I originally wrote about this subject much closer to the news itself -- that Flew, a llifelong defender of atheism, had converted to theism. But I wasn't happy with what I wrote then, and wanted to think a while about what I wanted to say.

Specificly, Flew is now a professing deist, meaning that he believes in a God, but rejects certain kinds of interaction with the universe as being possible, or at least being the kind of thing God would want to do.

Some deists say that miracles can't or won't occur. Flew, on the other hand, seem to have come to the conclusion, as I did, that it was improbable that life arose by chance: "It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism." In short, it shouldn't have happened, given what we now know, and that the existence of any life at all is, quite frankly, a miracle.

This isn't to say that Flew believes in other miracles, say, of Christian or Islamic flavor:

I think we need here a fundamental distinction between the God of Aristotle or Spinoza and the Gods of the Christian and the Islamic Revelations... My one and only piece of relevant evidence [for an Aristotelian God] is the apparent impossibility of providing a naturalistic theory of the origin from DNA of the first reproducing species ... [In fact] the only reason which I have for beginning to think of believing in a First Cause god is the impossibility of providing a naturalistic account of the origin of the first reproducing organisms.

And Flew still rejects the idea of "revelation", of learning stuff from God. Yet it seems that if one were to admit that even one "miracle" probably occurred, it opens the barn-door to considering a host of others, including revelation, as so many atheists recognize. And Flew seems to recognize that tension, when he says he currently "rejects" revelation, but is also "open" to further evidence for and consideration of it.

So Flew isn't now really a "believer" in the sense many would mean it, but he's still apparently enough of a believer to cause at least one atheist to elict the response I'd predicted in my first version of this article: "Prof. Flew is just getting old."

To add more context:

I myself think that the whole idea of God is meaningless. Maybe there is something eternal but if so it might as well be the universe itself. Postulating a God adds nothing to the explanation. Spontaneous order can spring from very simple influences -- as anyone who has observed the formation of crystals will know. Prof. Flew is just getting old.

So is this conclusion merely the first stage of senility for Flew, or is simply another logical step given the accumulated wisdom of many years of thought and study a stated committment to follow the truth where-ever it leads?

Yet what influenced Flew was not some hand-waving argument that all spontaneous orderings require miraculous divine intervention. Flew has surely heard of crystals. Instead, it seems that attempts to calculate the likelihood of the DNA molecule seem currently to indicate the thing shouldn't have happened.

Most skeptics I speak with misunderstand this argument. They respond: "Oh, it a big universe, and an old one. Even improbable things will happen with that many chances." Of course, what they don't understand is that the contention "it shouldn't have happened" already factors in the currently-believed size and age of the universe.

One popular form of rebuttal is to appeal to evidence yet undiscovered: Perhaps life could have started with only two pairs of nucleotides -- not the four found in DNA. Perhaps we'll discover some way this unliklihood could be reduced by breaking the problem down into parts. Perhaps we'll be able to show how DNA could have been constructed from some smaller kinds of self-replicating protein, like tetrahymena.

Perhaps.

But the problem here is that we're pitting a "perhaps" against an "is".

There's nothing wrong with hoping some day that science will prove whatever metaphysical case you're currently pulling for. But it doesn't carry the same weight as an honest look at the current evidence. Saying "In the future, perhaps the evidence will show X," is just a clever way of avoiding admitting that in the present, the evidence currently does not show X.

In that case, you are arguing from faith, not the current state of evidence, and doing so dishonestly if adopting the tone: "Hey, I'm all scientific, and you're just ignorant and faith-based." No, the opposite is true.

Further, your adversary is then justified in using the same sort of argument in response: "Perhaps no such solution will be found. Perhaps someone will show you can't reduce improbability by breaking the problem down into smaller parts." (That would seem obvious to me, but perhaps I'm wrong.)

This devolves to a mere battle of unanswerable assertions, hopes, and feelings, but for some, that's better than a frank admission that the best evidence we have now currently doesn't lend sufficient support to their preferred metaphysic, or even blatantly opposes it.

I love and enjoy science. But I'm also not freaked out if something I believe isn't yet supported by it. I take the long view and note that science -- and especially it's top lights -- are very frequently dead wrong or short-sighted.

Einstein, for example, was apoplectic at the idea that the universe might have had a beginning. And was aghast at the idea that there might be uncaused outcomes. In both cases, these ideas were in conflict with his atheistic, deterministic metaphysical outlook. In both cases, he was wrong.

So I don't try to cloak everything I believe in the mantle of science. If the history of science teaches us anything, it ought to be a realization of humility and fallibility.

More on that later.