Antony Flew

Antony Flew (born Feb. 11, 1923, London, Eng.—died April 8, 2010, Reading) was an English philosopher who became a prominent defender of atheism but later declared himself a deist.

Flew was the son of a Methodist minister and was educated at a Christian boarding school. As a teenager, he decided that the traditional Christian concept of a good God was inconsistent with the presence of evil in the world (see problem of evil), and thus he adopted atheism. After service in the Royal Air Force during World War II, Flew studied philosophy at St. John’s College, Oxford, where his teacher was the English linguistic philosopher Gilbert Ryle. At Oxford Flew was particularly influenced by critiques of traditional arguments for the existence of God and other religious phenomena by the 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume. Flew received a master’s degree in 1949 and stayed on at Oxford to teach. He subsequently lectured at the University of Aberdeen, Keele University, and the University of Reading, retiring from the latter in 1982.

In 1950 Flew delivered a short paper, “Theology and Falsification,” before Oxford’s Socratic Club (a salon then presided over by the Christian apologist C.S. Lewis). Flew argued that theological utterances about God’s nature, presence, power, or goodness are meaningless because there is no conceivable evidence that would refute them. Flew quickly became a prominent figure in the philosophy of religion and a popular intellectual spokesperson for atheism. Books by Flew such as God and Philosophy (1966; reissued 2005) and Atheistic Humanism (1993) provided articulate expositions of atheistic principles that won a wide popular as well as academic following. Flew’s writings influenced later atheists, such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, who wrote for popular as well as academic audiences. Flew nevertheless maintained an intellectual interest in religion, reading broadly and holding discussions with philosophers and scientists who were also practicing Christians or Jews—particularly the American evangelical philosopher Gary Habermas and the U.S.-born Jewish scientist Gerald Schroeder.

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In 2004 Flew courted controversy with his announcement that, upon reviewing the scientific evidence, he had come to accept a very limited form of deism, a theological perspective based on the concept of a God who created the world but does not make his will known through revelation within it. His announcement drew praise from many Evangelicals and criticism from atheists, many of whom suggested that Flew—in his early 80s and suffering from aphasia—may have been confused or even taken advantage of by individuals with ulterior motives. Flew publicly defended his perspective with the claim that the God he had come to believe in was similar to the unmoved mover proposed by Aristotle. However, Flew never returned to Christianity and continued to deny the survival of the human mind after biological death. In 2006 he was among the signatories of a letter urging British Prime Minister Tony Blair to introduce intelligent design (ID) into science classes in state-supported schools. The 2007 book There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, cowritten by Flew and the Christian author Roy Abraham Varghese, further incensed atheist critics, particularly when it was revealed that Varghese and a ghostwriter did most of the writing.

In addition to his works on religion, Flew wrote many books on other topics in philosophy and on education, politics, and society. Among these are Hume’s Philosophy of Belief (1961) and Sociology, Equality and Education (1976).