Re: Antony Flew shifts his position due to scientific evidence

On Wed, 15 Dec 2004 08:37:14 -0500, RFaussette@aol.com said:
> I've been to the ISCID forums and their science is questionable at
> best. Darwinian evolution cannot explain the origins of life, I agree,
> but does explain the Bible.

The popular press has done us a great disservice by conflating Flew's
position with so-called intelligent design(ID). Flew is concerned with
the abiogenesis problem and his teleological arguments are of the
Aristotelian "prime mover" variety.

For example Flew says:

> I do not think I will ever make that assertion, precisely because any
> assertion which I am prepared to make about God would not be about a
> God in that sense ... I think we need here a fundamental distinction
> between the God of Aristotle or Spinoza and the Gods of the Christian
> and the Islamic Revelations.

and

>My one and only piece of relevant evidence [for an Aristotelian God] is
>the apparent impossibility of providing a naturalistic theory of the
>origin from DNA of the first reproducing species ... [In fact] the only
>reason which I have for beginning to think of believing in a First
>Cause god is the impossibility of providing a naturalistic account of
>the origin of the first reproducing organisms.

This has very little in common with the modern ID movement. The
fundamental difference is that Flew posits "god" only at the beginning
of creation while intelligent design has God supernaturally interfering
after the beginning. ID seeks to disprove evolution while Flew does not.
In fact, it is the complexity of the evolutionary explanation of the
universe that led Flew to his current conclusions. What this show is
that ID does not have a monopoly on teleological arguments for the
existence of God (and also shows that Christianity as a whole does not
have a monopoly either). Even a casual student of the history of
religious philosophy should know this. The popular press failing to
understand this is the root cause of the misunderstanding that hearing
the words "intelligent" and "design" together implies ID, the movement.
Received on Wed Dec 15 11:28:41 2004