There is a god by antony flew ebook

Want to Read saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Antony Flew. Alasdair MacIntyre. David Marsland Editor. Antony Flew Editor ,. Thomas B. Peter Herbst. Antony Flew Editor. Flew earned his fame by arguing that one should presuppose atheism until evidence of a God surfaces. He now believes that such evidence exists, and There Is a God chronicles his journey from staunch atheism to believer.

For the first time, this book will present a detailed and fascinating account of Flew's riveting decision to revoke his previous beliefs and argue for the existence of God. Ever since Flew's announcement, there has been great debate among atheists and believers alike about what exactly this "conversion" means.

There Is a God will finally put this debate to rest. This is a story of a brilliant mind and reasoned thinker, and where his lifelong intellectual pursuit eventually led him: belief in God as designer. Philosopher and former atheist Antony Flew set the agenda for modern atheism with his essay "Theology and Falsification," which became the most widely reprinted philosophical publication of the last half century.

He spent twenty years as professor of philosophy at the University of Keele and has also held positions at Oxford, the University of Aberdeen, and the University of Reading. He now lives in Reading, England. The conclusion: a God stands behind the rationality of nature. Civil in argument, relentlessly reasonable. What would you like to know about this product? Please enter your name, your email and your question regarding the product in the fields below, and we'll answer you in the next hours.

View all 5 comments. Mar 08, Ghayeth Ersheidat rated it it was amazing Shelves: read-feed. I believe that this universe intricate laws manifest what scientists have called The Mind Of GOD" Flew's journey of discovery in finding God was not just based on pure reasoning, but also on following the arguments wherever they'd led. Nov 06, Terri Lynn rated it did not like it Shelves: nonfiction , author-is-an-idiot , books-by-disturbed-people.

As an Atheist, I was never impressed with Antony Flew even when he claimed to be one too. He always struck me as being sort of egomaniac and all around lightweight idiot and I wished the Christians had him then low and behold- brothers and sisters, we have a miracle here!

No, there is still not a god nor any goddesses, and Flew presents exactly 0 proof of one. Flew grew up in a religious family that brainwashed him into believing christian mythology but when he grew up and got some As an Atheist, I was never impressed with Antony Flew even when he claimed to be one too.

Flew grew up in a religious family that brainwashed him into believing christian mythology but when he grew up and got some education, he put that ignorance aside. In this book he is desperately seeking company from scientists. For example, he tries to claim Stephen Hawking who has repeated said that he is an Atheist. He also tries to claim Albert Einstein, apparently never reading the things Einstein wrote about the bible being fairy tales and that he did not believe in a god.

Einstein explained repeatedly that when he said "god" he did not mean a religious god but that his god is science. In the very last letter he wrote before dying sold for a lot of money in , Einstein answered a friend who had been concerned hearing Christians saying Einstein was one of them. Einstein told his friend that he was still an Atheist and that people misunderstood his use of the word "god". There is no proof here of any god but Flew did borrow from the thinking of C.

Lewis who had been an Atheist until he lost his wife and got older and hoped he would see her again so turned Christian. Lewis laid out a challenge to nonbelievers that Jesus would have to be a lunatic, a liar, or the lord then tried to prove by the bible itself that he was not a lunatic or liar.

D is the correct answer. Essentially Flew says here that there must have been a jesus because the bible says so and that he must have been god because otherwise he would be nuts. Go figure that. A piece of information that is vital to understanding why Flew suddenly turned Christian is the fact that he wrote this after being diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease. The simple reason he changed his mind is that he is losing his mind as the brain cells die off.

Jul 10, Sharon Barrow Wilfong rated it it was amazing. Philospher and former atheist Antony Flew set the agenda for modern atheism with his essay "Theology and Falsification" From the back of the book I had heard of Flew a number years ago because of his radical turn from atheism to deism in his eighties.

I love to hear people's arguments as to how they arrive at conclusions and this book does not disappoint. Imminently readable and coherent, Philospher and former atheist Antony Flew set the agenda for modern atheism with his essay "Theology and Falsification" Imminently readable and coherent, this is an excellent book for those with questions about the existence of God, who believe in God and would like to hear intelligent reasons to believe, or people who do not believe in God but are curious as to how someone who was an atheist became convinced of an intelligent creator.

The first part of the book gives Flew's history and why he was an atheist. He comprehensively and clearly gives all the arguments he had for not believing in the existence of a Creator.

He also provides other's arguments as well. The second part discusses his change and the arguments in favor of a creator and the world being intelligently designed.

