The proof of the pudding...

Te other night I was having a passionate debate with my son (Ben is 26 and an atheist). We were talking about morality, Christianity, life, death – you name it! The telephone call lasted just under two hours!

In our hopes and dreams, in our aims and objectives and in our motivation Ben and I are poles apart. He believes that as he only has this one life and that as one day he will close his eyes and simply cease to exist he needs to cram as much 'experience' into this one as he can. His only restraint is his belief that we should all 'do unto others as we would be done by' – beyond that simple maxim there are no limits.

Of course we are still Father and son and share that unique sense of love and companionship that can only be found in a Father/son relationship and of course I continue to pray for his conversion.

As our conversation continued he played his trump card – the atheist's trump card!

Lifestyle!

It goes something like this...

"If everything in the bible is true (as you say it is), if the people you meet every day (including your friends and family) are possibly going to spend eternity in hell, if God is all powerful and has given you the ability and authority to be effective in ministry, if you have access to the gifts of the spirit, if poverty and social injustice hurt God, if you are going to be made accountable one day for the way you have invested your life – if all of these things (and I could add many more statements) are true why isn't your life completely dominated by your faith? Why do you (most of the time) look just like anyone else on the planet? You drink coffee harvested by slaves. You wear clothes stitched together by child labourers working in oppressive and dangerous conditions. You tolerate the illegal activity of brothels, which 'employ' trafficked women, in your town. You show no real care for the environment. You watch sport sponsored by breweries and gambling companies. Your life is no different from the lives lived by so many other people because your God and his demands are not really real!"

I've never understood why atheists don't use this argument more often. If I was an atheist I wouldn't waste my time pointing out inconsistencies and contradictions in the bible I'd simply hold up the life of the western church. I'd point to Christians and highlight the obvious fact that although they say they believe their apathetic, lazy, self indulgent and worldly lives prove that they don't.

I came off the phone bruised but not beaten, recognising that the only argument that will win the day in our increasingly global society is lifestyle!

When I start to actually live my life as if God and his demands upon me are as real as the demands of my TV set or newspaper or favourite football team then maybe I'll have won the right to argue for his existence. Until then I need to spend much more time 'walking the walk'.

"Do you see, do you see
All the people sinking down
Don't you care, don't you care
Are you gonna let them drown

How can you be so numb
Not to care if they come
You close your eyes
And pretend the job's done

"Oh bless me Lord, bless me Lord"
You know it's all I ever hear
No one aches, no one hurts
No one even sheds one tear

But He cries, He weeps, He bleeds
And He cares for your needs
And you just lay back
And keep soaking it in,
Oh, can't you see it's such a sin?

Cause He brings people to your door,
And you turn them away
As you smile and say,
"God bless you, be at peace"
And all heaven just weeps
Cause Jesus came to your door
You've left him out on the streets

Open up open up
And give yourself away
You see the need, you hear the cries
So how can you delay

God's calling and you're the one
But like Jonah you run
He's told you to speak
But you keep holding it in,
Oh can't you see it's such a sin?

The world is sleeping in the dark
That the church just can't fight
Cause it's asleep in the light
How can you be so dead
When you've been so well fed
Jesus rose from the grave
And you, you can't even get out of bed

Oh, Jesus rose from the dead
Come on, get out of your bed

How can you be so numb
Not to care if they come
You close your eyes
And pretend the job's done
You close your eyes
And pretend the job's done

Don't close your eyes
Don't pretend the jobs done
Come away, come away, come away with Me my love,
Come away, from this mess, come away with Me, my love." (Keith Green)

Grace and peace, A

World's leading atheist changes his mind!

World's leading atheist changes his mind: there is a God!The photo is upside down - that's how it appears on the cover of a recent book by the most influential atheist over the past fifty years. So-called 'new' atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have stood on his shoulders in debunking the existence of God. But Professor Antony Flew's thinking has recently been turned upside down - or maybe right side up! He now believes in a Creator.

