There Is a God - How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind - Antony Flew, Roy Abraham Varghese - contributor

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• 
  erouting
  October 28th, 2021
  

  Nietzsche came back from the dead and also embraced religion? Huh. Neat.

  There Is a God - How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind - Antony Flew, Roy Abraham Varghese - contributor
• 
  lefty104
  October 28th, 2021
  

  I don’t know any atheists who became religious, but lots of people who realized that their religion was stupid.

  There Is a God - How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind - Antony Flew, Roy Abraham Varghese - contributor
• 
  illodiini
  October 28th, 2021
  

  I love dogs…

  There Is a God - How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind - Antony Flew, Roy Abraham Varghese - contributor
• 
  czvnvhnc
  October 28th, 2021
  

  Christopher Hitchins? Richard Dawkkns? Bertrand Russel? Thomas Huxley? No? None of them… I am not sure “most notorious” is very accurate, then.

  There Is a God - How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind - Antony Flew, Roy Abraham Varghese - contributor
• 
  pebbles188
  October 28th, 2021
  

  No alpha believes in god(s). Every alpha knows they have a soul.

  A lot of effort was made in the 19th/20th century to get betas to conflate a spiritual/soul understanding with organised religion.

  Thus today most betas think a rejection of the evil of organised religion requires embracing the idea that Man is nothing more than a ‘log’ (see Japan during WW2). Once betas are trained to be self-hating (and the war on the carbon cycle is an essential part of this psy-op), evil alphas can do anything with Mankind.

  PS the most ancient thinkers considered the idea of gods as fairytales to entertain/control the masses but each accepted the idea of Man’s soul as a given.

  There Is a God - How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind - Antony Flew, Roy Abraham Varghese - contributor
• 
  quivered
  October 28th, 2021
  

  I used to not believe but by carefully studying all the evidence I came to the conclusion I was wrong - Santa is real! I mean, the presents were right there, man! Under the tree! How else could they have got there if it wasn’t Santa? You can’t explain that.

  There Is a God - How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind - Antony Flew, Roy Abraham Varghese - contributor
• 
  Jiminy Cricket
  October 29th, 2021
  

  

  Okay, well, I wouldn’t exactly call Flew, “notorious,” but he was known for debating Christians and developing positivism. True, Hitchins and Dawkins have been more widely known in the 21st century, and notoriously more anti-theistic, nevertheless, Flew was an accomplished philosopher and his story stands on its own merit.

  There Is a God - How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind - Antony Flew, Roy Abraham Varghese - contributor
• 
  Jack_Milad
  October 29th, 2021
  

  Important to point out that Flew’s stance changed from one of atheism to deism, a belief in intelligent design. Not a belief in christ or christianity, as this book goes on to imply when talking about the resurrection. That was something added by Varghese.

  There Is a God - How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind - Antony Flew, Roy Abraham Varghese - contributor
• 
  caesar963
  October 29th, 2021
  

  

  Cripes, even the Alpha/Beta guy is here, throwing his dull stones. With a devastating PS into the bargain.

  While I appreciate that Flew is a towering intellectual, philosopher & academic - dammit all, I’m just as emotional, angry, resistant & fearful as most of the other commenters here! Dammit all!

  There Is a God - How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind - Antony Flew, Roy Abraham Varghese - contributor
• 
  Cog1
  October 29th, 2021
  

  The fact that I can’t find wholly satisfying, scientific answers to every little question that pops into my head, proves that there _must_ be a god. QED. And if there is indeed a God, he must be the one that was believed to exist in my distant ancestor’s not very well connected village, or maybe the one that some emperor’s mum had a dream about. Anyone who doesn’t believe this is deficient because they haven’t got “Faith” which is a way cooler - and more convenient - way of thinking. If all this is obvious to me, how come others don’t get it? They must be stupid or Evil. Sad.

  There Is a God - How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind - Antony Flew, Roy Abraham Varghese - contributor
• 
  caesar963
  October 29th, 2021
  

  I part reductio; 1 part caricature; 2 parts reductionism; just add ideological, anti-theist bigotry. Pop it in the oven until the “problem” disappears. Bob’s your mum’s brother.

