Antony Flew

Antony Flew
Born
Antony Garrard Newton Flew

(1923-02-11)11 February 1923
London, England
Died8 April 2010(2010-04-08) (aged 87)
Reading, Berkshire, England
Alma materSOAS, University of London
St John's College, Oxford
Era20th-century philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
SchoolAnalytic
Evidentialism
Libertarianism
Academic advisorsGilbert Ryle
Main interests
Philosophy of religion
Notable ideas
No true Scotsman
Presumption of atheism
Negative and positive atheism
Subject/motive shift

Antony Garrard Newton Flew (/fluː/; 11 February 1923 – 8 April 2010)[1] was an English philosopher. Belonging to the analytic and evidentialist schools of thought, Flew worked on the philosophy of religion. During the course of his career he taught philosophy at the universities of Oxford, Aberdeen, Keele, and Reading in the United Kingdom, and at York University in Toronto, Canada.

For much of his career Flew was an advocate of atheism, arguing that one should presuppose atheism until empirical evidence suggesting the existence of a God surfaces.[2][3][4] He also criticised the idea of life after death,[5] the free will defence to the problem of evil,[6] and the meaningfulness of the concept of God.[7] In 2003, he was one of the signatories of the Humanist Manifesto III.[8] He also developed the No true Scotsman fallacy,[9] and debated retrocausality with Michael Dummett.[10]

However, in 2004 he changed his position, and stated that he now believed in the existence of an intelligent designer of the universe,[11] shocking colleagues and fellow atheists.[11] In order to further clarify his personal conception of God, Flew openly made an allegiance to Deism,[11][12] more specifically a belief in the Aristotelian God,[11][12] a Divine Watchmaker removed from human affairs but responsible for the intricate workings of the universe,[11] and dismissed on many occasions a hypothetical conversion to Christianity, Islam, or any other religion.[11][12] He stated that in keeping his lifelong commitment to go where the evidence leads, he now believed in the existence of a God.[12][13]

In 2007 a book outlining his reasons for changing his position, There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, was written by Flew in collaboration with Roy Abraham Varghese, and included a chapter on the resurrection of Jesus.[2][14][15] An article in The New York Times Magazine alleged that Flew's intellect had declined due to senility, and that the book was primarily the work of Varghese;[2][14] Flew himself specifically denied this, stating that the book represented his views; although he acknowledged that due to his age Varghese had done most of the actual work of writing the book.[16]

  1. ^ "Professor Antony Flew". The Daily Telegraph (Obituary). 13 April 2010. Retrieved 26 April 2020.
  2. ^ a b c Gamble, Dave (25 May 2014). "Antony Flew – did he really change his mind?". Skeptical-Science.com. Archived from the original on 15 July 2014. Retrieved 7 January 2021.
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference Infidels was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ Flew the resumption of Atheism Commonsense Atheism September 2009 Archived 11 November 2020 at the Wayback Machine
  5. ^ Benn, Piers (14 April 2010). "Antony Flew obituary". the Guardian. Retrieved 23 November 2021.
  6. ^ "Logical Problem of Evil | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy". Retrieved 23 November 2021.
  7. ^ Flew, Anthony; Hare, Richard; Mitchell, Basil (1971). "Theology & Falsification: A Symposium" (PDF). Stephen Hicks. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 7 March 2023.
  8. ^ "Notable Signers". Humanism and Its Aspirations. American Humanist Association. Archived from the original on 5 October 2012. Retrieved 26 April 2020.
  9. ^ "Obituary: Professor Antony Flew". www.scotsman.com. Archived from the original on 21 October 2018. Retrieved 11 June 2019.
  10. ^ Flew, A.; Dummett, A. E. (11 July 1954). "Symposium: "Can An Effect Precede Its Cause?"". Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume. 28 (1): 27–62. doi:10.1093/aristoteliansupp/28.1.27. ISSN 0309-7013.
  11. ^ a b c d e f Grimes, William (16 April 2010). "Antony Flew, Philosopher and Ex-Atheist, Dies at 87". The New York Times. New York City. ISSN 1553-8095. OCLC 1645522. Archived from the original on 14 October 2022. Retrieved 10 May 2023. In "There Is a God" he explained that he now believed in a supreme intelligence, removed from human affairs but responsible for the intricate workings of the universe. In other words, the Divine Watchmaker imagined by deists like Isaac Newton, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.
    In a letter to The Sunday Telegraph of London in 2004, he described "the God in whose existence I have belatedly come to believe" as "most emphatically not the eternally rewarding and eternally torturing God of either Christianity or Islam but the God of Aristotle that he would have defined – had Aristotle actually produced a definition of his (and my) God – as the first initiating and sustaining cause of the universe".
  12. ^ a b c d Crawley, William (16 April 2010). "Antony Flew: the atheist who changed his mind". BBC. Retrieved 26 April 2020. In some interviews, and in subsequent publications, Flew made it clear that he had not become a Christian; he had moved from atheism to a form of deism. This is important: it is a mistake to claim that Flew embraced classical theism in any substantial form; rather, he came to believe merely that an intelligent orderer of the universe existed. He did not believe that this "being" had any further agency in the universe, and he maintained his opposition to the vast majority of doctrinal positions adopted by the global faiths, such as belief in the after-life, or a divine being who actively cares for or loves the universe, or the resurrection of Christ, and argued for the idea of an "Aristotelian God". He explained that he, like Socrates, had simply followed the evidence, and the new evidence from science and natural theology made it possible to rationally advance belief in an intelligent being who ordered the universe. In 2006, he even added his name to a petition calling for the inclusion of intelligent design theory on the UK science curriculum.
  13. ^ Habermas 2004.
  14. ^ a b Oppenheimer, Mark (11 April 2007). "The Turning of an Atheist". The New York Times Magazine. Retrieved 26 April 2020. As he himself conceded, he had not written his book.
    "This is really Roy's doing", he said, before I had even figured out a polite way to ask. "He showed it to me, and I said O.K. I'm too old for this kind of work!"
    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".
    So even the ghostwriter had a ghostwriter: Bob Hostetler, an evangelical pastor and author from Ohio, rewrote many passages, especially in the section that narrates Flew's childhood. With three authors, how much Flew was left in the book?
  15. ^ Habermas 2004, p. 6.
  16. ^ Flew 2007.