Letter in Liberty, March 2005, pp. 5-6

Dubious Deism

Jane Shaw writes (Reflections, February [p. 13]) that we should pay attention to the need for a creator God because noted atheist Antony Flew has converted to Deism. Flew, a philosopher in his 80s with no special knowledge or training in science, cites physicist Gerard Schroeder's The Hidden Face of God as a reason why he has adopted belief in the God of Thomas Jefferson and Aristotle. For a cogent critical view of Schroeder's work, I would recommend turning to physicist Mark Perakh's book Unintelligent Design rather than to Flew, who can't seem to decide what he currently believes or what his reasons are for it--see Richard Carrier's "Antony Flew Considers God... Sort of" on The Secular Web at https://www.secweb.org/asset.asp?AssetID=369.

Shaw also writes of Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller, a Catholic evolutionist, stating that "Darwinist Kenneth Miller calls intelligent design the 'best rhetorical weapon against evolution' and thus refuses to take it seriously." Actually, Miller took Michael Behe's irreducible complexity argument for intelligent design seriously enough to refute it in detail in his book Finding Darwin's God.

[This paragraph deleted from the published letter: I recommend that Shaw read Perakh and Miller's books, along with Barbara Forrest and Paul Gross's Creationism's Trojan Horse, Niall Shanks' God, the Devil, and Darwin, and Matt Young and Taner Edis' Why Intelligent Design Fails if she wants to know the real reasons why intelligent design--at least as advocated by Michael Behe, William Dembski, Gerald Schroeder, Phillip Johnson, Jonathan Wells, and the rest of the Discovery Institute crowd--should not be taken seriously.]

Jim Lippard
Phoenix, Ariz.