  There Is a God - How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind - Antony Flew, Roy Abraham Varghese - contributor
• 
  Cog1
  October 29th, 2021
  

  It may be all those things, reductive, caricatured, perhaps even bigoted. I’ll admit I have a visceral aversion to religious BS. The weird thing is that my point can nonetheless be true. It’s a sad comment on how facile the theist argument is: most of it can be fairly reduced to caricature. The rest amounts to “shut up and don’t be so rude!”. Show me a convincing argument that doesn’t resort to reliance on “Authority”, fantasy, unconvincing excuses, reliance on “faith” as a higher power, and what aboutism. The best you might do is Pascal’s wager, which is just a cheat. You can tell me to shut up now, and I will. Why bother?

  There Is a God - How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind - Antony Flew, Roy Abraham Varghese - contributor
• 
  caesar963
  October 29th, 2021
  

  No, it’s fair enough, in a way. So many people - on all “sides” - approach this from the highest emotional pitch. Emotion is a poor guide, and I don’t think reductionism is ever an adequate explanatory model for anything. Nor is base materialism.

  Which opens up a more metaphysical paradigm of causation. The first cause; uncaused cause; unmoved mover; what accounts for being/existence in the first inst; why is there something rather than nothing (Leibniz called this the most important question a person can ask), etc. This moves away from “authority” to a more philosophical discourse & warrant for existence & origins.

  This route is referred to as natural theology, a different approach from that of divine revelation, or textual sources. It’s essentially the human mind puzzling out being, causation, origins, existence, etc. Some arguments relating to this sphere are the argument from contingency, the moral argument, the cosmological argument, the ontological argument (& many more). There really isn’t just one theist argument, of course. The natural theology approach has led considerable numbers of people (such as Flew, Einstein, Twain, Locke) to what is known as “the God of the philosophers.” The Aristotelian understanding.

  Naturally, we’re all still finite creatures trying to grasp the infinite. As Augustine observed, “Si enim comprehendis, non est Deus” (if you can comprehend it, it isn’t God).
  I wish that every Christian understood their religion as Augustine, Aquinas & Newman did; every Jew as Maimonides; & every Muslim as Averroes. But not everyone can be the best exemplar of their beliefs. Not even all atheists.

  There Is a God - How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind - Antony Flew, Roy Abraham Varghese - contributor
• 
  caesar963
  October 29th, 2021
  

  is “never” an adequate explanatory model.

  There Is a God - How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind - Antony Flew, Roy Abraham Varghese - contributor
• 
  caesar963
  October 29th, 2021
  

  -No, disregard that last. Tired!

  There Is a God - How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind - Antony Flew, Roy Abraham Varghese - contributor
• 
  Cog1
  October 30th, 2021
  

  Who promised you an explanatory model? Or said you could make one up or borrow one from an old book if you didn’t have one?
  Dismissing materialism as “base” is hardly an argument, much less permission to adhere to some baseless metaphysics.
  As for “causation” there’s a mess of a concept if there ever was one.
  What I was implying in my original post is that the whole prospect of religion lies on ridiculous, shaky ground. If you presented Christianity, for instance, to an external observer without the benefit of authority and tradition she would laugh out loud at how preposterous it is. Weird thanatology, an unknowable, reprobate, insecure, inconsistent, pompous, yet all powerful and all knowing god. A symbology that centers around an instrument of torture, child sacrifice, virtual cannibalism, etc all papered over by the largely ignored sermon on the mount and an ever-evolving argument that “it’s all just symbolic” anyways.
  It’s risible.For all its historic seriousness.
  As for Augustine et. al, how is that not an appeal to authority? Another instance of “Smarter people than I believe in God, so he must exist!” Besides, for all their intelligence, religion was the air they breathed, they could barely conceive of a world without it. The cognitive dissonance of a world without God was too great even for them. Their questioning, from our point of view, looks like rhetorical game-playing more than anything else. I suspect they would have found it easier to believe in the dragon in my garage than imagine the car in it. Even Darwin simply couldn’t directly question the existence of God.What’s your excuse?You live in a big world where the vast majority of people have answers to such question that are diametrically opposed to each other.
  And no, atheism is not just another religion. It is simply a recognition that all gods are obviously human fabrications presented without any real evidence, hence unreliable.
  And how is your Augustine quote, - for all its latinate impressiveness and aura of wisdom and humility - not a bare appeal to faith and illogic? It’s just “shut up” in sheep’s clothing. And so I should. I stand by my original post. It’s shorter and slightly more entertaining.

