There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind by Anthony Flew was definitely written by a philosopher.  I guess I was expecting too much, I don’t know, but this book was a struggle for me to read the first time around (I’d originally read it several months ago, and then decided to reread it yesterday so I could write a review on here.)  Not surprisingly, it made more sense the second time around.  I’ve never been a big fan of “deep mysteries” where you ask philosophical questions that don’t actually have an answer.  That’s too nebulous for me.  I think philosophy and I don’t get along for the same reason that I’m not a big fan of poetry - I like concrete facts and things that I can categorize in my mind, or at least understand, lol.

Here’s a quotation from the book that left me scratching my head:

“Perhaps the most important and wide-ranging of these insights was that we must become constantly and crisply conscious of how all philosophy (insofar as philosophy is a conceptual inquiry) must be concerned with correct verbal usage.  We can have no access to concepts except through study of linguistic usage, and hence, the use of those words through which these concepts are expressed.” Page 38, There is a God

If you enjoyed that (or even understood that!) you should definitely check out the Journeyman Philosopher here at Today - I think you’d enjoy that site.

For me, that didn’t make much sense. I struggled through the middle of the book (the beginning was written in plain English, and the end wasn’t too bad either - it was the middle where he started explaining his philosophical beliefs that just completely lost me.)  I was almost to the point of giving up when it started to get good again: He started to explain the things that made him change his point of view on atheism, and he did it using language I could understand.

One of the most interesting parts was on page 75 - 78, where he talks about the work done by Gerry Schroeder to disprove the “monkey typing” explanation.  We’ve all heard it: Lock a group of monkeys in a cage and give them computers, and if they banged on the keyboards long enough, they’d eventually be able to produce a sonnet by Shakespeare.  The analogy is often used to explain how it is that this world, galaxy, and universe in all its complexities, could be produced by random chance.  I won’t go into the refutation by Gerry Schroeder because this post is getting too long, but definitely check the book out if you’ve ever thought that this sounded like a reasonable explanation, because Schroeder does an excellent job of tearing that idea apart using simple mathematics.  (Of course disproving an analogy does not disprove the random chance theory, but I did find it interesting that Mr Schroeder was able to disprove it so convincingly.)

In case anyone was wondering, Mr Flew did not become a theist because he attended a revival and “found Jesus.”  Far from it.  He doesn’t believe that there’s life after death, nor does he believe the Christian religion is true (although he does say that if you were to believe that revelation really does happen, Christianity has got the best explanation for it out of all of the religions).  He believes basically that there was some sort of intelligent being who created the universe, galaxy, and world, and then just left it to its own devices, never to bother with any of it again.  This is roughly the same theory that Albert Einstein had.

There’s something in here for everyone: I think the book will by turns offend and then please people, depending on their own ideas of how the universe came into being.   It is a great book to read if you’ve been thinking and wondering about the origins of man and universe - just skip over the boring parts if you get bogged down.  I promise I won’t tattle on you.

4 stars out of 5.  Too many dry spots to rate it higher than that.

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