Monday, April 19, 2010

Anthony Flew, RIP

""""In 2004...[Flew] announced on a DVD titled “Has Science Discovered God?” that research on DNA and what he believed to be inconsistencies in the Darwinian account of evolution had forced him to reconsider his views. DNA research, he said, “has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce life, that intelligence must have been involved.”

In “There Is a God” he explained that he now believed in a supreme intelligence, removed from human affairs but responsible for the intricate workings of the universe. In other words, the divine watchmaker imagined by deists like Isaac Newton, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.

In a letter to The Sunday Telegraph of London in 2004, he described “the God in whose existence I have belatedly come to believe” as “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 and sustaining cause of the universe.”

Antony Garrard Newton Flew was born on Feb. 11, 1923, in London. During World War II he did intelligence work for the Royal Air Force and spent a year learning Japanese at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.""""




Note Professor Flew's clarification: he believed neither in the judeo-Christian or Islamic conception of a monotheistic G*d (really, they're close cousins), but Aristotle's. Our Primum Mobile,
who art in Ouranon...

1 comment:

Luigi Speranza said...

Left a comment on Flew in your Nietzsche post, so was amused you covered his death, too. Great man: and student of H. P. Grice at St. John's College, Oxford, in 1945-8, so what can you expect?!

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