Antony Flew is considering the possibility that there might be a God. Sort of. Flew is one of the most renowned atheists of the 20th century, even making the shortlist of "Contemporary Atheists" at About.com. So if he has changed his mind to any degree, whatever you may think of his reasons, the event itself is certainly newsworthy. After hearing of this, I contacted Antony directly to discuss it, and I thought it fitting to cut short any excessive speculation or exaggeration by writing a brief report on, well, what's going on.

Once upon a time, a rumor hit the internet that Flew had converted to Christianity. The myth appeared in 2001 and popped up again in 2003. On each occasion, Flew refuted the claim personally, standing by his response to its first occasion with his own reply for publication at the Secular Web (Antony Flew, "Sorry to Disappoint, but I'm Still an Atheist!" 2001). So I was quite skeptical the third time around. But this time, things have indeed changed somewhat from where Flew stood in his 2001 article. Antony and I exchanged letters on the issue recently, and what I report here about his current views comes from him directly.

The news of his "conversion" this time came from a number of avenues, but the three I have good information on are an interview with Gary Habermas soon to be published by Philosophia Christi in which Flew appears to depart from his past views about God, a letter Flew wrote to a popular philosophy journal expressing doubts about the ability of science to explain the origin of life ("On Darwinism and Theology," Philosophy Now 47, August/September 2004, p. 22; cf. also Flew's Review of Roy Varghese's The Wonder of the World), and, just recently on national TV (the October 9 episode of "Faith Under Fire&quot, J. P. Moreland used Flew's "conversion" as an argument for supernaturalism.

The fact of the matter is: Flew hasn't really decided what to believe. He affirms that he is not a Christian--he is still quite certain that the Gods of Christianity or Islam do not exist, that there is no revealed religion, and definitely no afterlife of any kind (he stands by everything he argued in his 2001 book Merely Mortal: Can You Survive Your Own Death?). But he is increasingly persuaded that some sort of Deity brought about this universe, though it does not intervene in human affairs, nor does it provide any postmortem salvation. He says he has in mind something like the God of Aristotle, a distant, impersonal "prime mover." It might not even be conscious, but a mere force. In formal terms, he regards the existence of this minimal God as a hypothesis that, at present, is perhaps the best explanation for why a universe exists that can produce complex life. But he is still unsure. In fact, he asked that I not directly quote him yet, until he finally composes his new introduction to a final edition of his book God and Philosophy, due out next year. He hasn't completed it yet, precisely because he is still examining the evidence and thinking things over. Anything he says now, could change tomorrow.

I also heard a rumor that Flew claimed in a private letter that the kalam cosmological argument proved the existence of God (see relevant entries in Cosmological Arguments). But he assures me that is not what he believes. He said that, at best, the kalam is an argument for a first cause in the Aristotelian sense, and nothing more--and he maintains that, kalam or not, it is still not logically necessary that the universe had a cause at all, much less a "personal" cause. Flew's tentative, mechanistic Deism is not based on any logical proofs, but solely on physical, scientific evidence, or the lack thereof, and is therefore subject to change with more information--and he confesses he has not been able to keep up with the relevant literature in science and theology, which means we should no longer treat him as an expert on this subject (as Moreland apparently did).

Once Flew gives me permission to quote him I will expand this article with more information about his views and the reasons for them. That will have to wait for when Flew himself has finally mulled things over and come to something like a stable decision about what he thinks is most probable, and that may not happen until the release of his 2005 edition of God and Philosophy. For now, I think his view can best be described as questioning, rather than committed. And there is much to criticize in his rationale even for considering Aristotelian Deism. He is most impressed, he says, by Gerald Schroeder's book The Hidden Face of God: How Science Reveals the Ultimate Truth (2001), but Schroeder (a Jewish theologian and physicist) has been heavily criticized for "fudging" the facts to fit his argument--see Mark Perakh, "Not a Very Big Bang about Genesis" (1999); Victor Stenger, "Flew's Flawed Science"; and my own discussion in "Are the Odds Against the Origin of Life Too Great to Accept?" (2000), as well as my peer-reviewed article "The Argument from Biogenesis," Biology & Philosophy 19.5 (November, 2004), pp. 739-64. Flew points out that he has not yet had time to examine any of the critiques of Schroeder. Nor has he examined any of the literature of the past five or ten years on the science of life's origin, which has more than answered his call for "constructing a naturalistic theory" of the origin of life. This is not to say any particular theory has been proven--rather, there are many viable theories fitting all the available evidence that have yet to be refuted, so Flew cannot maintain (as in his letter to Philosophy Now) that it is "inordinately difficult even to begin to think about" such theories. I have pointed all this out to him, and he is thinking it over.

