Antony Flew's Conversion

Antony Flew (1923 – 2010) was an atheistic British philosopher, perhaps the most influential atheist in the 20th century. He insisted that one should presuppose atheism until evidence suggesting a God was adduced, but he didn't think any such evidence existed. 

However, Flew was serious about following the evidence, and in 2004 he changed his position, and stated that he now believed in the existence of an Intelligent Creator of the universe. This conversion shocked fellow atheists.

Flew never publicly embraced any particular religion and claimed to be a deist, but keeping with his lifelong commitment to go where the evidence leads, he now believed in the existence of a creator God.

In 2007 a book outlining his reasons for changing his position, There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind was written by Flew in collaboration with Roy Abraham Varghese.

In the book Flew says this:

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.

Why do I believe this, given that I expounded and defended atheism for more than half a century? The short answer is this: this is the world picture, as I see it, that has emerged from modern science.

Science spotlights three dimensions of nature that point to God. The first is the fact that nature obeys laws. The second is the dimension of life, of intelligently organized and purpose-driven beings, which arose from matter. The third is the very existence of nature.

When I finally came to recognize the existence of a God, it was not a paradigm shift, because my paradigm remains, as Plato in his Republic scripted his Socrates to insist: “We must follow the argument wherever it leads.”

The leaders of science over the last hundred years, along with some of today’s most influential scientists, have built a philosophically compelling vision of a rational universe that sprang from a divine Mind. As it happens, this is the particular view of the world that I now find to be the soundest philosophical explanation….

The French polymath Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) said four centuries ago that there's enough evidence to convince anyone who's not already dead set against it. Unfortunately, a lot of people today are ignorant of the evidence, in some cases, perhaps, culpably so, and some really are dead set against it.