NEW YORK Dec 9, 2004 — 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, and says so on a video released Thursday.

At age 81, after decades of insisting 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 England.

Flew said he's best labeled a deist like Thomas Jefferson, whose God was not actively involved in people's lives.

"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."

Flew first made his mark with the 1950 article "Theology and Falsification," based on a paper for the Socratic Club, a weekly Oxford religious forum led by writer and Christian thinker C.S. Lewis.

Over the years, Flew proclaimed the lack of evidence for God while teaching at Oxford, Aberdeen, Keele, and Reading universities in Britain, in visits to numerous U.S. and Canadian campuses and in books, articles, lectures and debates.

There was no one moment of change but a gradual conclusion over recent months for Flew, a spry man who still does not believe in an afterlife.

Yet biologists' investigation of DNA "has 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?"

The video draws from a New York discussion last May organized by author Roy Abraham Varghese's Institute for Metascientific Research in Garland, Texas. Participants were Flew; Varghese; Israeli physicist Gerald Schroeder, an Orthodox Jew; and Roman Catholic philosopher John Haldane of Scotland's University of St. Andrews.

The first hint of Flew's turn was a letter to the August-September issue of Britain's Philosophy Now magazine. "It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism," he wrote.

The letter commended arguments in Schroeder's "The Hidden Face of God" and "The Wonder of the World" by Varghese, an Eastern Rite Catholic layman.

This week, Flew finished writing the first formal account of his new outlook for the introduction to a new edition of his "God and Philosophy," scheduled for release next year by Prometheus Press.

Prometheus specializes in skeptical thought, but 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."

Last week, Richard Carrier, a writer and Columbia University graduate student, posted new material based on correspondence with Flew on the atheistic www.infidels.org Web page. Carrier assured atheists that Flew accepts only a "minimal God" and believes in no afterlife.

Flew's "name and stature are big. Whenever you hear people talk about atheists, Flew always comes up," Carrier said. Still, when it comes to Flew's reversal, "apart from curiosity, I don't think it's like a big deal."

Flew told The Associated Press his current ideas have some similarity with American "intelligent design" theorists, who see evidence for a guiding force in the construction of the universe. He accepts Darwinian evolution but doubts it can explain the ultimate origins of life.

A Methodist minister's son, Flew became an atheist at 15.

Early in his career, he argued that no conceivable events could constitute proof against God for believers, so skeptics were right to wonder whether the concept of God meant anything at all.

Another landmark was his 1984 "The Presumption of Atheism," playing off the presumption of innocence in criminal law. Flew said the debate over God must begin by presuming atheism, putting the burden of proof on those arguing that God exists.

Emmanuel Ofusu Yeboah. (ABC NEWS)

Emmanuel Ofusu Yeboah has a career as a cyclist despite having an artificial leg. (ABC NEWS)

Aug. 6, 2005 — From a distance, he looks like any other cyclist — but Emmanuel Ofusu Yeboah races with one leg he was born with, and one made for him.

Like all disabled athletes, Yeboah has come a long way. But his story — the subject of a new documentary called "Emmanuel's Gift" — goes beyond sports: His remarkable journey has changed a country.

Yeboah was born 28 years ago with a severely deformed left leg in the African nation of Ghana. There, where an estimated 10 percent of the people are disabled from birth defects or diseases, disabled babies often are despised, seen as omens of bad fortune, and often killed or left by their parents in the wilderness to die.

"My mother, she was crying every day," Yeboah said of the shock of his disability. "Because those days, when you're born deformed child or disabled person, they think it's a curse or something like that."

Yeboah's father soon abandoned the family.

Mother's Will

But his mother refused to accept Ghana's harsh judgment on her son. She taught him to see past his limitations and enrolled him in school, almost unheard of for a disabled child.

"My mother carried me to school" two miles from home, he said, "and bring me back to home, always."

In time, Yeboah learned to play soccer on his crutches. He learned a trade, shoe making, so he would not have to beg on the streets as so many disabled people do in Ghana. Every step of the way, his mother was there — until Christmas Eve 1997, when she died.

But her legacy to her son was profound.

"There's something always I believe myself," Yeboah said, "that I can do it, I can do it."

Alone in the world now, Yeboah set out to achieve the seemingly impossible, to change his country's prejudice against the disabled.

Cross-Country Demonstration

How? With a bicycle: Yeboah decided he would ride a bike across his entire country, nearly 400 miles, to prove what the disabled can do. So in 2002, for 10 days, he rode, pedaling on one leg, right across Ghana.

The country was astonished and inspired.

Khalil al-Dulaimi was appointed as the sole legal counsel

The family of ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein says it has sacked all members of his foreign defence team and will deal only with his Iraqi lawyer.

"From today, none of the lawyers, except Iraqi lawyer Khalil Dulaimi, will have the right to act on behalf of Saddam," read a statement from the family, signed by Saddam's daughter Raghad.

"They used their position to further interests not linked to the case."

Saddam, who was ousted in April 2003 after the US-led invasion of Iraq and captured the following December, is in US custody near Baghdad, awaiting trial on charges of crimes against humanity.

No trial date has been set.

Saddam criticised

A person close to the family with intimate knowledge of the case, who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to hurt relations with the family, said Raghad and other family members were upset by statements issued by various lawyers and wanted only one legal voice to speak on Saddam's behalf.

Saddam's daughter, Raghad,  issued the family statement

The family did not say what statements had upset its members.

However Saddam's former chief lawyer, Jordanian Ziad al-Khasawneh, who resigned on 7 July, claimed members of the legal team, especially Americans such as former US attorney general Ramsey Clark, were critical of his statements rebuking the American occupation of Iraq and declaring the resistance as "legitimate".

He claimed Clark advised Raghad and other members of Saddam's family that such statements hurt Saddam's defence.

The source added that the many subsequent powers of attorney issued by Saddam's legal team to other Arab and international lawyers also confused the family.
The source dismissed speculation that the legal team may in the future be made up mainly of foreign lawyers.

When he resigned, al-Khasawneh accused the family of trying to give foreign lawyers, mainly Americans, total control of the defence team, and sideline the Arabs.

Huge team
Monday's statement left the door open for future appointments.