In his new book, There is a God; How the world’s most notorious atheist changed his mind, Antony Flew comments,
In his book, The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins propounds my old position that Einstein was an atheist. In doing so, Dawkins ignores Einstein’s categorical statement above that he was neither an atheist nor a pantheist. This is puzzling
because Dawkins cites [Einstein’s friend, Max] Jammer on occasion, but leaves out numerous statements by Jammer and Einstein that are fatal to his own case. Jammer observes, for instance, that Einstein always protested against being regarded as an atheist.’ (99-100).
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11 comments:
Antony Flew is eminent anymore! He's new ideas are bullshits! I read Dawkins and due to my field of study, I know Flew is false about origin of entities with reproduction abilities!
Flew never did answer Dawkins arguments, and never thought about them! I'm so sad about him and his oldish mind! He had his life and now scares of a dying without any next life! He just fears!
Fear make a man down on his knees!
Welcome lord kavi from Iran! I didn't think they had atheists in Iran....isn't that what your President said? :-)
Anthony Flew was not attempting to launch a full-fledged refutation of Dawkins. Flew was simply giving the story of why he was no longer an atheist, in language the average person could understand. In the process he mentions Dawkins' dishonest selection of the evidence.
I'm amazed that so many atheists who pretend to be the rational ones, resort to irrational personal attacks, like your attack on Flew's age.
Dear Dennis:
I don’t know why I used such an irrational approach; maybe I was angry of somethin’; so excuse me for bad approach!
But as you know, when Bush states that we are the bringer of peace for Middle East, do you assume that he is telling the truth? Do you think that his act was more than suffering and pain for mid-east? Still he states that he was the survivor or somethin’! If you believe in politicians, then believe in ours as the same! As you know, politics are something twisted based on telling NOT the truth!
And you should pay attention to social diversity! There are believers, non-believers and to some extent believers, atheists, theists, deists, pantheists, Satanists, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Jews, Marxists and some other “ists” among every societies as yours and mine! Isn’t?
Ok, let’s see what’s going on about Dawkins and Flew:
We know that Flew changed his ideology from not being believer (atheist) to being to some extent believer that he doesn’t really know what it is himself! He might have been fanaticized in the complexity of genetic codes and its interesting world! But we should be more aware! Lets see what’s happening!
Everyone would be amazed of the complexity of the hardware that has been used in computers! To whom that they know nothing about electricity, such as gardeners, barbers, nurses, biologists and philosophers, it is every complex and interesting; but what about an electronic engineer?
Have you ever wondered about a heart surgery? Or some brain surgeries that we don’t understand what the surgeons are doing? Aren’t surgeons some kind of gods to us? Haven’t you been interested in the leader who sits Apollo’s on moon by some devices from earth?
And this is the same as a biologic subject that is common to biologists and amazing for engineers and philosophers! Isn’t it?
So some things are obvious in the eye of their professionals and amazing, fantastic and complex to another! Isn’t it?
It is the case of Dawkins as an evolutionary biologist and Flew as a philosopher!
When Flew says that I’m interested in complexity of DNA or something like this, his reasons are of not knowing DNA, its complexity and its origin; nothing else!
Let’s see the truth! We are all humans coming in this planet and die in this planet! We do not know about after death and it would be a tragedy for us to be finished in this way! Everyone wants to be! Being continuous! Can you suppose to not being here tomorrow? It is something sad that makes everyone to convince himself that there is another life and maybe some creator that rules the unseeing world!!!
I’m not here to say that Flew feared of dying with a tragic end, but MAYBE when he felt confused about DNA or something like this, he turned to a believer easier and doesn’t want to listen to biologists such as Dawkins! Maybe!
Even in this case, he is a Pantheist, not a believer in God, but in science! And he mentions that there are some orders or arrangements that are complex!
By the way his approach wasn’t very intelligent to me! I’d appreciated a better one; it didn’t satisfy me!
I’ll write a post about this on my weblog and please inform me of your probable answer to mine!
Regards,
Lord Kavi
And read "Reaction and response" of Antony Flew on Wikipedia for more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_Flew#Reaction_and_response
lord kavi:
Since you seem to dismiss Antony Flew because he is a philosopher rather than a scientist, let's discuss a scientist.
