However, he says, ‘I was not saying that statements of religious belief were meaningless. There he presented ‘Theology and Falsification’, a paper which argued that many theological statements have so many qualifications attached that they are essentially empty (pp. Lewis was the president for over a decade. In Oxford, Flew was part of the Socratic club, a forum for debate between atheists and Christians, of which C.S. Influential atheist works Photo from The 20th century’s most influential atheist thinker, Antony Flew, announced in 2004 that he accepted the existence of a God.įlew’s rejection of atheism would not be such a problem for atheists if he hadn’t been the foremost atheist thinker of the 20th century. 15), although Flew admits that he ‘reached the conclusion about the nonexistence of God much too quickly, much too easily, and for what later seemed to me the wrong reasons’ (pp.
By the time he was 15, he considered himself an atheist (p. The problem of evil caused Flew to question the possibility of an omnipotent God. 10), but during his studies began to question his faith. The son of a Methodist minister, Flew went to school as ‘a committed and conscientious, if unenthusiastic, Christian’ (p. From Christianity to atheismįlew begins the story of his rejection of atheism by explaining how he became an atheist in the first place. Flew documents this intellectual process in There is a God. Antony Flew’s rejection of atheism is a nightmare for skeptics, because the most influential atheistic philosopher of the twentieth century is rather harder to dismiss out-of-hand.
Of course, they often ignore or dismiss the conversion stories of former atheists. Skeptics often cite ‘testimonies’ of former professing Christians who ‘de-converted’ (apostatized) to atheism to show that Christianity is inherently unreasonable sure, a person may be raised Christian, but once he is able to reason for himself, the light of rationality will wash away all that religious superstition. Former leading atheist argues for the existence of GodĪ review of There is a God: How The World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind by Antony Flew with Roy Varghese
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