  There Is a God - How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind - Antony Flew, Roy Abraham Varghese - contributor
• 
  caesar963
  October 30th, 2021
  

  No, Cog1, that’s not it. Explanatory models are how we operate, how we approach the whole show. Reductionism is one of the worst approaches. That’s the point.

  “Or said you could make one up or borrow one from an old book if you didn’t have one?” What & what?!!!
  You also overreacted to “base materialism” - this just means uninformed materialism, purely on its own as it were, without a full-spectrum analysis, as the smart lads do say.

  “Baseless metaphysics” - yeah, such as mind, numbers, ethics & morality? Coz that’s the entire area under discussion.

  “As for “causation” there’s a mess of a concept if there ever was one.” - How do you figure?
  “Religion lies on ridiculous, shaky ground” - the approach of natural theology is to reason these things out, as every poor, flawed human must do, to some extent. That was the point there.
  “Weird thanatology, an unknowable, reprobate, insecure, inconsistent, pompous, yet all powerful and all knowing god.” - you’re merely falling back on bigoted abuse here again.

  “ever-evolving argument that “it’s all just symbolic” anyways.” - not really. Check out the fundamental transcendent/immanent paradigm. It’s the basis of (at least) Judeo-Christian theology, and is prior to all else.

  “As for Augustine et. al, how is that not an appeal to authority?” - Was he not just stating an unavoidable truth?
  “Besides, for all their intelligence, religion was the air they breathed, they could barely conceive of a world without it.” - Not at all, Augustine came reluctantly to Christianity, he was largely influenced by ancient Greek rationalism throughout his life.

  Do you think that our reasoning actually improves without the fullest knowledge of these thinkers of the past & the history of ideas, generally? You may dismiss them as old authorities, but in their absence I think that our minds narrow, diminish & atrophy. Augustine was essentially saying there that we can’t know anything for certain. Compare that to some of the ideological narrowness of our own day.

  “Their questioning looks like rhetorical game-playing more than anything else.” - They were reasoning out causes & origins. Are you?

  “I suspect they would have found it easier to believe in the dragon in my garage than imagine the car in it.” - Augustine proposed a model of human evolution 1400 years before the theory was formulated. He writes comparatively little about garage-dragons, but I’ll keep looking. Can you imagine 1400 years into the future? How easy is it for anyone?

  On the subject of our “advanced” state, the last century has been the most barbarous in human history, with the state & toxic, anti-theist ideologies committing murder & genocide on the most unprecedented scale. IQs are measurably declining. This is a book site, and when books are uploaded, a torrent of hatred & rage is often unleashed. I could count on one hand the amount of people I’ve encountered here who are capable of genuine critical thinking - at least those who choose to express a view, Tell me again how much we know?

  “What’s your excuse? You live in a big world where the vast majority of people have answers to such question that are diametrically opposed to each other.” - When was this ever not the case? Find two people who precisely agree on everything - or anything.

  “And no, atheism is not just another religion.” - Who said it was?
  “It is simply a recognition that all gods are obviously human fabrications” - this is another groundless ass-ertion, “presented without any real evidence, hence unreliable.” Are you truly conversant with all the arguments - on all sides of the equation? Or are you just going with a colourful youtube video?

  How is the Augustine quote not just a statement of the factual position? He never said “Shut up!” - all research & knowledge was glorious, he maintained. This philosophical orientation is also why the Church created the university, the hospital, the concept & doctrine of human rights, preserved Classical texts & culture, preserved literacy, etc. etc.

