TEXAS, USA, February 25, 2005: When 81-year-old atheist philosopher Anthony Flew announced to the world that he was no longer an atheist and considered his previous theories to be flawed, the world started taking notice. After teaching atheism at prestigious universities such as Oxford, Aberdeen, Keele and Reading and lecturing at many American and Canadian universities, the final turning point came for Flew after a conference at the Institute for Metascientific Research in Texas in May, 2003. The news release explains, “Flew participated together with author Roy Abraham Varghese, Israeli physicist and molecular biologist Gerald Schroeder, and Roman Catholic philosopher John Haldane. Flew was impressed by the weight of the scientific evidence in favor of creation and by the convincing nature of his opponents’ arguments, and abandoned atheism as an idea in the period following that discussion. In a letter he wrote for the August-September, 2003, edition of the British magazine Philosophy Now, he recommended Schroeder’s book “The Hidden Face of God: Science Reveals the Ultimate Truth” and Varghese’s book “The Wonderful World.” During an interview with the professor of philosophy and theology Gary R. Habermas, who also played a major role in his change of mind, and also on the video “Has Science Discovered God?,” he openly stated that he believed in intelligent design.
Flew cites the following three scientific reasons for his change of perspective, “Biologists’ investigation of DNA has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce [life], that intelligence must have been involved. It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism. I have been persuaded that it is simply out of the question that the first living matter evolved out of dead matter and then developed into an extraordinarily complicated creature.”
The article says, “The DNA research which Flew cites as a fundamental reason for his change of opinion has indeed revealed striking facts about creation. The helix shape of the DNA molecule, its possession of the genetic code, the nucleotide strings that refute blind chance, the storage of encyclopaedic quantities of information and many other striking findings have revealed that the structure and functions of this molecule were arranged for life with a special design. Comments by scientists concerned with DNA research bear witness to this fact.” Scientist Francis Crick who discovered the helix shape of DNA says, “An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.”
Led Adleman from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles says, “One gram of DNA can store as much information as a trillion compact discs.” Gerald Schroeder, the creationist scientist who wrote the book “The Hidden Face of God,” and who greatly influenced Flew, sums it up, “A single consciousness, a universal wisdom, pervades the universe. The discoveries of science, those that search the quantum nature of subatomic matter, have moved us to the brink of a startling realization: all existence is the expression of this wisdom. In the laboratories we experience it as information that first physically articulated as energy and then condensed into the form of matter. Every particle, every being, from atom to human, appears to represent a level of information, of wisdom.”
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