For now, the story of Antony Flew's change of mind should not be exaggerated. We should wait for him to complete his investigation of the matter and declare a more definite conclusion, before claiming he has "converted," much less to any particular religious view.

Update (December 2004)

Flew has now given me permission to quote him directly. I asked him point blank what he would mean if he ever asserted that "probably God exists," to which he responded (in a letter in his own hand, dated 19 October 2004):

I do not think I will ever make that assertion, precisely because any assertion which I am prepared to make about God would not be about a God in that sense ... I think we need here a fundamental distinction between the God of Aristotle or Spinoza and the Gods of the Christian and the Islamic Revelations.

Rather, he would only have in mind "the non-interfering God of the people called Deists--such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin." Indeed, he remains adamant that "theological propositions can neither be verified nor falsified by experience," exactly as he argued in "Theology and Falsification." Regarding J. P. Moreland using Flew in support of Moreland's own belief in the supernatural, Flew says "my God is not his. His is Swinburne's. Mine is emphatically not good (or evil) or interested in human conduct" and does not perform miracles of any kind. Furthermore, Flew took great care to emphasize repeatedly to me that:

My one and only piece of relevant evidence [for an Aristotelian God] is the apparent impossibility of providing a naturalistic theory of the origin from DNA of the first reproducing species ... [In fact] the only reason which I have for beginning to think of believing in a First Cause god is the impossibility of providing a naturalistic account of the origin of the first reproducing organisms.

He cites, in fact, the improbability arguments of Schroeder, which I have refuted online, and the entire argument to the impossibility of natural biogenesis I have refuted in Biology & Philosophy.

So what of the claim that Flew was persuaded by the Kalam Cosmological Argument? Flew "cannot recall" writing any letter to Geivett claiming "the kalam cosmological argument is a sound argument" for God but he confesses his memory fails him often now so he can't be sure. Nevertheless, I specifically asked what Antony thought of the Kalam, to which he answered:

If and insofar as it is supposed to prove the existence of a First Cause of the Big Bang, I have no objection, but this is not at all the same as a proof of the existence of a spirit and all the rest of Richard Swinburne's definition of 'God' which is presently accepted as standard throughout the English speaking and philosophical world.

Also, regarding another rumor that Flew has been attending Quaker meetings, Antony says "I have, I think, attended Quaker meetings on at least 3 or 4 occasions, and one was at the wedding of a cousin," and thus hardly a religious statement on his part but a family affair. Nevertheless, for him and his family generally, he says "I think the main attraction" of Quakerism has been "the lack of doctrines." On the whole God thing, though, Flew is still examining the articles I sent him, so he may have more to say in the future.

Update (January 2005)

Antony Flew has retracted one of his recent assertions. In a letter to me dated 29 December 2004, Flew concedes:

I now realize that I have made a fool of myself by believing that there were no presentable theories of the development of inanimate matter up to the first living creature capable of reproduction.

He blames his error on being "misled" by Richard Dawkins because Dawkins "has never been reported as referring to any promising work on the production of a theory of the development of living matter," even though this is false (e.g., Richard Dawkins and L. D. Hurst, "Evolutionary Chemistry: Life in a Test Tube," Nature 357: pp. 198-199, 21 May 1992) and hardly relevant: it was Flew's responsibility to check the state of the field (there are several books by actual protobiologists published in just the last five years), rather than wait for the chance possibility that one particular evolutionist would write on the subject. Now that he has done what he was supposed to do in the first place, he has retracted his false statement about the current state of protobiological science.

