People usually get amazed on someone who used to be an atheist and then become a Christian.

In the end, the debate can’t be won or lost based on the thoughts of one person, so I’m intrigued that many are so quick to try to discredit the book and Flew’s change of heart. I certainly won’t be abandoning my faith if a high profile believer ‘switches sides’ and I wouldn’t attempt to discredit their new opinions.

I appreciate the respectful manner in which Robert raises the points he does and I’m hoping that the discussion can remain respectful whichever point of view people hold.

Their first attempt was to leave erroneous messages on people’s blogs that talked about this but directed people to something Flew wrote several years before he started accepting God’s existence as plausible. How that was supposed to refute a later change in his views I still haven’t figured out, but when I started pointing out the date differences they left my blog alone. So now they’re just acting as if there’s no way he could have written the book or held any views remotely like what the book says, and yet there’s no evidence given for such claims. It’s a serious charge that they’re issuing, and there’s simply no evidence for it. It’s wishful thinking by some people who can’t allow that someone might go from atheism to theism, even though people do it all the time. Just because it’s more common to go the other way doesn’t mean smart people can’t become theists.

I never thought Flew was all that exceptional as a philosopher. He was always sort of seen as a crank, the way many of the Christian apologists are seen by professional philosophers. He also still has very serious reservations about a good God creating anything like the world we’ve got now because of the problem of evil. But he does now think the fine-tuning design argument is a pretty good argument. Why is that so hard for people to accept?