The wife of my youth pastor and friend happened to work at Biola, and she happened upon me in line and asked how I was doing. I was almost in tears. Without skipping a beat she showed me how to redo my paperwork so that I got more money from Financial Aid based on the fact that I would be living on campus—something I had overlooked. It covered my expenses to the penny.

The next year I was well over $1,000 short. A friend’s dad found out about it through the grapevine and cut me a check for the exact amount.

The semester after that I couldn’t afford to buy all my books. The ones I needed showed up in a bag at the door to my dorm room.

The stories go on. I was awarded an unexpected scholarship one semester that made the difference in my ability to stay or go. I got a job one semester that gave me an advance that kept me in school, and other things happened too.

This isn’t an apologetic or evangelical post. This is a post of Thanksgiving. I believe in God and I believe He intervenes and I believe He provided for me to go to college and find my wife, and best friend and business partner there. I believe He taught me life lessons at Biola and, eventually, gave me a heart for the mind.

And I am thankful to Him for it.

Thanksgiving |

He went on to study at

the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and was a Royal Air Force intelligence officer. After a period with the Inter-Services Topographical Department in Oxford, he was posted to Bletchley Park in June 1944.

After the war, Flew achieved a first class degree in Literae Humaniores at St John’s College, Oxford. Flew was a graduate student of Gilbert Ryle, prominent in ordinary language philosophy. Both Flew and Ryle were among many Oxford philosophers fiercely criticised in Ernest Gellner’s book Words and Things (1959). A 1954 debate with Michael Dummett over backward causation was an early highlight in Flew’s career.

For a year, Flew was a lecturer in philosophy at Christ Church, Oxford. Afterwards, he was a lecturer for four years at the University of Aberdeen, and a professor of philosophy at the University of Keele for twenty years. Between 1973 and 1983 he was professor of philosophy at the University of Reading. At this time, he developed one of his most famous arguments, the No true Scotsman fallacy in his 1975 book, Thinking About Thinking. Upon his retirement, Flew took up a half-time post for a few years at York University, Toronto.

…While an undergraduate, Flew attended the weekly meetings of C. S. Lewis’s Socratic Club fairly regularly. Although he found Lewis to be “an eminently reasonable man” and “by far the most powerful of Christian apologists for the sixty or more years following his founding of that club,” he was not persuaded by Lewis’s argument from morality as found in Mere Christianity. Flew also criticised several of the other philosophical proofs for God’s existence. He concluded that the ontological argument in particular failed because it is based on the premise that the concept of Being can be derived from the concept of Goodness…

During the time of his involvement in the Socratic Club, Flew also wrote the article “Theology and Falsification,” which argued that claims about God were meaningless where they could not be tested for truth or falsehood. Though initially published in an undergraduate journal, the article came to be widely reprinted and discussed. Later, in God and Philosophy (1966) and The Presumption of Atheism (1976, reprinted 1984), Flew argued that one should presuppose atheism until evidence of a God surfaces. Flew was also critical of the idea of life after death and the free will defence to the problem of evil.

-Wikipedia

He was an Honorary Associate of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists, and was celebrated for his contributions to political philosophy as well, being awarded the Schlarbaum Prize by the Ludwig von Mises Institute for his “outstanding lifetime achievement in the cause of liberty”.

And then, in January of 2004, Dr. Flew called his friend Gary Habermas on the telephone to inform him that his mind had been changed and that he had become a theist. He said in a later phone call that he felt he had simply been “forced to go where the evidence leads”. You can read the transcript of a subsequent interview between Habermas and Flew here.

In 2007 Flew went on to write a book, “There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind”, Habermas’ review of which can be read here. N. T. Wright himself contributes an appendix to the book arguing for the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus.

In an interesting twist of fate, Flew’s lifetime of arguing for atheism had been one of the catalysts of the renaissance in theistic philosophy that started in the 60’s and 70’s, major players in which, especially Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne, were in turn instrumental in Flew’s own conversion to theism. Flew taunts the “New Atheists” for falling short of the intellectual greatness and philosophical rigor of the atheists of yore.

There has been a lot of outcry about Antony Flew’s conversion to theism, even from such prominent atheists as Richard Dawkins, to which Flew personally responds in his review of “The God Delusion”.

