Is there finally an argument for the existence of God?

[Calilasseia]

Oh look, it’s the blatant lie that Flew became a believer in a cartoon magic man!!!

And I KNOW that this is a blatant lie, because the episode was covered at length in the past. A neat encapsulation of the relevant duplicity on the part of the mythology fanboys involved (one being a creationist by the name of Roy Varghese, whose sleazy role in this episode is a major one) can be read in detail here, which includes a link to an article on this matter in the New York Times. That article reveals that Flew was being manipulated by sleazy mythology fanboys, at a time when he was profoundly affected by a neurodegenerative disorder.

From the article, we have this:

In “There Is a God,” Flew quotes extensively from a conversation he had with Leftow, a professor at Oxford. So I asked Flew, “Do you know Brian Leftow?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t think I do.”

“Do you know the work of the philosopher John Leslie?” Leslie is discussed extensively in the book.

Flew paused, seeming unsure. “I think he’s quite good.” But he said he did not remember the specifics of Leslie’s work.

“Have you ever run across the philosopher Paul Davies?” In his book, Flew calls Paul Davies “arguably the most influential contemporary expositor of modern science.”

“I’m afraid this is a spectacle of my not remembering!”

He said this with a laugh. When we began the interview, he warned me, with merry self-deprecation, that he suffers from “nominal aphasia,” or the inability to reproduce names. But he forgot more than names. He didn’t remember talking with Paul Kurtz about his introduction to “God and Philosophy” just two years ago. There were words in his book, like “abiogenesis,” that now he could not define. When I asked about Gary Habermas, who told me that he and Flew had been friends for 22 years and exchanged “dozens” of letters, Flew said, “He and I met at a debate, I think.” I pointed out to him that in his earlier philosophical work he argued that the mere concept of God was incoherent, so if he was now a theist, he must reject huge chunks of his old philosophy. “Yes, maybe there’s a major inconsistency there,” he said, seeming grateful for my insight.

There’s more:

When I asked Varghese, he freely admitted that the book was his idea and that he had done all the original writing for it. But he made the book sound like more of a joint effort — slightly more, anyway. “There was stuff he had written before, and some of that was adapted to this,” Varghese said. “There is stuff he’d written to me in correspondence, and I organized a lot of it. And I had interviews with him. So those three elements went into it. Oh, and I exposed him to certain authors and got his views on them. We pulled it together. And then to make it more reader-friendly, HarperCollins had a more popular author go through it.”

PZ Myers offers this advice at the end:

Don’t buy the book. Remember this every time some apologist brings up the name of Flew to argue against atheism: this is an example of the depths to which desperate Christians will sink — they will lie and take advantage of the confusion of an old man to get a trophy for their wall. Remember too that Roy Varghese is a wretched con man, as are his collaborators, Schroeder and Haldane.

Once again, we see how low mythology fanboys will stoop, in order to propagandise for their sleazy and nasty little doctrine.