Philosophy Now Issue 47 //philosophynow.org/issues/47/Letter_from_Antony_Flew_on_Darwinism_and_Theology

Letter from Antony Flew on Darwinism andTheologyProfessor Antony Flew, who is famous for his philosophical arguments in favour of atheism,has contributed these tantalising comments to the debate.

Dear Editor,

The publication of The Alleged Fallacies of Evolutionary Theory by Massimo Pigliucci and others inIssue 46 of Philosophy Now provides a convenient occasion for pointing out the limits of the negativetheological implications of Darwins Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. In the fourteenth and finalchapter of The Origin of Species Darwin himself apart from noticing certain short (a mere handful ofmillion years long) geological periods in which the fossil record reveals the occurrence of inexplicablyrapid evolution wrote:

Analogy would lead me one step further, namely to the belief that all animals and plantshave descended from one prototype.... Therefore I should infer from analogy that probably allthe organic beings that have lived on the earth have descended from some one primordialform, into which life was first breathed.

Probably Darwin himself believed that life was miraculously breathed into that primordial form of notalways consistently reproducing life by God, though not the revealed God of then contemporaryChristianity, who had predestined so many of Darwins friends and family to an eternity of extremetorture.

But the evidential situation of natural (as opposed to revealed) theology has been transformed in the morethan fifty years since Watson and Crick won the Nobel Prize for their discovery of the double helixstructure of DNA. It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing anaturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism.

I will here confine myself to recommending two books by individuals who started as believers in twodifferent revealed religions. The author of the first started as, and remains, a Protestant Christian. Theauthor of the second started as, and remains, an Orthodox Jew. The first book is Roy Abraham VarghesesThe Wonderful World: A Journey from Modern Science to the Mind of God (Fountain Hills, Arizona;TyrPublishing 2003). The second book is Gerald L Schroeders The Hidden Face of God: Science Revealsthe Ultimate Truth (Touchstone; New York 2001)

Anyone who should happen to want to know what I myself now believe will have to wait until thepublication, promised for early 2005, by Prometheus of Amherst, NY of the final edition of my God andPhilosophy with a new introduction of it as an historical relic. That book was a study of the argumentsfor Christian theism, first published in 1966 in various editions in both hardcover andpaperback in boththe USA and the UK. My own commitment then as a philosopher who was also areligious unbeliever was

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and remains that of Platos Socrates: We must follow the argument wherever it leads.

Yours,

Antony Flew

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