A couple of things. I thought it was interesting that his basic premise in his atheist years was that people who believe in God must prove there is a God, but no such responsibility rests on atheists to prove that there is no God. He then provides several reasons how there must be a god, such as the human mind, intelligence and consciousness.

The impossibility of evolution producing self-awareness or the ability to love or hate or enjoy our lives. To give it meaning and purpose. He tackles evolution and points out the fallacy of believing something could come from nothing and imbue it with meaning and purpose.

That if we are intelligent, we must have been created by an intelligent First Cause. He deals with the argument that if the universe had a beginning or a creator, than so must God. He shows that we know the universe has a beginning and it doesn't follow that God must have a beginning. There must be a first cause.

He lists several laws of nature, such as Newton's first law of motion, namely that an objection at rest will stay at rest unless acted upon by an external and unbalanced force etc.. He argues that we can only exist by the laws that create the environment we live in. These laws had to be in place before we could exist. So how did the universe know that we were coming? His best illustration involves an experiment a scientist made of monkeys.

It was an actual experiment based on the hypothesis that given enough time monkeys would type out a Shakespearean sonnet. I suppose this was to support the idea that anything, no matter how intelligent, could happen by chance. After one month of hammering away at it If we take it that the keyboard has thirty characters The likelihood of getting a one-letter word is one chance out of If you took the entire universe and converted it to computer chips It would be off again by a factor of 10 to the th.

You will never get a sonnet by chance. The universe would have to be 10 to the th time larger. Yet the world thinks the monkeys can do it every time" pg. It only eliminates, or tends to eliminate, whatever is not competitive. So how do you arrive at something to begin with through the process of elimination?

Then, after insisting that we are all the choiceless creatures of our genes, he infers that we cannot help but share the unlovely personal characteristics of those all-controlling monads. Flew concludes with the perceptive statement that the driving motive behind adhering to evolution is to negate God. I checked this book out of the library, but then bought it because I want to write in the margins and make highlights. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in this subject. Feb 15, Glenn Myers rated it really liked it.

Enjoyable, brief ramble from the former to the probably final state of philosopher Antony Flew's thinking, particularly about God, and including how he changed his mind from atheism to Deism. It is bookended by a lengthy introduction and an appendix by the actual writer of the book, Roy Abraham Varghese, and another by the biblical scholar of the hour, Tom, or NT, Wright.

Flew took care to write, and personally sign, his own introduction. Here's a quote, cue unreasoned, buttock-clenching joy from Enjoyable, brief ramble from the former to the probably final state of philosopher Antony Flew's thinking, particularly about God, and including how he changed his mind from atheism to Deism. Here's a quote, cue unreasoned, buttock-clenching joy from theists and wailing and gnashing of teeth from his former atheist pals: I must stress that my discovery of the Divine has proceeded on a purely natural level, without any reference to supernatural phenomena.

It has been an exercise in what is traditionally called natural theology. It has no connection with any of the revealed religions. Nor do I claim to have had any personal experience that may be called supernatural or miraculous.

In short, my discovery of the Divine has been a pilgrimage of reason and not of faith. The book is a good read. The Internet is also a good read, seeing some atheists build a case against the book using the same kind of tactics usually employed by cigarette companies, traffic lawyers, climate-change deniers or creationists, on the lines of 'the old boy lost it, very sad, and was bundled into the back of a van by evangelicals and forced to sign a script someone else had written for him.

He didn't believe in an afterlife. He thought Christianity was the best available religion, but he didn't claim to embrace it, despite the admittedly gorgeous scholarship of N T Wright. All this is in the book. It's nice to find good and honest atheist commentators who recognize this, and who agree with the broadsheet obituaries of Flew, not least in the New York Times which put some journalistic resource into investigating the circumstances of the book.

Flew had his marbles and after a lifetime of brilliant atheist philosophical discourse, took to believing that the universe was created by an infinite, immutable, omnipotent, First Cause. Flew's widow agreed that that was his position.

The jeers and hoots coming from the Theist side may be in bad taste, but perhaps we should be allowed our little moment of fun. Remember, we also have to put up with Creationists and Republicans, and sometimes even have to call them 'brother'.

Jun 12, S. Surovec rated it did not like it Shelves: atheism-religion-philosophy. Possibly one of the biggest loads of crap the fundamentalists have attempted to shovel at us since Prop. How sad that they have to invent someone who never was really an atheist to begin with, much less the "world's most notorious atheist" considering that most freethinkers would classify Dawkins or Hitchens as such in order to "prove" their point.

