Flew Flees Atheism

Thanks for the Memory to Ricky V at Ya Think So?

An interesting AP Article:

One of the World's Leading Atheists Now Believes in God, More or Less

The thing I found most interesting in the article was this note:

Flew first made his mark with the 1950 article "Theology and Falsification," based on a paper for the Socratic Club, a weekly Oxford religious forum led by writer and Christian thinker C.S. Lewis.

Given the conclusions he has now reached, and how he reached them, there's a serendipity, almost a symmetry, to this connection to Lewis, which will be apparent to anyone who has read Lewis' autobiographical Surprised By Joy. Lewis made a similar journey through Atheism and Agnosticism to Deism, then to Theism and eventually Chrisianity. In the end, he converted because he concluded that Christianity was the truth. As Lewis writes in the book,

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The words compelle intrare, compel them to come in, have been so abused by wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.