Well-known Atheist Now Believes in God Based on Scientific Evidence
British philosophy professor Antony Flew, 81, who was a leading champion of atheism, said in a video released Thursday that he now believes in God after being an atheist since age 15, reported The Associated Press.
A super-intelligence is the only good explanation for the origin of life and the complexity of nature, said Flew who arrived at the conclusion that God exists based on scientific evidence. He told The Associated Press his current ideas have some similarity with American "intelligent design" theorists.
In his new video, "Has Science Discovered God?" Flew said 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.
However, Flew said he doesnt believe in a God who is active in peoples lives and that there was no afterlife.
"I'm thinking of a God very different from the God of the Christian and far and away from the God of Islam, because both are depicted as omnipotent Oriental despots, cosmic Saddam Husseins," he said. "It could be a person in the sense of a being that has intelligence and a purpose, I suppose."
Flew became known through a 1950 article "Theology and Falsification," based on paper for the Socratic Club, a weekly Oxford religious forum led by writer and Christian thinker C.S. Lewis.
He has finished the formal account of his new outlook for the introduction to a new edition of his "God and Philosophy," scheduled for release next year by Prometheus Press.