  When anyone bases their argument on their own biased ignorance of this rich history of ideas, then they’re hardly engaging in a Chestertonian level of discourse, are they?

  There Is a God - How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind - Antony Flew, Roy Abraham Varghese - contributor
• 
  caesar963
  October 30th, 2021
  

  Apologies for my incredible length (& girth).

  There Is a God - How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind - Antony Flew, Roy Abraham Varghese - contributor
• 
  Cog1
  October 30th, 2021
  

  I certainly don’t aspire to Chestertonian levels of discourse, God forbid. That’s just the point, the whole argument gets muddled in rhetoric and always has been. I’ll admit having been taught by Jesuits a long time ago indeed, I used to be more conversant with the arguments, but in any case I eventually came back to basics in my thinking on this and tried to cut through all the obfuscations.What have you said other than a long winded version of “Smart people believed in God, hence he existed” And Augustine’s “it’s too complex for mere humans to understand” equivalent is indeed an attempt to close the conversation, in rather thin disguise. A factual position??? Really? Puhlese. Do you know what is indeed incomprehensible to mere humans for the foreseeable future? The basic nature and extent of reality. Inventing a God in Daddy’s image so we can deal with all that uncertainty is, and always has been a crock. Sorry, but virtually nothing you say cannot - with a little shoehorning - fit into my original tongue-in-cheek analogy.

  There Is a God - How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind - Antony Flew, Roy Abraham Varghese - contributor
• 
  caesar963
  October 30th, 2021
  

  I’m pretty sure the Jesuits didn’t impart a daddy figure, or the white-bearded man on the cloud. You’re just doing the reductionism two-step again. I prefer moonwalking. I’ve never learned anything by viscerally hating it. You just learn some dark things abt yourself by going that grim route. We learn by conceptualizing through language, metaphor, comparison, observation, experience - if you think it’s possible to grasp the infinite with a finite mind, good luck to you. (Kant is great on the difficulty of true knowledge in any sphere - but I know you don’t like mentions of authors/books. Uh, on a book site…)

  Also, you dodged all of my step-by-step refutations. For inst, “As for “causation” there’s a mess of a concept if there ever was one.” - How do you figure?

  You’re never going to fully grasp everything, that’s just a brute fact. The best we manage are intimations, suggestions, indications, impressions. Any other position is arrogance upon stilts. Language is a beautifully complex instrument, but many concepts are genuinely ineffable. We’re not instantly persuaded of any moral/ethical/political system. It’s a gradual process of experience, relationships, conversations, learning, reading & living a certain way. We’re on that journey all of our lives - as long as we remain open to change & dynamic transformation. I wouldn’t simply attack an issue with emotion/anger/hysteria, that way lies stoopidity. You’re banging your head against complexity - which is understandable, to a degree. However, we have to work our own way thru complexity, no one can undertake that for us.

  “I eventually came back to basics in my thinking on this and tried to cut through all the obfuscations.” - My impression is that you did what a lot of people do (I did a version of it myself when I rejected religion) - you exchanged one belief system for another; or an anti-belief system, if you will. People merely embrace a whole new set of obfuscations & justifications - political obfuscations, quite often.

  “What have you said oth than a long winded version of “Smart people believe in God, hence he existed”” - No, that’s a desperate effort at reductionism again. You’re relying on calculated misunderstanding & distortion too much. I’ve said several times that everyone has to find their own way, & puzzle existence out for themselves. I do believe that it’s necessary to at least make a sincere attempt at this, and not merely escape into emotional rejectionism. Uninformed emotion is ever a poor guide, as evidenced here.

  “And Augustine’s “it’s too complex for mere humans to understand” - Nope. He’s saying it’s arrogant to think that one can ever grasp the totality. You disagree? In what respect?
  Also, rather than Augustine ending a philosophical conversation, if you learn about him & the classic texts which he wrote, he contributed vastly to this & myriad other areas of inquiry. But, yeah, mindlessly hating is easier than learning I suppose…

  “A factual position??? Really?” - Oy. Yes; again, he was stating the factual position in relation to our state of knowledge. How could it be otherwise? How can you achieve absolute certainty, in all seriousness?

