Nietzsche, an influential German philosopher, made the famous comment, “God is dead…” Without God controlling the world, he felt that humans could be liberated to create their own values and laws and live their lives according to them.  

Now the name for the denial of God is called Atheism. It’s a belief that there is no evidence for the existence of God or a higher power. Have you ever wondered, does God really exist? 

The recent census in many countries in the Western world, like the US, Australia, NZ, and Europe, found that for the first time ever, the number of atheists – the people who don’t believe in God – is growing rapidly. If the trend continues in the western world, there may soon be more people who don’t believe in God than those who do.

One of the most well-known promoters of atheism was Antony Flew, a university lecturer here in England. He was a staunch atheist and felt it was his mission to enlighten the world. So, for about 50 years, he successfully dedicated a good part of his intellectual life to advocating and promoting atheism. 

In fact, Antony Flew was so good at spreading his beliefs that he is credited with setting the agenda for atheist arguments. With his fellow atheist Richard Dawkins, who wrote the book The God Delusion, they propagated their philosophy at the universities and among the intellectuals and thinkers.

But then something happened to Antony Flew. Despite all those years and his many sophisticated arguments against the existence of God, Antony Flew was suddenly faced with a few facts that, well, shook the foundations of his atheist beliefs. 

So, what did the world’s most notorious atheist do?  Well, join me, Gary Kent, on a journey into the world where there is no belief in God, and discover why this fervent atheist intellectual changed his mind. 

-Title Block-

TROUBLING SIGNS

Antony Flew was born in London in 1923. He was the son of the Methodist minister and theologian, Robert Newton Flew. Now, Antony was raised in a conservative Christian home and was educated at St Faith’s School, in Cambridge and then at the private religious Kingswood school in Bath. 

The Kingswood School had been founded by the famous English cleric, John Wesley for the sons of Preachers. Antony recalled that as a child, he was a committed and conscientious Christian, but often unenthusiastic.

Flew also remembers that he only went to chapel and said prayers out of duty, because he never really felt a connection with God.

Then, before the Second World War, when Antony was still a boy, his family went on a European holiday to Bavaria in Germany.  While there, the young Antony saw signs outside of small towns, saying, “Jews not welcome here.” He was very troubled by these signs.

Then the sight of tens of thousands of brown-shirted Nazi storm troopers marching in the streets also shocked the young Antony Flew. He was troubled by what he saw and found it hard to comprehend how a powerful and loving God could allow such things to happen.

So, by the age of 15, Flew had decided that there couldn’t be a God if he allowed all the pain, suffering and evil in the world.  So, he decided to stop believing in God and become an atheist. Now the word atheist comes from the Greek language and means, godless. Flew had now rejected the idea of a creator God in exchange for a belief in no God at all.

Then during the Second World War, Flew studied Japanese at the University of London and worked as a Royal Air Force intelligence officer and code-breaker. 

ATHEISM’S CHAMPION

After the war ended, Flew studied at Oxford University and would quite regularly attend the weekly meetings of the C.S. Lewis’ Socratic Club.  Now C S Lewis was a well-known lecturer at Oxford, a literary scholar, a writer, a Christian and a strong believer in God.

Although Flew found Lewis to be an eminently reasonable man and by far the most powerful Christian apologist, Flew was not persuaded by Lewis’ arguments for the existence of God in the meetings, or in his well-known and popular book, Mere Christianity (1952). 

From 1949, Flew began to lecture on the philosophy of religion, first at Oxford University, then Aberdeen University, Keele University, the University of Calgary and finally here at the Reading University.

Antony Flew was now not only an atheist but someone who for half a century did his level best to try to get as many others to believe in atheism as well. He was a campaigner for atheism.  He was arguably the premier atheist apologist in the last half of the twentieth century.  

Antony Flew prided himself in presenting philosophical arguments to successfully disprove most of the common conceptions and beliefs of a divine God. Flew’s viewpoint was that without a good reason, belief is either impossible or simply not worth having, and unbelief in God becomes the default position.

So, once you throw out your belief in God, what then? Well, an atheist will explain that they now have the freedom to think and believe whatever they wish. They don’t have any guilt as they don’t believe in the all-knowing, all powerful, ever-present God, the source of the moral law – the Ten Commandments.

