Antony Flew

I Believe, yeah, where the guy who said-

Anthony Flew, Ross did that.

Yeah, he's just like, no, it's not a great leap of faith.

It's acknowledging what everyb- y- y- the, the evidence which is right in front of you.

And, um, a lot of people, um, have, uh ...

Well, p- uh, even, like, famous atheists, I think Anthony Flew was a very famous atheist who later in his life, uh, came to at least believe that there was a God based on, um, like DNA, based on look- looking at the, the, looking at inside the cell and saying, "There look, there seems to be [laughs] a design going on here, and if there's a designer, if there's intelligence, then there's gotta be something intelligent behind it." And so, um, I, I found, I've always found that stuff to be super encouraging as a believer, you know.

Um, I went through my own season of looking through that.

But y- yeah, you look at the, the mosquito and you think, you know-

Now, at the end of this message, I'm gonna be giving you some contact info, so you stand by.

An atheist by the name of Antony Flew who tells this parable to illustrate the difficulty of defending the Christian faith.

He says that once upon a time there were two explorers that were walking through a forest when they came to a clearing in the woods.

And they noticed that there were some flowers as well as some weeds in the woods and the clearing, and one of them said, "I believe that there's a gardener that tends this plot." The skeptic said, "I don't agree.

As time went by, the electric fence was never tripped, and the bloodhounds never cried out.

But the believer kept insisting, "I believe that there is a gardener.

It's just that he is an elusive, invisible, intangible gardener." But said the skeptic, "How do you distinguish a, an elusive, intangible, invisible gardener from no gardener at all?" Now, says Antony Flew, that is the dilemma of the Christian faith.

We say that there is a gardener that attends this plot with its weeds and with its flowers, with its mixed results, with its good and its evil, but nobody ever sees him.

His name was Saul of Tarsus, who was a Pharisee, the strictest of the kind.

Now, Anthony Flew, one of the foremost philosophical atheists in the world, we had him on for a debate with Gary Habermas.

And I asked him the question, I said, What do you do with 1 Corinthians 15, where Paul, this very strict Pharisee, saw Jesus? And right away he says, yeah, he was a scholar.

And the fact is, I like the way that he writes.

The snark was a bogeum, you see, softly like the baker, my faith just softly and silently vanished away.

I really thought... that by the time I'm 70, I'll be back onside like Anthony Flew was.

You know, you get to 70, you can't afford to make mistakes.

So I thought I'd be back onside.