Antony Flew

Antony Flew, the son of Methodist minister and theologian Robert Newton Flew (1886–1962) and his wife Winifred née Garrard (1887–1982), was born in London.

He was educated at St Faith's School, Cambridge followed by Kingswood School, Bath.

He is said to have concluded by the age of 15 that there was no God.

During the Second World War he studied Japanese at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and was a Royal Air Force intelligence officer.

Antony Garrard Newton Flew (11 February 1923 – 8 April 2010) 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.

He also criticised the idea of life after death, the free will defence to the problem of evil, and the meaningfulness of the concept of God.

After a period with the Inter-Services Topographical Department in Oxford, he was posted to Bletchley Park in June 1944.

In the post-war era, Flew achieved a first class degree in Literae Humaniores at St John's College, Oxford (1947).

He also won the John Locke Scholarship in Mental Philosophy in the following year.

Flew was a graduate student of Gilbert Ryle, prominent in ordinary language philosophy.

For a year, 1949–1950, Flew was a lecturer in philosophy at Christ Church, Oxford.

From 1950 to 1954 he was a lecturer at the University of Aberdeen, and from 1954 to 1971 he was a professor of philosophy at the University of Keele.

Although he found Lewis to be "an eminently reasonable man" and "by far the most powerful Christian apologists for the sixty or more years following his founding of that club", he was not persuaded by Lewis' argument from morality as found in Mere Christianity (1952).

Flew also criticised several of the other philosophical arguments for God's existence.

He concluded that the ontological argument in particular failed because it is based on the premise that the concept of Being can be derived from the concept of Goodness.

Only the scientific forms of the teleological argument ultimately impressed Flew as decisive.

During the time of his involvement in the Socratic Club, Flew also wrote the article Theology and Falsification, which argued that claims about the existence of a God were merely vacuous since they couldn't be falsified, therefore it was impossible to test these claims for truth or falsehood.

Flew was also critical of the idea of life after death and the free will defence to the problem of evil.

A 1954 debate with Michael Dummett over backward causation was an early highlight in Flew's career.

Both Flew and Ryle were among many Oxford philosophers fiercely criticised in Ernest Gellner's book Words and Things (1959).

He held a professorship at the University of Calgary, 1972–1973.

Between 1973 and 1983 he was professor of philosophy at the University of Reading.

At this time, he developed one of his most famous arguments, the No true Scotsman fallacy in his 1975 book, Thinking About Thinking.

Upon his retirement, Flew took up a half-time post for a few years at York University in Toronto, Canada.

Politically, Flew was a right-wing libertarian-leaning conservative which opposed to immigration, egalitarianism, and the European Union, and wrote articles for The Journal of Libertarian Studies.

His name appears on letterheads into 1992 as a vice-president of the Conservative Monday Club, and he held the same position in the Western Goals Institute.

He was one of the signatories to a letter in The Times along with Lord Sudeley, Sir Alfred Sherman, and Dr. Harvey Ward, on behalf of the institute, "applauding Alfredo Cristiani's statesmanship" and calling for his government's success in defeating the Cuban and Nicaraguan-backed communist FMLN in El Salvador.

In 1999 he wrote the foreword to a publication of the British far-right think tank Bloomsbury Forum, Standard Bearers: British Roots of the New Right.

In political philosophy, the main interest of Antony Flew was in opposing the concept of social justice, i.e. the idea that income and wealth should be redistributed among the population in accordance with a principle of economic equality.

While an undergraduate, Flew attended the weekly meetings of C. S. Lewis' Socratic Club fairly regularly.

In 2003, he was one of the signatories of the Humanist Manifesto III.

He also developed the No true Scotsman fallacy, and debated retrocausality with Michael Dummett.

However, in 2004 he changed his position, and stated that he now believed in the existence of an intelligent designer of the universe, shocking colleagues and fellow atheists.

In order to further clarify his personal conception of God, Flew openly made an allegiance to Deism, more specifically a belief in the Aristotelian God, a Divine Watchmaker removed from human affairs but responsible for the intricate workings of the universe, and dismissed on many occasions a hypothetical conversion to Christianity, Islam, or any other religion.

He stated that in keeping his lifelong commitment to go where the evidence leads, he now believed in the existence of a God.

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.

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; 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.