Atheists believe that because they have freed themselves from religion and God, they can now escape guilt and obligation to obey the precepts from God. 

Atheists consider themselves rational thinkers, and believe that morality doesn’t come from God, but rather, it is something that we devise for ourselves. Of course, if you decide on your own morality and want to live a degenerate life, then you take personal responsibility for your own moral autonomy and sexuality.

In addition, if there is no belief in God then the often touted so-called ‘seven deadly sins’ that came from the established church in the Middle Ages: greed, lust, gluttony, slothfulness, wrath, envy and pride, are no longer temptations to overcome but rather are just temptations to be enjoyed.

Atheists feel strongly that others should accept their personal choices in life. They preach tolerance of a society without mores or boundaries. Their wish is to just be able to focus on the present, how they feel today, without having to worry about the future judgment of an all-knowing God who would be your moral enemy.

Recently, CBS in America reported that every day 20,000 new people join a website that links married people with other married people, so that they can secretly have an affair and commit adultery. They want to be able to make their own personal choices without boundaries and the restraint of the Ten Commandments given by God. 

The Bible would be the last place that atheists would look for instruction because they want to be rid of God’s laws. It’s the same reason criminals want to be rid of the police. Criminals don’t like the law telling them what to do and threatening them with punishment. 

The sinful mind is actively hostile in how it despises the God of the Bible. We hear this daily when His name is taken in vain and is used to swear. What greater contempt could I have for another person than to use their name to express disgust? But the humanist contemptuous view of God is also recorded in the Bible. 

“The mind of the flesh [with its sinful pursuits] is actively hostile to God. It does not submit itself to God’s law, since it cannot.” (Romans 8:7)

Then, there is the end of life. Atheists see death as the end of the road, a full stop. If there is no God, then there is no heaven. Atheists do not accept that there is an afterlife, so do not have to fear any accountability for their actions. 

Now for most of his adult life, Antony Flew embraced these ideas and propagated these beliefs to the thousands of young eager minds in his philosophy of religion classes. As a professor, he told the students that based on the science there was no evidence for the existence of God. That God was a myth, a little like Santa Claus.

BIG QUESTIONS

He actively, deliberately, and gleefully destroyed many young people’s faith in God. But what about the big questions in life, Where did I come from? Is my life nothing more than a cosmic accident? What is the meaning of life? And what happens when I die? 

Antony Flew believed that there was no design in the world, that the grand universe was, as he put it, a ‘brute fact.’ That is, the universe, stars, space, planets, time, galaxies, are just facts. They are there, but we have no explanation for their existence. They just were always there. He couldn’t explain them so just accepted they had existed for eternity.

Flew said that the universe could be thought of without beginning and without an end. Now, if the universe exists without any reason at all, then it was easy to see its existence as what he called a brute fact. It’s just there – and that’s it.  It is what it is.

Anyway, that all became a moot point for Antony Flew once he accepted the Big Bang theory.  This is the current evolutionary theory that billions of years ago, a massive explosion created space and time and matter. All the stars, planets, galaxies, humans, and everything else, are the long-term results of that initial Big Bang.

GAME CHANGER

The important point here was that Flew now believed that the universe had a beginning.  That is, the universe once didn’t exist, but then came into existence. And, for Anthony Flew, this was a game changer.  

As long as he believed the universe had always existed, he had no need to think that something, or someone, had created it. But if the universe had come into existence somehow then that meant there had to be a cause for its beginning. 

So, what was this cause? How did the universe begin?  These were deep questions that caused Flew to radically reconsider his belief system. Ultimately it led Flew to believe in God, or in some Divine Mind as the first cause or creator of the universe.

He thought of it like this: Here is an empty block of land. No building is there. But if you come back six months later, and find a house is now on the land, obviously, there has to be an explanation for how the house got there.  

This is not a new or radical argument. It has been around for thousands of years.  But what is amazing is that such a prominent intellectual atheist was convinced by it. But that wasn’t the only argument.

MONKEY THEOREM

You may have heard of the Monkey Theorem? It was the idea that an infinite number of the primates battering away on typewriters would eventually write Shakespeare’s Hamlet, or a Shakespearean sonnet. The idea was that, if given enough time life could emerge by chance.  

