I’ve just come across a lengthy post on the Internet Infidels DB by Richard Carrier, which goes into considerable detail about the Antony Flew debate.
Key quotes:
“It bothers me that Flew has not […] even bothered looking for critiques of Schroeder, much less considered them. He told me so–just as he told me he has not kept up on current science, even of biogenesis, much less cosmology.”
“[Flew] thinks that life started with a DNA molecule (that is false–no biologist today believes that), and that the smallest possible replicating DNA molecule is so complex that it could not have arisen by chance (that is also false–or at most remains unproven–even assuming life did begin with a DNA molecule).”
“It is still unclear to me why or how Flew’s imagined Deity thus accomplished the origin of life if it was (essentially) physically impossible, without supernaturally interfering in the natural order of the universe (since Flew insists he does not believe his Deity does that). This is one of several contradictions in Flew’s overall position that bothers me. Flew’s conclusion makes more sense as resulting from a fine-tuning argument, not an impossibility-of-life argument, yet he tells me the fine-tuning argument isn’t what impressed him. I can’t make sense of this.”.
Carrier’s other comments are extremely interesting, and will have me re-reading some of Flew’s earlier work. (As for probabilities and protobiont sequences, see Ian Musgrave’s excellent tutorial.)
[UPDATE] Richard Carrier has now updated his piece on SecWeb about Flew’s “conversion”.
“Antony Flew has retracted one of his recent assertions. In a letter to me dated 29 December 2004, Flew concedes: ‘I now realize that I have made a fool of myself by believing that there were no presentable theories of the development of inanimate matter up to the first living creature capable of reproduction.’“
Flew inaccurately blames Dawkins for this. According to Carrier, he goes further: “Flew also makes another admission: ‘I have been mistaught by Gerald Schroeder.’ He says ‘it was precisely because he appeared to be so well qualified as a physicist (which I am not) that I was never inclined to question what he said about physics.’“
Sad, but c’est la vie. If Flew does indeed feel that “I am just too old at the age of nearly 82 to initiate and conduct a major and super radical controversy about the conceivability of the putative concept of God as a spirit,“, perhaps it would have been wiser if he had resisted the temptation to publicise his recent series of statements and retractions.
In the circumstances, Carrier’s conclusion, though harsh, seems to be justified: “Flew has thus abandoned the very standards of inquiry that led the rest of us to atheism. It would seem the only way to God is to jettison responsible scholarship. […] Theists would do well to drop the example of Flew. Because his willfully sloppy scholarship can only help to make belief look ridiculous.”