Paradigm change

Paradigm changes, that is to say fundamental changes in theories that have long been accepted without question, have always been difficult.

They are like births with unexpected complications. However, that is how the human knowledge of the reality that surrounds us and has shaped us. Kepler, Copernicus and Galileo are important examples of such cultural mutations.

Nowadays, there is also abundant evidence of these complicated births. One of the most recent of these is perhaps the case of the British philosopher Anthony Flew.

In fact, when he announced publicly that he had become a deist, the belief according to which there is a wise Creator of everything that exists, and that what had led him to that belief was not any religious conviction, but, especially, all the complexity that every living organism exhibits, a whole avalanche of criticism and disqualification fell on him.

How could a life-long atheist abandon evolutionary materialism and embrace the existence of God? Some even said that he had gone mad, or that in his senility he had been brainwashed by some fundamentalist cult. Everything but accept the fact that it might have been the evidence of the facts themselves that had caused him to change his mind.

The heartlessly scathing criticism that Flew was subjected to shows once again that naturalism (the Philosophy which maintains that Nature made itself) can blind even the most brilliant minds to the many features of our universe which clearly indicate the existence of a creative intelligence behind it all, in spite of the fact that this intelligent design is actually the most reasonable explanation of the facts as they are.