From a BSA post by Keith P. Myers on Jun 21, 2026.
This is rather long because it is my [Keith P. Myers] summary of an entire book. I found the book to be very significant, and made this summary for my own reference and to refer to in the future. I’m sharing it here in hopes that you also find it helpful.
From: Flew, Antony; Varghese, Roy Abraham. There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind.
Antony Flew was technically the “god-father” of the New Atheists. He was an avowed atheist from very early in his life, despite the fact that he was the son of a Methodist minister. As an academic philosopher he wrote books about atheism and participated in multiple debates on the side of atheism. But in 2004 he changed his mind! This shocked many people! He didn’t suddenly come to believe in the Judeo-Christian God. Rather he came around to a belief in what we might call the “God of the philosophers.” He described himself as someone that was always willing to “follow the evidence.” His change of heart came about by examining the discoveries that science had been making. He felt that science had provided enough credible evidence to support the belief that there is a “cosmic mind” that gave rise to the universe.
1. Flew’s admission. “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. 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. 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 of a multitude of phenomena encountered by scientists and laypeople alike. The important questions to ask are: How did the laws of nature come to be? How did life as a phenomenon originate from nonlife? How did the universe, by which we mean all that is physical, come into existence?”
2. Argument from Design: The important point here is not merely that there are regularities in nature, but that these regularities are mathematically precise, universal, and “tied together.” Einstein spoke of them as “reason incarnate.” The question we should ask is how nature came packaged in this fashion. This is certainly the question that scientists from Newton to Einstein to Heisenberg have asked—and answered. Their answer was…. the Mind of God. The overwhelming impression of the universe that scientists have developed is one of order. The more we discover about the universe, the more we find that it is governed by rational laws. By “laws”, we simply mean a regularity or symmetry in nature. Everyone who is seriously engaged in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that the laws of nature manifest the existence of a spirit vastly superior to that of men, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble. These laws seem almost contrived—fine-tuned, some commentators have claimed—so that life and consciousness may emerge. This contrived nature of physical existence is just too fantastic for me to take on board as simply ‘given.’ It points to a deeper underlying meaning to existence. Regularities in nature, however you describe them, can be best explained by a divine Mind. If you accept the fact that there are laws, then something must impose that regularity on the universe. What agent (or agents) brings this about? The theistic option is the only serious option as the source. Atheists claim that the laws of nature exist reasonlessly and that the universe is ultimately absurd. I find this hard to accept. There must be an unchanging rational ground in which the logical, orderly nature of the universe is rooted.
3. Fine-Tuning Argument: The laws of nature seem to have been crafted so as to move the universe toward the emergence and sustenance of life. Virtually no major scientist today claims that the fine tuning was purely a result of chance factors at work in a single universe. Any universe hospitable to life—what we might call a biophilic universe—has to be “adjusted” in a particular way.
4. Origin of Life: How can a universe of mindless matter produce beings with intrinsic ends, self-replication capabilities, and “coded chemistry”? Here we are not dealing with biology, but an entirely different category of problem. Living matter possesses an inherent goal or end-centered organization that is nowhere present in the matter that preceded it. Something that is alive will possess intrinsic ends, goals, or purposes. The capability for self-reproduction has not been shown to be able to arise by natural means from a material base. In being alive, living matter possesses a teleological organization that is wholly absent from everything that preceded it.
5. Biological Coding: Another philosophical dimension to the origin of life relates to the origin of the coding and information processing that is central to all life-forms. Biologists’ investigation of DNA has suggested, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements needed to produce life, that intelligence must have been involved. It’s the enormous complexity of the number of elements and the enormous subtlety of the ways they work together. The meeting of these two parts at the right time by chance is simply minute. A gene is nothing but a set of coded instructions with a precise recipe for manufacturing proteins. We have to ask how something that is intrinsically purpose-driven and managed by symbol processing can emerge spontaneously from a collection of mindless molecules subject to blind and purposeless forces. Life could not have evolved without a genetic mechanism—one able to store, replicate, and transmit to its progeny information that can change with time. Precisely how the first genetic machinery evolved also persists as an unresolved issue. When (and then how) sexual reproduction itself evolved is still unknown despite decades of speculation. The existence of conditions favorable to life still does not explain how life itself originated. Life was able to survive only because of favorable conditions on our planet. But there is no law of nature that instructs matter to produce end-directed, self-replicating entities. Mind, rather than emerging as a late outgrowth in the evolution of life, has existed always as the matrix, the source and condition of physical reality. The stuff of which physical reality is constructed is mind-stuff. It is mind that has composed a physical universe that breeds life, and so eventually evolves creatures that know and create: science-, art-, and technology-making creatures. The only satisfactory explanation for the origin of such “end-directed, self-replicating” life as we see on earth is an infinitely intelligent Mind.