In May of 2006, Flew was awarded the second “Phillip E. Johnson Award for Liberty and Truth” from Biola University. The award was given to Flew “for his lifelong commitment to free and open inquiry and to standing fast against intolerant assaults on freedom of thought and expression”.

What finally convinced one of the 20th century’s leading atheist philosophers that God exists? Scientifically rigorous arguments from the empirically detectable presence of design in the world, rendered all the more compelling by recent discoveries in biology.

Antony Flew passed away in April of 2010.

Flew |

Also, it was Thanksgiving week and my sister was in from Seattle and our friends Chris and Abby were in from Portland. We had a wonderful time! Laura and Abby played with Soren a lot, Chris and Abby brought us Stumptown Coffee, I got some good quality time in with Laura, some great philosophical conversations in with Chris, and we even got to read through a one-act play that Abby is writing (it’s pretty funny).

Now it’s back to work!

Catching Up |

(This post fulfills my duty to post on the 21st.)

Missing Posts |

By “constants” I just mean phenomena that are universal in nature and unchanging in value. For example the speed of light in a vacuum, the Gravitational Constant, the elementary charge, etc. We can include the rate of entropy in this category if you want (and if you think it is stable).

By “quantities” I mostly just mean the amount of matter and dark matter that exist, and the amount of energy that exists (and the amount of dark energy, if any exists). Theoretically those quantities should remain constant, but if they have changed (or can), then just take their initial values. We can include the amount of entropy in this category if you want, or rather the initial amount of entropy (or zero if there was none).

By “laws” I mean things like gravity (or, more accurately, Relativity), electromagnetism, etc. Keep in mind that most of the laws listed in that link are laws describing the behavior of high-order phenomena like buoyancy and thermodynamics and others that operate on matter at a high level of description like planetary bodies, chemicals, etc. Theoretically all of these logically supervene on lower-level phenomena like the nuclear forces, that operate on matter at a low level of description like subatomic particles. Ultimately it’s probably all governed by just a few fundamental interactions (and maybe even just one), operating on just a few fundamental particles like quarks or maybe strings.

So get this though. It turns out that the values of these constants, quantities, and laws could have been anything. There is nothing about the gravitational constant that makes it logically necessary. It could have been a totally different value altogether. It seems somewhat arbitrary that it is dialed to the value that it is. There is no explanation for it. And the same goes for the amounts of the stuff in the universe, and the laws governing it all—why is energy equal to mass times the square of the speed of light? It could have been the cube of the speed of light, and the speed of light could have been different, or the phenomena could have behaved according to different rules relative to different phenomena altogether.

The possibilities are, logically, infinite.

But it gets weirder. If the values of any one of these things had been different by even a hair’s breadth, the universe wouldn’t have been life-permitting. Planetary bodies couldn’t have formed, space couldn’t have expanded or would have expanded too quickly, etc. The logically possible scenarios according to which the universe could have existed such that it could not have been able to sustain life are infinite, while the life-permitting scenarios are extremely few.

To conceptualize the situation, I like to picture a number line for each value that requires fine-tuning—so there is a number line for the Gravitational Constant, and the value for the GC could have been anything on that infinitely long line, but it needs to fall within an infinitesimal range to play its role in a life-permitting universe, the boundaries for which are marked in red on the line. Then I picture another number line below that with Planck’s Constant, with the markings, and so on. There are a quite a few of these number lines (some lists are longer than others), but even if there were only one, the possibility is equivalent to one in infinity.

Then I like to imagine a lottery, the results from which determine the values for each thing. The lottery is run once to determine each value, and there are an infinite number of possible outcomes each time. This helps me wrap my mind around how improbable a life-permitting universe is. And it doesn’t even touch on the fact that a life-permitting universe alone doesn’t necessarily yield life. You have to somehow get life into it (a topic for another post), and then you need a planet within the universe that can support the life (the specific requirements of which I’ll leave for another post as well).

And yet, here we are.

It’s obvious to me that cosmic fine-tuning cannot be due to necessity, and I explained why earlier. But by now it should be almost as obvious that it is not likely to have occurred by chance either. Like literally, mathematically, it is unlikely. So the question you have to ask yourself at this point is:

How plausible is it that this fine-tuning is due to Design?

Necessity, Chance, or Design? |