HARUN YAHYA
www.harunyahya.com
"As people have certainly been influenced by me, I want to try and
correct the enormous damage I may have done." (Anthony Flew)
The newspapers these days are echoing with these regret-filled words
by Anthony Flew, in his time a well-known atheist philosopher. The
81-year-old British professor of philosophy Flew chose to become an
atheist at the age of 15, and first made a name for himself in the
academic field with a paper published in 1950. In the 54 years that
followed, he defended atheism as a teacher at the universities of
Oxford, Aberdeen, Keele and Reading, at many American and Canadian
universities he visited, in debates, books, lecture halls and
articles. In recent days, however, Flew has announced that he has
abandoned this error and accepts that the universe was created.
The decisive factor in this radical change of view is the clear and
definitive evidence revealed by science on the subject of creation.
Flew realised, in the face of the information-based complexity of
life, that the true origin of life is intelligent design and that
the atheism he had espoused for 66 years was a discredited
philosophy.
Flew announced the scientific reasons underlying this change in
belief in these terms:
"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." (1)
"It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about
constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first
reproducing organism." (2)
"I have been persuaded that it is simply out of the question that
the first living matter evolved out of dead matter and then
developed into an extraordinarily complicated creature." (3)
The DNA research which Flew cites as a fundamental reason for his
change of opinion has indeed revealed striking facts about creation.
The helix shape of the DNA molecule, its possession of the genetic
code, the nucleotide strings that refute blind chance, the storage
of encyclopaedic quantities of information and many other striking
findings have revealed that the structure and functions of this
molecule were arranged for life with a special design. Comments by
scientists concerned with DNA research bear witness to this fact.
Francis Crick, for instance, one of the scientists who revealed the
helix shape of DNA admitted in the face of the findings regarding
DNA that the origin of life indicated a miracle:
An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now,
could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at
the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which
would have had to have been satisfied to get it going. (4)
Based on his calculations, Led Adleman of the University of Southern
California in Los Angeles has stated that one gram of DNA can store
as much information as a trillion compact discs. (5) Gene Myers, a
scientist employed on the Human Genome Project, has said the
following in the face of the miraculous arrangements he witnessed:
"What really astounds me is the architecture of life… The system is
extremely complex. It's like it was designed… There's a huge
intelligence there." (6)
The most striking fact about DNA is that the existence of the coded
genetic information can definitely not be explained in terms of
matter and energy or natural laws. Dr. Werner Gitt, a professor at
the German Federal Institute of Physics and Technology, has said
this on the subject:
A code system is always the result of a mental process… It should be
emphasized that matter as such is unable to generate any code. All
experiences indicate that a thinking being voluntarily exercising
his own free will, cognition, and creativity, is required… There is
no known natural law through which matter can give rise to
information, neither is any physical process or material phenomenon
known that can do this. (7)
Creationist scientists and philosophers played a major role in
Flew's acceptance of intelligent design, backed up by all these
findings. In recent times Flew participated in debates with
scientists and philosophers who were proponents of creation, and
exchanged ideas with them. The final turning point in that process
was a discussion organised by the Institute for Metascientific
Research in Texas in May, 2003. Flew participated together with
author Roy Abraham Varghese, Israeli physicist and molecular
biologist Gerald Schroeder, and Roman Catholic philosopher John
Haldane. Flew was impressed by the weight of the scientific evidence
in favour of creation and by the convincing nature of his opponents'
arguments, and abandoned atheism as an idea in the period following
that discussion. In a letter he wrote for the August-September,
2003, edition of the British magazine Philosophy Now, he recommended
Schroeder's book "The Hidden Face of God: Science Reveals the
Ultimate Truth" and Varghese's book "The Wonderful World."(8) During
an interview with the professor of philosophy and theology Gary R.
Habermas, who also played a major role in his change of mind (9),
and also on the video "Has Science Discovered God?," he openly
stated that he believed in intelligent design.
The "Intelligence Pervading the Universe" and the Collapse of Atheism
In the face of all the scientific developments outlined above, the
acceptance of intelligent design by Antony Flew, famous for
defending atheism for many years, reflects a final scene in the
process of collapse being undergone by atheism. Modern science has
revealed the existence of an "intelligence pervading the universe,"
thus leaving atheism out of the equation.
In his book "The Hidden Face of God," Gerald Schroeder, one of the
creationist scientists who influenced Flew, writes:
"A single consciousness, a universal wisdom, pervades the universe.
The discoveries of science, those that search the quantum nature of
subatomic matter, have moved us to the brink of a startling
realization: all existence is the expression of this wisdom. In the
laboratories we experience it as information that first physically
articulated as energy and then condensed into the form of matter.
Every particle, every being, from atom to human, appears to
represent a level of information, of wisdom." (10)
Scientific research into both the functioning of the cell and the
subatomic particles of matter has revealed this fact in an
indisputable manner: Life and the universe were brought into being
from nothing by the will of an entity possessed of a superior mind
and wisdom. There is no doubt that the possessor of that knowledge
and mind that pervade the universe at all levels is Almighty Allah.
Allah reveals this truth in the Qur'an:
Both East and West belong to Allah, so wherever you turn, the Face
of Allah is there. Allah is All-Encompassing, All-Knowing." (Qur'an,
2:115)
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