Then again, they're quite good at crafting imaginary beings to defend their point of view, so it's not such a surprise after all; just incredibl Possibly one of the biggest loads of crap the fundamentalists have attempted to shovel at us since Prop.

Then again, they're quite good at crafting imaginary beings to defend their point of view, so it's not such a surprise after all; just incredibly sad.

In The Presumption of Atheism and other atheistic writings, Flew argued that we must take the universe itself and its most fundamental laws as themselves ultimate. Every system of explanation must start somewhere, and this starting point itself cannot be explained by the system. So, inevitably, all such systems include at least some fundamentals that are not themselves explained. This is a consequence following from the essential nature of explanations of why something that is in fact the case, In The Presumption of Atheism and other atheistic writings, Flew argued that we must take the universe itself and its most fundamental laws as themselves ultimate.

This is a consequence following from the essential nature of explanations of why something that is in fact the case, is the case. Science spotlights three dimensions of nature that point to God. The first is how did the laws of nature come to be? The second is how did life as a phenomenon of purpose-driven, reproducing beings originate from a nonlive matter. The third is the very existence of nature or why does the universe bother to exist? This is certainly the question that scientists from Newton to Einstein to Heisenberg have asked—and answered.

Their answer was the Mind of God. Singular facts as our capacity to know and explicate truths, the correlation between the workings of nature and our abstract descriptions of these workings what physicist Eugene Wigner called the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics , and the role of codes systems of symbols that act in the physical world such as the genetic and neuronal codes at the most fundamental levels of life manifest by their very being the foundational and allpervasive nature of rationality.

Natural selection presupposes the existence of physical entities that interact according to specific laws and of a code that manages the processes of life.

Also another aspect of this rationality lies in the idea of symmetry, According to most accounts of modern physics, symmetry is any kind of transformation that leaves the laws of physics that apply to a system unchanged.

The idea was initially applied to the differential equations of classical mechanics and electromagnetism and then applied in new ways to special relativity and the problems of quantum mechanics.

These laws seem to be fine tuned so that life and consciousness may emerge and life would not have been possible if some of these laws and constants had been slightly different The anthropic principle. This fine tuning has been explained in two ways.

But this claim is absurd for two reasons: 1 it is crazy to postulate a trillion causally unconnected universes to explain the features of one universe because since they are unconnected then we can't validate this claim by a scientific method, when postulating one entity God will do the job.

It doesn't answer anything. We have only shifted the problem of cosmic biophilicity up one level. Richard Dawkins has rejected the argument that God wrote the laws of nature on the grounds that God is too complex a solution for explaining the universe and its laws. What is complex about the idea of an omnipotent and omniscient Spirit, an idea so simple that it is understood by all the adherents of the three great monotheistic religions;Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

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. A second philosophical dimension to the origin of life relates to the fact that living matter possesses an inherent goal that is nowhere present in the matter that preceded it. An overriding question is when and then how sexual reproduction itself evolved and precisely how the first genetic machinery evolved also persists as an unresolved issue.

There is no law of nature that instructs matter to produce end-directed, self-replicating entities. It is true that protobiologists do have theories of the evolution of the first living matter, but they are dealing with a different category of problem.

They are dealing with the interaction of chemicals, whereas our questions have to do with how something can be intrinsically purpose-driven and how matter can be managed by symbol processing. A third philosophical dimension to the origin of life relates to the origin of the coding and information processing that is central to all life-forms. Following this there is translation whereby the message from RNA is conveyed to the amino acids, and finally the amino acids are assembled into proteins.

A gene is nothing but a set of coded instructions with a precise recipe for manufacturing proteins. Most important, these genetic instructions are not the kind of information you find in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics; rather, they constitute semantic information. In other words, they have a specific meaning.

These instructions can be effective only in a molecular environment capable of interpreting the meaning in the genetic code. The origin question rises to the top at this point. The problem of how meaningful or semantic information can emerge spontaneously from a collection of mindless molecules subject to blind and purposeless forces presents a deep conceptual challenge.

The very existence of a code is a mystery. The coding rules the dictionary of codon assignments are known. Yet they provide no clue as to why the code exists and why the mechanism of translation is what it is.

When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist.

This is an idea first floated by the physicist Edward Tryon, who said he had shown that the net energy of the universe is almost zero and that there is therefore no contradiction in saying that it came to be out of nothing since it is nothing. If you add up the binding attractive energy of gravitational attraction, which is negative, and the rest of the whole mass of the universe, which is positive, you get almost zero.

