One Flew Over the Finch’s Nest

March 30, 2010 by Dr. Mc.

I just finished reading Anthony Flew’s There is a God. Because he has been a life-long defender of atheism, whatever he had to say about his change of mind would be interesting. He begins of course with how he became atheistic, so I was well into the book before I learned what began the change. There it was on page 68: he heard a scientific explanation for why Darwinian evolution is not a satisfactory explanation for the world we experience. This is not his whole argument, but it is apparently what got the ball rolling. Flew contends that at publication of this book he is not a Christian, but I am intrigued that he includes as an appendix a dialogue with N.T. Wright, who logically explains why Christ must be who He says He is (the Son of God) and that He did what the Bible says He did (died and rose to offer us eternal life).
What I find most interesting is that Flew is now toying with the claims of Christ. It illustrates what I think is the primary reason Darwin’s theory is so ravenously defended. It isn’t because alternatives are so illogical, or even that introducing a metaphysical cause into the equation ruins all hope of scientific explanations of cause-and-affect. It is because immediately upon the admission of a creator follows the need to justify one’s own self before that Creator, Whoever that is.
Oh, there are many defenders of Darwinism who honestly think any alternative is unscientific, simply because they have been taught to consider nothing else. Among them are some Christians. But they do not typically represent the almost frantic rebellion against alternative views that we see from prominent Darwin defenders like Eugenie Scott, Richard Dawkins, and Michael Ruse.
Admitting the possibility of a designer is not a door to some pantheistic, Star Wars-type “force.” The same logic that precipitates a creator of mind says it must therefore have one. The logic that admits that life and its environment is purpose-driven leads inevitably to the conclusion that the creator has purpose.
Throughout history and across the present a common trait of humans is belief in a supernatural. Darwinism is a man-made dam to stop the flood of accountability to some superior being that all the rest of mankind naturally senses and that modern science suggests. The barrier to belief is artificial, and so are the excuses for not admitting it.

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