EVOLVING OPINION
“A British
philosophy professor who has been a leading champion of atheism for more than a
half-century has changed his mind. He
now believes in God – more or less - based on scientific evidence...
At age 81, after
decades of insisting such a belief is a mistake, Antony Flew has concluded that
some sort of intelligence or first cause must have created the universe. A super intelligence is the only good
explanation for the origin of life and the complexity of nature, Flew said in a
telephone interview from
‘I’m thinking of
a God very different from the **** God of the Christian and far and away from
the God of Islam, because both are depicted as omnipotent Oriental despots,
cosmic Saddam Husseins,’ he said, ‘It could be a
person in the sense of a being that has intelligence and a purpose, I suppose.’
‘…biologists
investigation of DNA have shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the
arrangements which are needed to produce life, that intelligence must have been
involved,’ Flew says in the new video, Has Science Discovered
God?
‘
…if his belief upsets people, well, ‘that’s too bad,’ Flew said. ‘My
whole life has been guided by the principle of Plato’s Socrates; ‘Follow the evidence,
wherever it leads.’”
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
**** (Editor’s note: If
Professor Flew honestly came to the Bible with an open mind, he would see that
it does not teach the doctrine of a despotic God who torments in a false
doctrine of Hell-fire. See following
article.)
THE TRUTH ABOUT HELL
Numerous people have
come to believe that there is a place of fire and brimstone where millions of
souls go at their death, to be tormented for all eternity, making our Creator a
most unjust despot! Is this a Scriptural truth? Has anyone returned from the
grave to report what he has seen or heard from the grave? No one has. So why do
some speak so surely about a place no one
has ever seen in order to confirm its existence?
In a careful
search of the Bible on this subject, we learn that in the Old Testament, the Hebrew word for
hell is sheol, and that in the New Testament,
the Greek word for hell is hades.
Scholars tell us both words mean exactly the same thing. Let us examine what
the Old Testament says about sheol. We find this word
occurs 65 times; in the KJV, it is rendered grave
31 times, hell 31 times, and pit 3 times. In the New Testament the Greek word hades has been
translated hell 10 times and grave once. This difference in
translation has caused a great deal of confusion on the subject.
From the
foregoing, it is clear that the Hebrew sheol and the Greek hades
mean the grave, the place where all
the dead are placed. No one is alive in the grave. The Bible calls the place of
death "the land of forgetfulness,"
of "silence" where all
sleep, for "there is no work, no
device, no knowledge, no wisdom” in the grave. "There the wicked cease
from troubling; there the weary are at rest, there the prisoners hear not the
voice of the oppressor. The small and the great are there and the servant is
free from his master." "The living know that they shall die but the dead know not anything;
their love, hate and envy, even their
very thoughts, have perished, therefore, we are admonished, “Whatever your hand
finds to do, do it with your might; for there is no work, nor device, nor
knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave where you go." (Job 3:17-19; Eccl. 9:5-10)
From the above Scriptures,
it is evident that the doctrine of the immortality of the soul is not a
biblical one; that all the dead are truly dead; the only hope for them being
the promised Resurrection. In fact, the Apostle Paul declared that if there
were to be no resurrection, all the dead would have perished (1 Cor.
All the dead are
in the Lord’s memory and in His own due time, hell (the grave and death) itself
will be abolished, destroyed forever as we read in Hosea 1:14: "Oh death, I will be thy plague; oh
grave, I will be thy destruction." Again, we read in Revelation 20:14
of a beautiful promise: “And death and
hell (the grave) were cast into the lake of fire” to be destroyed forever. Let no one have any
fear of a burning hell of eternal torment for there is no
such awful place. God is not a cruel, merciless, unjust God. John tells us,
“God is LOVE!” “His anger is but for a moment, but His mercy endures forever,”
says David. May we love, revere, serve
and obey Him with all our heart, and at the Resurrection receive a heavenly reward.
Gaetano
Boccaccio