No energy, then, would be required to create the universe, and therefore no creator is required. Alvin Plantinga points out that God understood as a necessary Being exists in all possible worlds. My religiosity consists of a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds.

Certainly, the existence of evil and suffering must be faced. From the existence of nature, we arrive at the ground of its existence. Nature may have its imperfections, but this says nothing as to whether it had an ultimate Source. Thus, the existence of God does not depend on the existence of warranted or unwarranted evil.

With regard to explaining the presence of evil, there are two alternate explanations for those who accept the existence of the Divine. The first is that of the Aristotelian God who does not intervene in the world. The second is the free-will defense, the idea that evil is always a possibility if human beings are truly free. It is very unlikely that something did come from nothing? Atheists say that the explanation for the universe is simply that it is eternally existing, but we cannot explain how this eternally existing state of affairs came to be.

It is inexplicable and has to be accepted as such. A universe would exist uncaused, but rather more likely that God would exist uncaused. Hence the argument from the existence of the universe to the existence of God is a good C-inductive argument. Religious conceptions of the universe use approximations and analogies to help in grasping ultimate things. They are not the whole truth, but this does not stop them being a part of the truth. But where is God? How can we relate God to the universe?

No theist has ever thought that God was literally there in space. The question then becomes: What sense can you make out of there being a personlike being outside of time? If God is timeless, then everything he does, he does, so to speak, all at once, in a single act. The most basic question is: How could there be a causal connection between a spaceless, timeless finding space for god being and the entirety of space-time? Whether you can make sense of that depends very much on what your theory of causation is.

If you think that the concept of cause involves an essential temporal reference [i. The question of whether the Divine has revealed itself in human history remains a valid topic of discussion. You cannot limit the possibilities of omnipotence except to produce the logically impossible. Everything else is open to omnipotence. Dec 12, Mohammed Algarawi rated it liked it.

Although I believe in God, I believe that there isn't an absolute clear conclusive evidence of his existence. Aside from all that, I don't believe that the burden of the proof should be on those who say that there is a God, or those who say that there isn't. I believe that every person is entitled to their own be Although I believe in God, I believe that there isn't an absolute clear conclusive evidence of his existence.

I believe that every person is entitled to their own belief and opinion without having to justify it to others. And I don't know of any logical reasons that can lead to the conclusion of the existence of God. What Flew proposes here is his purely logical and scientific journey to believing in the existence of a prime maker of the universe. He supports his assumptions with the usual arguments of the fine tuning of the universe, and the laws of physics.

That didn't convince me fully. He attempted to refute other hypotheses and theories, such as the multiverse theory, using the arguments mentioned above. But in my opinion, refuting 10 or 20 or even s of theories and hypotheses doesn't prove the existence of God himself. We exist in a universe where the truth behind our existence and the reason of our being is unknown to us, which means that anything is permitted and plausible. But anyway, the book itself is actually a good read.

My only issue with it is that it didn't meet my expectations and the hype around it. I say give it a shot, you might like it. Flew is truly a man who is courageous enough to change his position after a very long career in philosophy as an outspoken atheist. This book can be used as inspiration to unbelievers who aren't willing to honestly approach the evidence for the existence of God. After all, if Flew can convert to theism from atheism Nov 29, Yomna Sherif rated it liked it.

I have found real toughness in getting along with that book's language and philosophy. As a matter of fact, I consider myself new to this whole reading experience, but my curiosity took me to this book. Although I had an unexplained weird journey while reading it, I enjoyed the thoughts it brought to me.

First of all, the dictionary and google search didn't leave my side while reading as to me there was a huge difficulty in getting every phrase in the right way. And I don't have to mention how ma I have found real toughness in getting along with that book's language and philosophy. And I don't have to mention how many times I had to repeat reading paragraphs over and over!

But "I found myself inclined to the pleasure of" grasping each word. However, only one idea controlled my mind from the very first page to the last one which is my belief. It is not that I question my religion, of course not! But it is the fact that I am a muslim and my Quaran tells me to discover nature, universe and facts! Quaran pushes me to understand, to read, to learn and to question everything for the sake of finding the Lord's Greatness all around and believe in Him more.

Despite this fact, I stayed dormant. I belong to muslims, yet, I did nothing to feel the ultimate belonging to Islam. On the other hand, "the world's most famous atheist turned into a believer" because of his continuous passion towards discoveries, understanding and knowledge which guarded his journey.

No matter how much I disagree with some points in that book and how irrelevant some examples are, I discovered the tremendous flaw in myself.