How to Convince an Athiest

In a previous blog, I mentioned a book called The Heart of the Mind by my friends Russell Targ and Jane Katra in which they maintained that one could experience god directly by opening themselves up to the experience of universal love. This book was aimed at non-believing members of the scientific community. In effect, it provided a recipe for entering into a direct awareness of god. It was an excellent book, based upon time-honored traditions. However, it certainly would not satisfy one of the world’s most prominent, former philosophical atheists, Anthony Flew, who (I believe) still maintains that it is “impossible to infer from a particular religious [and, therefore, I imagine any other personal] experience that it had as its object a transcendent divine being.”

Anthony Flew, one of the most prominent living philosophers has spent over half a century defending philosophical atheism and attacking philosophical arguments in favor of theism or deism. However, to the astonishment of his atheistic colleagues in academia and the philosophical world, in about 2004 he changed his mind and became a philosophical deist. (Of course, I must be clear that philosophical deism is far from a conventional religious belief in a god associated with Judeo-Christian -- or Islamic -- revelation.)

Flew believes that his acceptance of the “god hypothesis” stems strictly from rational and scientific considerations. Personal experience played no role in his conversion. And, although he has been a lifelong student of parapsychology (to his credit), he employs none of this (very significant) data to justify his believe in a divine creator.

Flew began his philosophical career in the 1940s at a time when the logical positivist school was quite influential. According to adherents to that point of view, questions concerning the existence or nonexistence of god were so completely meaningless that it was impossible to argue intelligently one way or another. In a very significant paper, published in 1950, titled “Theology and Falsification,” Flew rejected that argument. He argued that the claim for god’s existence should, logically, exclude other claims and that philosophers should be able to weigh the evidence on both sides of the argument. Then, and in many other subsequent publications, he argued that the evidence in favor of the god hypothesis was either nonexistent or inconclusive. In the absence of evidence favoring god, one should logically be an atheist – he claimed.

Following the Socratic dictum to “follow the argument wherever it leads,” Flew now claims that recent advances in science have led him to conclude that the arguments in favor of god’s existence now have the upper hand. What are these arguments?

Probably the strongest argument influencing Flew’s conversion was derived from work in the field of genetics. The incredible complexity of the genetic code convinced Flew that it could not possibly have been the product of blind chance (as proposed by the atheist biologist Richard Dawkins). The odds of this happening are so small that the universe, as large and old as it is, would have to be gazillions of times larger and older for such an event to have occurred by chance. It was the discovery of this simple fact of mathematics and probability (originally articulated by the Israeli scientist Gerald Schroeder), I believe, that led Flew to a reexamination of other arguments in favor of god.

Flew was particularly impressed by the statements of Albert Einstein – and many of the other great theoretical physicists – who maintained that the laws of nature, intricate and rational, as discovered by science implied the existence of a divine mind that created those laws.

Furthermore, he then engaged in a reexamination of the foundations of philosophy in ancient Greece – observing that Aristotle, himself, cogently argued that the existence of motion in the universe necessitated the existence of an “unmoved mover.”

Flew also pointed out that the very existence of something (i.e., the universe itself) rather than nothing at all is a problem calling out for a solution – and that the “god hypothesis” offers the only available, satisfactory solution. Flew now rejects, as inadequate, arguments that he once accepted such as the notion that the universe came into existence of its own accord or that the laws of physics exist in and of themselves requiring no other foundation for their being.

Flew also now accepts the argument for god’s existence based on the anthropic principle – i.e., that the laws of the universe (including many of the observed constants of physics, such as the “fine structure constant”) are uniquely fashioned to support life as we know it. The slightest deviation in these constants would have made biological life impossible.

All of these arguments are consistent with the controversial concept of “intelligent design.” In fact, Flew – the former atheist – was one of eleven academics who signed a petition urging the British government to teach the theory of intelligent design in the public schools. Ironically, regarding this issue, he now seems to be aligning himself with the religious fundamentalists – whose cause he certainly does not, in other regards, embrace.

Personally, I am in agreement with Flew’s present position, in almost all regards. (I still find the Buddhist arguments for "anata" or the non-existence of any "self" -- including god -- to be quite impressive.) I would go further than Flew, however, and argue that his case can be strengthened even more with reference to the data of scientific parapsychology – and with reference to developments in the mathematics of hyperspace.

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