Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Antony Flew Over America

By Rick Pearcey

I enjoyed reading There Is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, by Antony Flew (with Roy Abraham Varghese), on a recent trip to Santa Barbara.

My brother works at UC Santa Barbara as a computer analyst. A lovely campus. The photo above was taken during the return flight back to the East Coast.

By the way, one of the reasons jets fly is because they are intelligently designed. And they're maintained by flight mechanics, not by rolls of the dice nor by impersonal laws that unaccountably popped into existence out of sheer, absolute nothingness.

These kinds of facts give free-thinkers such as myself lots to think about. It's a willingness to think freely about the basic philosophic questions that led me to consider secular, pagan, and biblical data with an open mind.

The atheistic, naturalistic case is just too weak intellectually -- the theory of the world required by the mobilization of its presuppositions does not accurately describe the actual external world in which all people must live, atheist or not. There are no atheists in jets formed out of nothing by chance or impersonal law.

The Flew book itself will help you see why. So will this review essay by Gary Habermas of the philosophy and theology department at Liberty University.

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Rick Pearcey is editor and publisher of The Pearcey Report (articles).

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The atheist mind. It is interesting to witness the degree to which man or woman will go just to avoid being confronted by Truth. My husband and I regularly (almost nightly) engage self-proclaiming atheists on the web.

On a site/blog called de-conversion.com, you would be saddened to see just how many former and current "ministers" of The Gospel are really suffering from a hardness of heart and outright rebellion. These ministers hail from all denominations, including Episcopalian, and the very controversial, and often heretical, Emergent Church movement. One observation I have made while speaking to atheists (& being a former agnostic myself), is the anger and hurt that runs so deep within their hearts, and explodes out of their mouths. It is an anger that comes from their separation from their loving Father; their refusal to come to Him like a child.

I just recently ended a three-day, lively exchange on my blog with an atheist who has published a blog called, "Stuff Drunk People Like." I challenged him to reconsider just how humorous drunkenness is, and whether he would invite victims of drunk driving accidents to enjoy his creative project. He has still not sent out the invitations.

Atheists are not outside of God's reach, yet their arguments are circular and presumptuous--and it doesn't take long before that becomes evident.

One woman on de-conversion.com, recently posted an article expressing her contempt for marriage and the Bible's seeming chauvinistic teachings. I am currently preparing my response to her assertions.

The observation you made about how planes fly is a great one. My unlce is a retired pilot/captain, and I would often sit with him and ask him to explain how such a large object floats in the air. He would try and try to explain it,but it just flew over my head, so to speak. I thought airplanes were so amazing, and I couldn't understand how man could come-up with such amazing technology. Then, one day, I got a bit of a revelation while watching birds fly: the original aircraft is the bird. The plane is fashioned after the bird, and GOD designed their wings and things. We humans really didn't come-up with anything new.

Both my husband and I are looking forward to reading Flew's writing, and we are glad he is seeing the light. I hope his book will give us more insight into the atheist mind. Thanks for sharing it.

The fool has said in his heart, "There is no God." Psalm 14:1