philosophy was the Socratic concept of “follow the evidence, wherever it leads”. It turns out that the evidence he was following was a scientific one — in particular, the discovery in 1953 of the double helix, the twisted-ladder structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), by Nobel laureates James Watson and Francis Crick which marked a milestone in the history of science. This gave rise to modern molecular biology which is largely concerned with understanding how genes control the chemical processes within cells. In a short time, their discovery yielded groundbreaking insights into the genetic code and protein synthesis.

 

It was like a moment of epiphany for Flew. “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.”

 

Actually it was the vast complexity of the number of elements and the enormous subtlety of the ways they worked together that shook the atheist’s ground.The meeting of two parts at the right time was simply too miniscule to be attributed to random chance alone. It was a matter of massive complexity by which the results were achieved, which to him looked certainly like the work of intelligence.

 

The second scientific lead that Professor Flew followed was the socalled anthropic cosmic principle that became widely known and prevalent during the 1960s and 70s.This states that it appears there is a set of fundamental physical constants that are such that had they been even a tiny bit different, the universe would have been void of intelligent life. It’s as if we’re balancing on a knife’s edge. Some philosophers and physicists take this kind of ‘fine-tuning’ of such constants to be a problem that’s crying out for an explanation — namely, why theories of the universe are constrained by the necessity to allow human existence?

 

There was, however, one problem with Flew’s conversion that he could simply not file away in a back drawer till the end of his life in 2010.The fact that he embraced deism which allows for the existence of an intelligent orderer but does not believe that this entity has any further agency in the running of the universe — far less in its inhabitants’ daily lives. In which case the question that immediately arises is:“Then why bother?”