Many of us are suspicious about the sincerity of numerous last-minute conversions. In the old days, Catholic priests, dealing with a loved one that was unrepentantly not catholic, would lean in on the deathbed, and claim to have heard a last minute “conversion.”

Or indeed – more relevant to Flew – lots of people, faced with death, hypocritically convert to religion at the last minute, to hedge their bets.

That way they get the best of both worlds, so to speak: they can sin all their lives … and yet get “saved” in the end.

And who knows, they may be desperate enough, that its not even hypocritical; they “reall”y convince themselves.

Though to be sure, … God will examine them deeply for any potential hypocrisy.

“No, Carrier holds irrational views and rejects sound scholarship whenever it disagrees with him.”

We probably all hold (some) irrational views. What’s your evidence that Carrier “rejects sound scholarship whenever it disagrees with him”? That’s a fairly strong claim which can’t be substantiated by citing merely a few instances.

Peace.

No, Carrier holds irrational views and rejects sound scholarship whenever it disagrees with him.

The view of Oppenheimer is that Flew is a doddering old man who has been deceived into deism in his senility.

I haven’t found any of Flew’s atheistic arguments particularly strong, so I’m not surprised that he recanted them at this late stage. His mental state is immaterial to that.

You dismiss the article because it describes Carrier as “brilliant” although Carrier happens to hold some eccentric views. (Is this a good reason to dismiss a disagreeable article?)

Here’s the full quote:

“Richard Carrier, a 37-year-old doctoral student in ancient history at Columbia, is a type recognizable to anyone who has spent much time at a chess tournament or a sci-fi convention or a skeptics’ conference. He is young, male and brilliant, with an obsessive streak both admirable and a little debilitating. In the time that he hasn’t finished his dissertation, Carrier has self-published a 444-page magnum opus called “Sense and Goodness Without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism.” (According to its Amazon.com description, the book offers “a complete worldview . . . covering every subject from knowledge to art, from metaphysics to morality, from theology to politics.”)”

Considering that Mark Oppenheimer regards Richard Carrier as “brilliant” I can’t help thinking that this is little more than an atheistic beat up job. Carrier’s main objection to God is that the Almighty doesn’t make the world into a Carebear paradise. His techniques of argument involve boring people into submission, and people on this site have detailed how he’s mistranslated the Greek in the NT in order to support a position that he already holds.

He’s also given lip service to the Christ myth, a view no competent historian holds.

Bringing in purveyors of drivel like Richard Dawkins (someone who thinks that “if God created everything then who created God?” is a unique and rational argument) shows Mark’s bias more than anything I could say. His reference to the “pseudoscience” of religious belief indicates that he has an inability to just report the facts.

Whilst Flew is not a Christian, although I hope he does follow the evidence to the cross, he is at least a rational (as opposed to rationalizing) human being. Oppenheimer, Dawkins, Carrier et al are not.

The NY Times Magazine ran an illuminating piece on this called “The Turning of an Atheist”:

http://tinyurl.com/5ufm5q

(It’ll make you think twice about using Flew as your poster boy.)