The book's title declares: THERE IS NO GOD - but the 'NO' is scribbled out and replaced by an 'A'. And the subtitle adds, How the world's most notorious atheist changed his mind.

Antony Flew engaged in debate with C.S. Lewis at the Oxford University Socratic Club in 1950, when he presented a paper called Theology and Falsification. This became the most widely reprinted philosophical publication of the last century. The Socratic principle emphasised by this club - of following the evidence wherever it may lead - became a guiding principle throughout Flew's career.It was that principle, he explains, which led him to change his mind about God after more than sixty years of atheism and a distinguished career as a philosopher. In a chapter entitled Atheism calmly considered (following John Wesley's sermon, Predestination calmly considered), Flew describes his various debates with theists over the decades. Some were attended by thousands. The professor found himself confronted in debate with increasing evidence of an intelligent designer behind the universe.

Big Bang cosmology, implying that the universe had not always existed, had pulled the rug out from under some of his key arguments. Other developments in modern science too seemed to point to a higher Intelligence."In one report it was said that of all the great discoveries of modern science, the greatest was God!"

In May 2004, Flew was invited to participate in a symposium at New York University, to debate with Israeli scientist Gerald Schroeder and Scottish philosopher John Haldane. All were greatly astonished when he announced at the start that he now accepted the existence of a God. The scheduled debate thus became a joint exploration of the implications of recent scientific discoveries. In one report of the event, it was said that of all the great discoveries of modern science, the greatest was God!Asked that evening if recent work on the origin of life indicated creative Intelligence, Flew answered: 'Yes, I now think it does... DNA (investigations have shown)... that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinarily diverse elements to work together.'

Atheists, he explained, were fond of appealling to the idea that given enough time, chance could produce anything, even life. But Schroeder impressed Flew by debunking the so-called 'monkey theorem': that enough monkeys banging away on enough keyboards could eventually produce a Shakespearean sonnet. Or, by analogy, that life could emerge by chance.Schroeder referred to an experiement conducted by the British National Arts Council, in which six monkeys were put in a cage with a computer. One month and fifty typed pages later, not a single word had been produced by the monkeys. Not even the single-letter words of 'a' or 'I'. Actually, argued Schroeder, the likelihood of getting a one-letter word was one in 27,000. What chance then was there of getting a fourteen-line Shakespearean sonnet by chance? Schroeder did the maths and came up with 10 to the 690th.

To get that in perspective, the number of particles in the whole universe-protons, electrons, and neutrons-is a mere 10 to the 80th! For Flew, this was a convincing display that the monkey theorem he and others had often used to discount any intelligent Creator was simply 'rubbish'."Look and follow the evidence wherever it may lead."Flew calls his discovery of the Divine a pilgrimage of reason, not of faith.

He claims no personal experience of God or any experience of the supernatural or miraculous. Yet he includes as an appendix in his book an article by Bishop Tom Wright arguing the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. Introducing the article - 'by far the best case for accepting Christian belief that I have ever seen' - Flew states: 'I think that the Christian religion is the one religion that most clearly deserves to be honoured and respected whether or not its claim to be a divine revelation is true... If you're wanting Omnipotence to set up a religion, this is the one to beat.'

The book's other remarkable appendix, by Flew's collaborator Roy Abraham Varghese (The Wonder of the World), is a critique of the 'New Atheism', represented by Dawkins (The God Delusion), Sam Harris (The End of Faith), Lewis Wolpert (Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast), and others. Varghese accuses these 'atheist evangelists' of ignoring the very phenomena relevant to the question of God's existence. These are: rationality, implicit in all our experience of the physical world; life, the capacity to act autonomously; consciousness, the ability to be aware; conceptual thought, the power of articulating and understanding language; and the human self, the 'centre' of consciousness and action. All the evidence we need is in our immediate experience, argues Varghese; only a deliberate refusal to 'look' is responsible for atheism of any variety.

Flew's book is a powerful challenge to all to 'look' and follow the evidence wherever it may lead.

Love and prayers

A