There is nothing that supports in a scientific way the existence of a Supreme Being. I wish there were.
One of the most prominent atheists of the past century apparently disagrees. Anthony Flew - though he hasn't "converted", he has changed his mind about the existence of God and claims he did so on the basis of the weight of the evidence.
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Flew's U-turn on God lies in a far more significant reality. It is about evidence. "Since the beginning of my philosophical life I have followed the policy of Plato's Socrates: We must follow the argument wherever it leads." I asked him if it was tough to change his mind. "No. It was not hard. I've always engaged in inquiry. If I am shown to have been wrong, well, okay, so I was wrong."
Actually, Flew has been rethinking the arguments for a Designer for several years. When I saw him in London in the spring of 2003, he told me he was still an atheist but was impressed by Intelligent Design theorists. By early 2004 he had made the move to deism. Surprisingly, he gives first place to Aristotle in having the most significant impact on him. "I was not a specialist on Aristotle, so I was reading parts of his philosophy for the first time." He was aided in this by The Rediscovery of Wisdom, a work on Aristotle by David Conway, one of Flew's former students.
Flew also cites the influence of Gerald Schroeder, an Israeli physicist, and Roy Abraham Varghese, author of The Wonder of the World and an Eastern Rite Catholic. Flew appeared with both scientists at a New York symposium last May where he acknowledged his changed conviction about the necessity for a Creator. In the broader picture, both Varghese and Schroeder, author of The Hidden Face of God, argue from the fine-tuning of the universe that it is impossible to explain the origin of life without God. This forms the substance of what led Flew to move away from Darwinian naturalism.
I studied with Flew in 1985 in Toronto, and he told me then about the positive impression he had of emerging evangelical scholarship. That year Varghese had arranged a Dallas conference on God, and included atheists, like Flew, and theists. That same year Flew had his first debate with historian Gary Habermas of Liberty University on the resurrection of Jesus, recorded in Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? They have debated twice since on the same topic.
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