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Anthony Flew accepts God

Any halfwit can jump up and down denouncing God, but for a half century professor Anthony Flew has been considered probably the number one living intellectual proponent of religious skepticism and atheism. If Madalyn Murray O'Hair had ever actually engaged in logical debate about atheism, it would have most likely been Anthony Flew's books she'd have read to bone up.

Now at age 81, Flew says he believes in some kind of God. Basically, over some period of time he's come to accept the "design" argument that says that there's simply too much complexity in DNA for life to have developed without some kind of intelligent guidance.

I'm thinking of a God very different from the God of the Christian and far and away from the God of Islam, because both are depicted as omnipotent Oriental despots, cosmic Saddam Husseins. It could be a person in the sense of a being that has intelligence and a purpose, I suppose.

That's still a long way from being a Christian, or believing in an afterlife. He would describe himself as a "deist," the same religious generalization prefered by Thomas Jefferson.

I'm not going so far as express positive belief in something that I don't understand like this, but I'm sympathetic to the underlying point. That is, fumbling Darwinian evolution really doesn't seem like a realistic explanation of the complexities of a human DNA.

Not having a good answer of my own does not, however, mean that I'm going to accept anyone else's. I don't know whether this change is a terrific example of someone keeping their mind engaged and willing to consider new arguments and evidence even into old age, or whether it simply indicates senility. I'll assume the former.

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