Anyway, researchers in England tried something similar: six monkeys were placed in a cage for one month with a computer turned on to a word processing program.  

After a month of the monkeys hammering away on the computer they produced 50 typed pages, but not even one ‘a’ or ‘I’ by itself.  That is, the single letter ’a’ or ‘I’ with a blank space on either side.  Not even one recognisable one-letter word!

A scientist said that the odds of these monkeys creating even one Shakespearean sonnet, much less Hamlet, were ludicrous.  The scientist calculated that the odds of a monkey typing the 488 words in Shakespeare’ s sonnet, Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day, were something like 1:10690.  

Now, if the theorem won’t work for a single sonnet, then it’s absurd to suggest that the more elaborate feat of the origins of life could have been achieved by chance. And, if it were not by chance, then just how did the universe, and life in it, arise?  

FOLLOWING THE ARGUMENT

So, using his own line of reasoning to “follow the argument wherever it leads”, the world’s most notorious atheist followed it to belief in God. Flew wrote: 

“I now believe that the universe was brought into existence by an infinite Intelligence. I believe that this universe’s intricate laws manifest what scientists have called The Mind of God. I believe that life and reproduction originate in a divine Source.”

Wow! Isn’t that something? This argument, which people have been trying to debunk for centuries, convinced this die-hard atheist that he had been wrong. And wrong for such a long time; in fact for over fifty years. It took a lot of courage for Flew to admit his change of position.

Of course, Anthony Flew’s belief now that God exists doesn’t mean that God really does exist, any more than his belief for more than 50 years that God didn’t exist meant that God didn’t exist.  The existence or non-existence of God is independent of anyone’s beliefs. 

That’s only logical. And whether one agrees with Flew or not, he was using logic and reason to make his decision. Remember what he said?  His 

“…discovery of the Divine has been a pilgrimage of reason and not faith.”  

Now, let’s use a little bit of logic here ourselves for a few moments. 

Look at these wonderful fruit bearing trees, vines and plants. And look at the fruit that, literally grew out of these things: apples, peaches, pears, plums, grapefruits, lemon, limes, kiwi, pineapples, avocados, blueberries, raspberries, green grapes, purple grapes, red grapes, oranges, tangerines, and many more.  They look so good, they taste so good, and they happen to be so good for us!

And that’s just the fruit. We haven’t even got to the veggies! Look at all these things, all literally growing out of ground; so tasty, so healthy, so perfectly adapted for human needs. 

You think this all happened by chance or luck?  Maybe given eternity, a monkey might type Hamlet, but in the billions of years it is believed that our intricate and complicated universe has come into existence? Not a chance!

SOMETHING NOT RIGHT

Something just doesn’t seem right here.  The idea that all of this is by chance, with no purpose, no intention, no meaning. . . it just doesn’t seem to fit the facts.  It just doesn’t seem reasonable, does it?

So like Antony Flew, let’s follow the argument wherever it leads. Sure, if you want to look at all the beauty in nature, the design in life, from flowers, to trees, to human families, and you want to argue that it’s all a chance fluke in the cosmos, well, you can.

But, as you look at all this in its wonderful beauty, and design, and richness and glory—what do you think? Let’s read a few verses from the Bible. 

“But now ask the beasts, and they will teach you; And the birds of the air, and they will tell you; Or speak to the earth, and it will teach you; And the fish of the sea will explain to you. Who among all these does not know That the hand of the LORD has done this, In whose hand is the life of every living thing, And the breath of all mankind?”  (Job 12: 7-10)

As you look at these magnificent things around us, what do you think? Well, I think that the world’s most notorious atheist, following the argument wherever it led, was led to the right conclusion: that it must have had a beginning, and that there must have been an intelligent being as the creator.

MEDIA SENSATION

Which is why, in 2004, when Flew publicly declared that he now believed in God as the intelligent designer, it created a media sensation.  TV, Radio, newspapers, the Internet, all picked up the story. Had Antony Flew really changed his mind? 

So, what happened?  How did the world’s most notorious atheist change his mind? 