Gerald Schroeder is a scientist with a Ph.D. from MIT--one of our countries most prestigious scientific institutions. Here are some execrpts from one of his books (note: he's not writing here for scientists but so average readers can understand):
"When a specific protein is needed by a cell, a chemical messenger is sent from the outer cell, through a pore in the nuclear membrane, into the nucleus. How the messenger knows to go to the nucleus remains a mystery. This messenger finds the needed chromosome (one of the twenty-three pairs), locks onto that chromosome, and moves along, nucleotide by nucleotide, until it comes to the specific sequence of bases that marks the beginning of the gene that codes for the desired protein.
At this stage, the signaling molecule changes shape, and in doing so allows—or causes—and enzyme called DNA-dependent RNA polymerase (I’ll call it RNA-P) to join the action.
The RNA-P opens the helix, reads each nucleotide base, selects the correct complementary base from among the four types floating in the intracellular slurry, concurrently selects…the molecules that make up the spine of the lengthening strand of mRNA being manufactured, trailing behind the RNA-P, joins the just-selected base to the spine, takes the portion of DNA that has just been read and reseals it to the parallel DNA strand which it was separated, opens the portion of DNA to be read next, reads it, and continues the juggling act til it reaches a coded stop order…And RNA-P does this manufacturing at fifty bases a second…Keep in mind,
this entire sequence is performed by molecules reading molecules, molecules selecting molecules, molecules walking along with other molecules.
Don’t project too much brain power or body power into this system. It’s not little people in there. It’s simply molecules that somehow seem to act like little knowledgeable people, as if they had a wisdom of their own. Which they do (192-199).
This is only one small part of a much more complicated process that
takes place in what was once called the “simple cell.” At one time scientists used to imagine that, given enough time (billions of years) simple cells could
evolve by themselves purely by chance or natural selection. The kicker here is that “it all developed so very rapidly, almost simultaneously with the
appearance of liquid water on earth. We have absolutely phenomenal complexity,
not after billions of years of evolution, but at the very beginning of the entire process (193-194)!"
End Schroeder quote.
Scientists once thought in terms of the evolution of a simple cell. Now we know that there is no such thing as a simple cell. The very simplest cell known to man--the eubacteria, Mycoplasma genitalium, contains 580,000 nucleotid pairs per haploid genome. It if far more complex than the computers you mentioned. But computers were designed and assembled by intelligent designers. You apparently want me to believe that incredibly complex organiaisms like Mycoplasma genitalium just somehow evolved by chance or natural selection?
Flew, Schroeder and many others are now pointing out that this is scientifically impossible.
It is only the blind faith of atheism, the dogma of Darwinsim, and the self-appointed high priests of the scientific establishment that keeps people hanging on to the myth of naturalism.
I did respond to your comment in my weblog:
http://philophil.blogspot.com/2008/01/antony-flew-richard-dawkins-and-gerald.html
regards,
lord kavi,
1) You’re right, Flew was not trying to prove theism. I never said he was. Flew is not a theist. He has simply become convinced that atheism is scientifically impossible.
2) The idea of multiple Big Bang’s is not science. It is shear speculation. Surely you know that in the world of real science, even time itself begins at the Big Bang so it is not possible to know anything before that. In fact, that is the excuse Christians get when we want to know where the matter came from which caused the Big Bang in the first place.
3)If Gerald Schroeder’s Ph.D. in science from MIT is not enough, I guess I should stop reading your posts until you can demonstrate that you are more qualified to discuss the topic than he.
4)When you compare the arguments of Gerald Schroeder to Erick Von Daeniken etc. you are destroying your own credibility. Have you even read Schroeder’s book?
5)Regarding your arguments about how Schroeder and Flew don’t know about microbiology--are you a microbiologist? Then why should I take your word over theirs?
I’ve been reading one of the premiere textbooks on the biology of the Cell by some leading microbiologists and I’ve been amazed how many times in the first hundred pages or so that they admit that they don’t have the answers either.
6)You wrote, “It seems that Dawkins wasn’t able to answer Schroeder here [BINGO!] but actually he has answered these creationists in his books abundantly!”
First, later on in your post you mention six day creationists. You seem to be mixing Schroeder with six day creationists in an attempt to discredit Schroeder. Schroeder is not a six day creationist. As I recall, he even believes in evolution.
Second, one of the points Flew demonstrated in his book is that Dawkins sometimes plays fast and loose with the truth.