Flew also makes another admission: "I have been mistaught by Gerald Schroeder." He says "it was precisely because he appeared to be so well qualified as a physicist (which I am not) that I was never inclined to question what he said about physics." Apart from his unreasonable plan of trusting a physicist on the subject of biochemistry (after all, the relevant field is biochemistry, not physics--yet it would seem Flew does not recognize the difference), this attitude seems to pervade Flew's method of truthseeking, of looking to a single author for authoritative information and never checking their claims (or, as in the case of Dawkins, presumed lack of claims). As Flew admitted to me, and to Stuart Wavell of the London Times, and Duncan Crary of the Humanist Network News, he has not made any effort to check up on the current state of things in any relevant field (see "No Longer Atheist, Flew Stands by 'Presumption of Atheism'" and "In the Beginning There Was Something&quot. Flew has thus abandoned the very standards of inquiry that led the rest of us to atheism. It would seem the only way to God is to jettison responsible scholarship.

Despite all this, Flew has not retracted his belief in God, as far as I can tell. He only writes that "if any unbelievers choose to make a fuss about my recent very modest defection from my previous unbelief in any journal to which I subscribe, then I intend to point out in a letter to the editor that" his new preface to God and Philosophy "points the road to a more radical form of unbelief than" he held originally, which "was a belief that there was no sufficient evidencing reason to believe in the existence of the Gods of either Christianity or Islam," but now "surely there is material here for a new and more fundamental challenge to the very conception of God as an omnipotent spirit," it's just that "I am just too old at the age of nearly 82 to initiate and conduct a major and super-radical controversy about the conceivability of the concept of God as a spirit." This would appear to be his excuse for everything: he won't investigate the evidence because it's too hard. Yet he will declare beliefs in the absence of proper inquiry. Theists would do well to drop the example of Flew. Because his willfully sloppy scholarship can only help to make belief look ridiculous.

Update (March 2006)

During the course of 2005, Flew cut off all correspondence and now refuses to speak to any member of the press. When Matt Donnelly, a reporter for Science and Theology News, asked him for permission to read and quote his letters to me, Flew refused, and insisted that even his phone conversations with Donnelly not be used. A friend and eyewitness whom I trust reported to me that he and another prominent secular humanist spoke to Flew in private during his recent visit to New York for the 25th Anniversary conference of the Council for Secular Humanism in October of 2005. They found him to be philosophically incoherent. He affirmed his belief in an uncaring, uninvolved, unconscious (yes, unconscious) Jeffersonian Deity, but despite half an hour of questioning as to why, he could not give any specific reason for this belief.

In the meantime, Flew wrote "My 'Conversion'" for the Autumn 2005 issue of Think (pp. 75-84), the only article Flew himself has ever written about his conversion. This article is so confused and unclear that in it he fails to affirm belief in any God and actually suggests he is still an atheist. Flew claims to set the record straight about his, as he himself puts it, "putative conversion from atheism to some form of revealed theistic religion." Because of the massive press attention, "it seemed to me," Flew writes, "that there was a need ... for me to explain myself" (p. 75). Yet nowhere in the entire nine pages of the article does he explain himself.

Flew starts with a few autobiographical paragraphs explaining that he was an "atheist" in the same sense that someone would be "apolitical," so he didn't believe in God simply for lack of evidence, not because God's nonexistence could be demonstrated. He explains that because of the nuance of this distinction, after the first edition of God and Philosophy he "was mistaken to be a very positive opponent of the Christian religion." Then, he says, his new introduction to God and Philosophy "reveals my present position." But it doesn't. The rest of his Think article proceeds to quote that introductory chapter largely verbatim. But neither that chapter nor this article ever says anything about what he believes or why. Though in both he surveys some of the cutting edge issues in the debate between theists and atheists, he offers no conclusion as to whether any of these new arguments succeed in refuting or confirming theism. And in both, he never once voices any opinion or conclusion about what he himself believes.

The closest he ever comes to such a revelation seems to assert that he is still an atheist, though surely he can't mean that. Flew writes, "I can here say only that I myself, having read" Victor Stenger's book Has Science Found God? "cannot but agree with his negative conclusions" (p. 78). Since Stenger's conclusions are "No, science has not found God," and Flew says he agrees, ordinarily this would mean Flew remains an atheist, affirming there is still no evidence to warrant believing in God. But given his personal affirmations in New York, all I can conclude from this sentence is that either Flew does not believe any scientific evidence supports his belief (which leaves us completely in the dark as to what evidence then does) or Flew didn't read carefully what he himself wrote. Neither possibility inspires much confidence.

