During the 1990′s I actually made it a practice to write famous atheists and scientists that were mentioned by Adrian Rogers and Francis Schaeffer and challenge them with the evidence for the Bible’s historicity and the claims of the gospel. Usually I would send them a cassette tape of Adrian Rogers’ messages “6 reasons I know the Bible is True,” “The Final Judgement,” “Who is Jesus?” and the message by Bill Elliff, “How to get a pure heart.”  I would also send them printed material from the works of Francis Schaeffer and a personal apologetic letter from me addressing some of the issues in their work. My second cassette tape that I sent to both Antony Flew and George Wald was Adrian Rogers’ sermon on evolution.  

Below is the video of Rogers’ sermon on Evolution.

Check out this short article by Adrian Rogers:

I think that Antony Flew may have pondered this quote from George Wald which was in Adrian Rogers’ sermon.

Dr. George Wald of Harvard:

“When it comes to the origin of life, we have only two possibilities as to how life arose. One is spontaneous generation arising to evolution; the other is a supernatural creative act of God. There is no third possibility…Spontaneous generation was scientifically disproved one hundred years ago by Louis Pasteur, Spellanzani, Reddy and others. That leads us scientifically to only one possible conclusion — that life arose as a supernatural creative act of God…I will not accept that philosophically because I do not want to believe in God. Therefore, I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible, spontaneous generationarising to evolution.” – Scientific American, August, 1954.

Adrian Rogers said the lack of an  answer for the  origin of life was a big reason Rogers rejected evolution.  Rogers noted, “Evolution offers no answers to the origin of life. It simply pushes the question farther back in time, back to some primordial event in space or an act of spontaneous generation in which life simply sprang from nothing.”

I actually had the chance to correspond with George Wald twice before his death. He wrote me two letters and in the first one he suggested that he was just using hyperbole when he made the assertion that is quoted by Dr. Rogers. He also suggested the religion of Buddhism although he said he was not a Buddhist himself, but he thought that would be closest to the truth which he thought was atheism. This does seem to contradict what Flew says of Wald’s views in the 1990’s. Flew contended concerning Wald:

In later years, he concluded that a preexisting mind, which he posits as the matrix of physical reality, composed a physical universe that breeds life: ‘the stuff of which physical reality is constructed is mind-stuff. It is mind that has composed a physical universe that breeds life…’ 

In my letters to both Wald and Flew in the 1990’s I demonstrated that  there is evidence that points to the fact that the Bible is historically true as Schaeffer pointed out in episode 5 of WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? There is a basis then for faith in Christ alone for our eternal hope. This link shows how to do that.

Fortunately some modern philosophers and scientists are starting to wake up and realize that materialistic chance evolution was not responsible for the origin of the universe but it was started by a Divine Mind. In fact, Antony Flew who was probably the most famous atheist of the 20th century took time to read several letters I sent him the 1990’s which included much material from Francis Schaeffer and he listened to several cassette tapes I sent him from Adrian Rogers and then in 2004 he reversed his view that this world came about through evolution and he left his atheism behind and  because a theist.  I still have several of the letters that Dr. Flew wrote back to me and I will be posting them later on my blog at some point. One of the letters I got back in 1994 said specifically that he enjoyed listening to whole cassette tape.

 Notice the quote in Antony Flew’s book: The Nobel Prize-winning physiologist George Wald once famously argued that “We choose to believe the impossible: that life arose spontaneously by chance”

A heavier read but an excellent look at the philosophical implications of modern scientific discoveries is “There is a God: How the world’s most notorious atheist changed his mind” by Anthony Flew with Roy Abraham Varghese (Harper One, 2007). This book is available for about €10 on http://www.amazon.co.uk.

Here is a taster of what the book contains:

Chapter 4 “A pilgrimage of reason”

 

“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” (Anthony Flew).

One could say that this vision was prompted by a response to three big questions –

(a)How did the laws of nature come to be?

(b)How did life as a phenomenon originate from non-life?

(c)How did the universe, by which we mean all that is physical, come into existence?

Chapter 5 “Who wrote the laws of nature?”

The important point 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.

We can put the issue this way:

(a)Where do the laws of physics come from?

(b)Why is it that we have these laws instead of some other set?

(c)How is it that we have a set of laws that drives featureless gases to life, consciousness and intelligence?

Chapter 6 “Did the universe know that we were coming?”

“The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense knew we were coming” (Physicist Freeman Dyson).

In other words, the laws of nature seem to have been crafted and fine-tuned so as to move the universe towards the emergence and sustenance of life.

Chapter 7 “How did life go live?”

How can a universe of mindless matter produce beings with intrinsic ends, self-replication capabilities, and “coded chemistry”?

How can self-reproduction arise by natural means from a material base?

Why does living matter possess an inherent goal or end-centred organisation that is nowhere present in the matter that preceded it?

“Life is more than just complex chemical reactions. The cell is also an information-storing, processing and replicating system. We need to explain the origin of this information, and the way in which the information processing machinery came to exist”. (Paul Davies, physicist and cosmologist)

The Nobel Prize-winning physiologist George Wald once famously argued that “We choose to believe the impossible: that life arose spontaneously by chance”

Chapter 8 “Did something come from nothing?”

Here, Flew notes how modern cosmology has placed the need to explain the universe centre stage again.

“No matter how you describe the universe – as having existed for ever, 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” (John Leslie).

In other words, “the universe is something that begs an explanation” (Richard Swinburne).

Chapter 9 “Finding space for God”

Flew formerly argued that the very concept of God is incoherent because it presupposes the idea of an incorporeal omnipresent spirit. In this (unsatisfactory) section, he discusses his new thinking on the subject.

 

___________

_________

Making Sense of Faith and Science

Uploaded on May 16, 2008

Antony Flew – World’s Most Famous Atheist Accepts Existence of God

Uploaded on Nov 28, 2008

Intelligent Design: Is It Viable? William Lane Craig vs. Francisco J. Ayala

Published on Nov 10, 2013

 

Related posts: