The ex-atheist philosopher who upset his Level 3-thinking colleagues
One man who was on the fore-front of the anti-God battle was the brilliant academic Antony Flew, whose 1950’s work Theology and Falsification became the bedrock that most later atheistic writing was built on. However, much to the horror of his former colleagues, he has now come out and openly said he has changed his mind.
He has co-authored a book with Roy Abraham Varghese called There is a God, subtitled, “How the world’s most notorious atheist changed his mind.” Author Francis S Collins said of this book, “It is towering and courageous … and Flew’s colleagues in the church of fundamentalist atheism are totally scandalised.”
“I am not an atheist.” Albert Einstein
Flew spends some time in his book putting the record straight about Albert Einstein, whom atheists had gone about dishonestly distancing from any form of belief in God. He quotes Einstein: “I am not an atheist, and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child only dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is.”
He went on to say, “That seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations.”
It is true that Einstein had some difficulty in comprehending what he called a personal God. But he clearly maintained that “God manifests himself in the laws of the universe as a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.”
“Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.” Einstein
Einstein is only one of the many significant minds that helped produce the new era in scientific thinking, along with the likes of Max Plank, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schroder and Paul Dirac. All have made similar comments to Einstein.
Max Planck, who first introduced our age to the revolutionary world of quantum physics said, “There can never be any real opposition between religion and science; for one is the complement of the other.” He also said, ”Religion and natural science are fighting a joint battle in an incessant, never relaxing crusade against scepticism and against dogmatism, against unbelief and superstition – therefore on to God.”
Paul Dirac, who complemented Heisenberg and Schroder with a third formulation of quantum theory said, “God is a mathematician of a very high order and he used advanced mathematics in constructing the universe.”
Having smacked out of the park the old furphy about science disproving the need for spirituality, we can now see the remarkable results that are achieved when they respectfully work together.