6. The Process of Evolution. Natural selection does not positively produce anything. It only eliminates, or tends to eliminate, whatever is not competitive. A variation does not need to bestow any actual competitive advantage in order to avoid elimination; it is sufficient that it does not burden its owner with any competitive disadvantage. So then how do life forms advance forward in complexity? Darwin’s mistake was in his suggestion that natural selection produces something. Natural selection does not produce, it only selects for traits that provide some advantage, or at least do not result in a disadvantage. But how do those traits show up to begin with? Darwin’s overall employment of the expression “natural selection” or “survival of the fittest” rather than his own ultimately preferred alternative, “natural preservation”, has led many to develop somewhat of a skewed impression.
7. The Big Bang. Something does not come from Nothing. As long as the universe could be comfortably thought to be not only without end but also without beginning, it remained easy to see its existence (and its most fundamental features) as brute facts. And if there had been no reason to think the universe had a beginning, there would be no need to postulate something else that produced the whole thing. But the big-bang theory changed all that. If the universe had a beginning, it became entirely sensible, almost inevitable, to ask what produced this beginning. This radically altered the situation. None of today’s fashionable cosmological speculations preclude the possibility of a Creator. A number of cosmologists have speculated that the universe emerged from “nothing.” But no matter how you describe the universe—as having existed forever, or as having originated from a point outside space-time or else in space but not in time, or as starting off so quantum-fuzzily that there was no definite point at which it started, or as having a total energy that is zero—the people who see a problem in the sheer existence of Something Rather Than Nothing will be little inclined to agree that the problem has been solved. There is quite a chance that, if there is a God, he will make something of the finitude and complexity of a universe. Therefore it would seem that it is very unlikely that a universe would exist uncaused, but rather more likely that God would exist uncaused. This version of the cosmological argument seems to be right in a fundamental way. Some features of it may need to be amended, but the universe is something that begs an explanation. And once you consider that there is life in the universe, the question becomes even more poignant. Because once you understand the nature of matter, of mass-energy, you realize that, by its very nature, it could never become “aware,” never “think,” never say “I.” But the atheist position is that, at some point in the history of the universe, the impossible and the inconceivable took place. Undifferentiated matter (here we include energy), at some point, became “alive,” then conscious, then conceptually proficient, then an “I.”
8. A person without a body. Persons (human and divine) are agents that can act intentionally. The human person is an agent organism, a body capable of intentional action. But though all embodied agents (such as human persons) must be psychophysical units (and not minds plus bodies), all agents do not have to be embodied. No anti-dualist argument shows that a body is a necessary condition for being an agent, since the condition for being an agent is simply to be capable of intentional action. God is an agent whose every activity is intentional action. To speak of God as a personal being is to talk of him as an agent of intentional actions. God’s powers of action are unique, and the actions ascribed to God cannot in principle be attributed to other agents. For instance, God, through his intentional agency, is the agent who brings into existence all other beings. God is an agent whose mode of life and powers of action are fundamentally different from ours. Apprehension of divine actions can help give content to our descriptions of God as loving or wise, but we still have to admit that our understanding is radically limited. But if you take Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity very seriously, you believe that everything that is in time is also in space. It’s just a four-dimensional continuum. No theist has ever thought that God was literally there in space. If he’s not in space and whatever is in time is in space, then he is not in time. The question then becomes: What sense can you make out of there being a person-like being outside of time? If God is outside of time, then God is timeless. Everything he does, he does all at once, in a single act. He couldn’t do one thing first and then another later on. But that one act might have effects at different times. The idea of an omnipresent Spirit is not intrinsically incoherent if we see such a Spirit as an agent outside space and time that uniquely executes its intentions in the spatio-temporal continuum. There are no good philosophical arguments for denying God to be the explanation of the universe and of the form of order it exhibits.
The Bottom Line:
Five phenomena are evident in our immediate experience that can only be explained in terms of the existence of God. These are, first, the rationality implicit in all our experience of the physical world; second, life, the capacity to act autonomously; third, consciousness, the ability to be aware; fourth, conceptual thought, the power of articulating and understanding meaningful symbols such as are embedded in language; and, fifth, the human self, the “center” of consciousness, thought, and action. Each of these five phenomena, in their own way, presuppose the existence of an infinite, eternal Mind. God is the condition that underlies all that is self-evident in our experience. Realize that we are not talking about probabilities and hypotheses, but about encounters with fundamental realities that cannot be denied without self-contradiction. It is not a matter of deducing God from the existence of certain complex phenomena. Rather, God’s existence is presupposed by these phenomena. We have all the evidence we need in our immediate experience. Only a deliberate refusal to “look” is responsible for atheism of any variety.
