Is there a God?

Professor Antony Flew, an emeritus philosophy professor at Reading University, who for the past 50 years had been among the intellectual world's leading proponents of atheism, has done a volte face.

He now says, considering "... the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce life, that intelligence must have been involved."

He goes further, and now believes Darwin's theory of evolution does not explain the origin and development of life.

"I have been persuaded that it is simply out of the question that the first living matter evolved out of dead matter and then developed into an extraordinarily complicated creature."

He finds the conventional scientific explanation that life arose out of a complex chemical brew or primordial soup "improbable."

His British colleague, Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees, recently caused a major uproar when he said in a Channel 4 television documentary that the universe might be no more than a computer simulation, with humans simply bits of software.

Sir Martin said, "This raises the philosophical question: could we ourselves be in such a simulation and could what we think is the universe be some sort of vault of heaven rather than the real thing?"

What, I ask, is going on over there in England?

Do the British know something we don't?