7)Seventh, you quoted Dawkins as saying,” Creationist 'logic' is always the same. Some natural phenomenon is too statistically improbable…to have come into existence by chance. Design is the only alternative to chance that the authors can imagine….And science's answer to this faulty logic is also always the same. Design is not the only alternative to chance. Natural selection is a better alternative.”
First, natural selection is not just statistically improbably---the evolution of complex life forms from non living matter by natural selection alone, is statistically impossible, especially given that we only have 15 billion years to work with.
Second, the atheist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre once said that the greatest problem in the universe is, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” He’s absolutely right. Logically, you just can’t get from absolutely nothing, to something. But here we are.
So which of these options is easier to believe: 1) that life on this planet is the result of some kind of outside intelligent force, or 2) that incredibly complex microorganisms developed from non-living matter all by themselves (statistically impossible). Dawkins and his ilk would rather believe the impossible than admit even the possibility that there may be some outside intelligent force at work (that's not science on Dawkins' part--its faith. I don't have that much faith).
8)Again, you quote Dawkins as saying, “…natural selection is a cumulative process, which breaks the problem of improbability up into small pieces. Each of the small pieces is slightly improbable, but not prohibitively so. When large numbers of these slightly improbable events are stacked up in series, the end product of the accumulation is very very improbable indeed, improbable enough to be far beyond the reach of chance. It is these end products that form the subjects of the creationist's wearisomely recycled argument. The creationist completely misses the point, because he … insists on treating the genesis of statistical improbability as a single, one-off event. He doesn't understand the power of accumulation.” (120-121)”
Oh, I get it. It’s like the probability of winning the lottery a thousand times in a row. I shouldn’t look at the accumulation of improbabilities of winning a thousand lotteries. I should just focus on the fact that it is possible to win a single lottery, so it must therefore, be possible to win a thousand in a row!
What nonsense!
Or, if I’m playing “Russian Roulette” with five bullets in a six chamber gun, the chances of me surviving the first round are only one in six. What do you suppose the chances are that I will survive after a hundred rounds or a thousand rounds?
Yet Dawkins doesn’t want us to look at the combined probability because he knows that would absolutely destroy his entire case.
He thinks that if life can survive the first round, it must be able to evolve through the second, third, tenth, hundredth, thousandth, millionth, or billionth round. It is Dawkins who apparently doesn’t understand the power of accumulation.
Remember, the simplest life-form known to man—the Mycoplasma genitalium, has 580,000 nucleotide pairs, combining into about 3,000-5,000 genes. These are just inanimate molecules not living beings. Yet somehow all of these non-living molecules come together in just the right sequence to produce an amazingly complex life form for a “simple cell”—and If I believe Dawkins, they do it all by themselves! You’ve certainly got much more faith than I do.
I just spoke to a colleague who is a cell biologist. She said that there is no purely scientific mechanism to explain how these non-living molecules organize themselves into complex life. You might hope that scientists will one day find an explanation, but until they do that expectation is faith, not science.
Finally, you asked who created God and how did God evolve. You seem to illogically assume that if I can’t answer your question, you win.
Let’s take one thing at a time. The idea that the universe just sprung into existence by itself, that inanimate matter somehow turned into living organisms and those living organisms gradually evolved into greater and greater complexity all by themselves, is not science; it is modern day mythology. Flew and Schroeder are right—it is scientifically impossible.
So that leaves us with a number of different options. Maybe a more advanced civilization spread spores on our planet, like the Nobel Prize winning geneticist Francis Crick once proposed (some science!).
Or maybe there are a bunch of gods (polytheism). Or maybe the universe is god (pantheism). Or maybe God is the soul of the universe (pan-en-theism). Or maybe there is a God who created and sustains it all (theism).
But all that is in the area of philosophy and religion, not science.
All we can say scientifically is that the idea that the universe just sprung into existence by itself, that inanimate matter somehow turned into living organisms by themselves, and those living organisms gradually evolved into greater and greater complexity all by themselves, is absolutely, statistically impossible. That’s all Antony Flew is saying.
Thanks for your answer Dennis!
These days I'm so busy, but I'll be back in a month and we will discuss more!
Regards,
I like to read your commentaries on the review by Flew of Dawkins' The God Delusion.
Please work on such commentaries.
And perhaps you know of the latest words from Flew on where he now stands on the existence of God.
Ergry
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