  “Do you know what is indeed incomprehensible to mere humans for the foreseeable future? The basic nature and extent of reality.” - You’ve actually said something reasonably cogent there. Read Kant.
  “Inventing a God in Daddy’s image so we can deal with all that uncertainty” - How could such a thing remove uncertainty? Existence is ambiguous. That’s a constant. Deal with it. It’s not going away.

  There Is a God - How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind - Antony Flew, Roy Abraham Varghese - contributor
• 
  illodiini
  November 1st, 2021
  

  Just love a fairly intellectual debate about a figment of imagination.

  There Is a God - How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind - Antony Flew, Roy Abraham Varghese - contributor
• 
  caesar963
  November 1st, 2021
  

  Go on outta that, illodiini, you old trickster.

  There Is a God - How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind - Antony Flew, Roy Abraham Varghese - contributor
• 
  iaudiophile
  November 5th, 2021
  

  

  if an atheist took 100mg pure LSD and spoke to a deity? ok, maybe he change his mind while high. but it’s unlikely that deity would be Yahweh - as author would like to believe. Probably Zues, Ra, or Odin as they would kick the sh!t out of any christian god.

  There Is a God - How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind - Antony Flew, Roy Abraham Varghese - contributor
• 
  caesar963
  November 5th, 2021
  

  …many such toxic ideologues are indeed attracted to coercive power & brute force. A valuable illustration, but otherwise hopelessly confused.

  There Is a God - How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind - Antony Flew, Roy Abraham Varghese - contributor
• 
  ivw
  November 11th, 2021
  

  Cog1 and ceasar963, the more exclamations marks and multiple question marks and single words in quotation marks you use, the less sense you make. Don’t try to sugar coat emotional rants in pseud-scientific language. Download the book or don’t, listen to it or don’t. If audiobookbay is your best soap box to stand on and yell at each other, it is just sad.

  There Is a God - How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind - Antony Flew, Roy Abraham Varghese - contributor
• 
  caesar963
  November 11th, 2021
  

  Just an exchange, ivy, nothing to become excited about. Try to exclude emotion, if possible. Punctuation tends to enhance comprehension; w’out it, readers often lose sense/nuance. The kidz are increasingly eliding punctuation, for some reason. They don’t perceive its purpose either. I had a good go at clearing up the mistakes regarding the book, & defending against the hysterical attacks which always appear around this subject, but it’s tough to be comprehensive.
  Curious error there on “scientific” language.

  There Is a God - How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind - Antony Flew, Roy Abraham Varghese - contributor
• 
  ivw
  November 12th, 2021
  

  c963aesar, firstly, apologies for the typo on pseudo-scientific. I am actually old enough not to fall into the “kidz” (sic) category who are “eliding” (sic) punctuation. Appropriate punctuation should be encouraged. Multiple question marks and exclamation marks however, should be kept for cartoon strips as they convey emotion, not meaning. To quote Terry Pratchett: “Multiple exclamation marks, […] are a sure sign of a diseased mind.” Ciao. ivw, not Ivy. PS. I will overlook your typos for what they are and not try to attach sinister meaning to them.

  There Is a God - How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind - Antony Flew, Roy Abraham Varghese - contributor
• 
  caesar963
  November 12th, 2021
  

  I’m an awful man for sinister typos all the same - a sure sign of a disordered, malfunctioning Caesar. In my defensiveness, exclamation points (as the Americans refer to ‘em) can be usefully emphatic, in their unemotional incarnation. They can also be comedic in character.
  I don’t think Socratic question marks are remotely emotional - are you trying to be gratuitously offensive?!!!

  “Kidz” really do spurn sensible punctuation. I recently noticed that even Octavian has crossed this Rubicon. He was raised better, I assure u.

  There Is a God - How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind - Antony Flew, Roy Abraham Varghese - contributor

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