Well, according to Anthony Flew, this one concept had guided his intellectual life; it was the following: he “must follow the argument wherever it leads.” And, following the argument wherever it led, well… led Anthony Flew from atheism to a belief in God.

Flew said that his discovery of God, of the divine, was a quest, not of faith but of reason.  Flew said that he had good reasons for coming to a belief in God. 

Let’s look at the cover of his last book, published in 2007.  It originally looks as if it were titled, There is No God. But as you can see, the “No” was crossed out and an “A” replaced it.  So, the title reads: There is A God.  

Remember, Flew was known as a premier apologist and respected among intellectuals and professional philosophers. He was the author or co-author of more than 30 influential books and papers credited with helping set the agenda for atheism in the last half of that century.  For over 50 years Anthony Flew had been writing and speaking on why he believed that God did not exist. 

Antony Flew is buried at Highgate Cemetery in London. But a few years before his death in 2010, Flew changed his belief system. He said that a belief in God is far more rational than atheism and that logic can show that there is a God. He came to believe that science showed that the universe could not have happened by chance, rather it came about by an intelligent creator of the universe. 

IMPACT ON LIFE TODAY

So, how does atheism impact our life today? Well, there are many changes that have resulted from the growth of atheism in society. The absence of a common moral or ethical framework that guides behaviour makes for shifting sands and makes it difficult to establish societal standards.

Ultimately, how much atheism changes society depends on how many people hold these beliefs. As the western world turns away from the values and principles of Christianity and embraces the alternate worldview, it challenges the established norms, beliefs and practices of society. 

Without a belief in God, there is a corresponding increase in anti-authority, lawlessness and the breakdown of the family. If we cannot answer the big questions in life, Where did I come from? Why am I here? What is the meaning of life? and Where am I going? then it leads to feelings of hopelessness, futility, meaninglessness and chaos. 

In addition, we are seeing a rise in the statistics of those suffering from mental health issues, depression and suicide. So, what does this all mean? 

MEANING AND PURPOSE

Well, John was born into a family of atheists and grew up not believing in the idea of a higher power or an afterlife. He saw the world as a product of natural processes, and life as simply a coincidence. He found comfort in the scientific explanations of the world around him and felt that relying on a belief in a divine being was unnecessary.  

However, as John grew older, he began to question the purpose and meaning of his life. He‘d achieved a great deal professionally and personally, but still felt a sense of emptiness. 

He realised that he was missing something that went beyond the physical world. Reading philosophical and spiritual literature, John discovered the concept of God, the one who created the universe and established its natural laws. 

The idea of a higher power gave him a sense of security and provided answers for some of the big questions about life that had previously confounded him.

A belief in the existence of God brings peace and assurance. You can turn to God in times of trouble to seek guidance, strength and solace. It brings hope to the hopeless, comfort to the sorrowing and those in despair.

Wherever you look around you in nature, there is evidence of design. And if there is design then there is evidence of a designer. 

It takes more faith to not believe in God, than it does to believe in Him. If someone doesn’t want to believe in God, then it is because they have made the choice, but I personally feel that there is widely available evidence for the existence of God through creation, conscience, rationality and human experience. 

In addition, we have the Bible as a guidance system for a belief in God. Archaeology and ancient historical manuscripts provide evidence to support the Biblical records. A belief in God provides a moral and ethical framework for living a life of purpose and meaning. It gives a sense of belonging that cannot be found anywhere else.

Whether or not to believe in God is up to each individual to decide. Let me recommend God to you. Look at the evidence; I believe it is overwhelming.

SPECIAL OFFER

If you would like to find out more about the existence of God and how a belief in God can change your life, then I’d like to recommend the gift we have for all our Incredible Journey viewers today.

It’s the booklet, What is God Like?  This booklet is our gift to you and is absolutely free. I guarantee there are no costs or obligations whatsoever. So, make the most of this wonderful opportunity to receive your free gift today.

-Contact details-

Dear Heavenly Father, we are thankful that You provide us with overwhelming evidence and experience that allows us to believe in You – a God who provides a moral and ethical framework for living a life of purpose and meaning.  You give us a sense of belonging that cannot be found anywhere else.  Above all, we thank you for Jesus, who offers us salvation and eternal life.  Please bless us and our families.  We ask this in Jesus’ name, Amen.