In the Think article and the new introduction to God and Philosophy Flew does offer some encouraging words for Aristotelian Deism, but he never affirms his belief in it nor says whether he considers any arguments for it successful. For instance, he says things like "the expectations of natural reason must surely be that an omnipotent Creator would be as detached and uninvolved as the gods of Epicurus" (p. 81, my emphasis), not "that an omnipotent Creator is as detached and uninvolved." Flew never actually says in this article or in the new edition of God and Philosophy whether he believes an omnipotent Creator exists, only that "if" he did "then" he would be "detached and uninvolved." Then Flew repeats his belief that "there is an enormous yet very rarely recognized difficulty with the very conception of 'A person without a body (i.e. a spirit)'" (p. 81). He quotes Gaskin favorably as concluding "the absence of a body is therefore not only factual grounds for doubting whether a person exists" but "also grounds for doubting whether such a bodiless entity could possibly be an agent" (p. 83). Flew even cites his own books, The Logic of Mortality (1987) and Merely Mortal (2001), against the possibility of disembodied existence. So Flew seems to think there is still insufficient reason to believe a disembodied spirit like God can even exist. He never explains how, then, or why, he still believes in such a god, nor does he even mention that he does. Flew concludes by saying that Swinburne's book Is There a God? offers only a "religious hypothesis" that "cannot in principle be either verified or falsified by any experience" (p. 83).

Anyone who knew nothing about Flew except this one article would conclude that Flew is currently an atheist. That's odd for an article that is supposed to explain his conversion. Instead, he calls the claim of his conversion merely "putative," states no belief in a god of any kind, presents all the new debates as unresolved stalemates or as unsolved problems for theism, affirms his belief that science has not found God, cites even his own past work in defense of the conclusion that spirits (divine or otherwise) cannot exist, and suggests that God's existence "cannot in principle be either verified or falsified by any experience." Nevertheless, Flew claimed this article "explains himself" and "reveals his present position." I shall leave it to my readers to decide what is going on here.

Update (May 2006)

In recognition of his "conversion," Antony Flew was awarded the Phillip E. Johnson Award for Liberty and Truth at Biola, an Evangelical Christian university in La Mirada, California. Flew accepted it in person (see Former Atheist to Receive Award at Biola). I have received communications from several eyewitnesses in attendance who all confirm that Flew appeared to sleep through most of it, said little, and what he did say was difficult to understand. James Underdown, Executive Director of Center for Inquiry-West recorded the whole event, including a personal interview with Flew afterward. Underdown's article reporting briefly on this affair will appear as "One Flew Over Biola" in the August-September issue of Free Inquiry, which should come off the presses by the end of July.

Underdown was kind enough to give me an advance look at his article and discussed the experience with me. Flew gave a roughly ten minute acceptance speech to an audience of over a hundred, in which he said nothing new. He declared he was a Deist and believed in a God who "is neither interested in nor concerned about either human beliefs or human behavior." According to Underdown, the only clear reason he gave for this belief was "that since we've not yet solved how the first form of life came about then it must have been God that created it," even though Flew admitted to the same audience that he lacked any expertise in chemistry. Flew already abandoned his prior claim that science has no viable hypothesis for the origin of life (since he renounced that to me in writing, as noted above), so it appears he has retreated and is now resting his belief in God solely on an invalid "God of the Gaps" argument: merely because no scientific hypothesis of biogenesis has been confirmed, therefore God exists. I doubt any Evangelical with a Ph.D. would endorse such an argument as valid. Underdown said Flew also tried to make some argument about evolved life being too complex for evolution to explain, but it wasn't clear how Flew determined something to be "too" complex or how he determined that evolution hadn't or "couldn't" explain it. In short, it does not appear to me that Flew presented any sound argument for his position at this event, and Underdown and other witnesses agreed.

Apart from being unsound, Flew's belief might also be incoherent, since it is unclear why a God who was not "interested or concerned" would go out of his way to "intervene" in nature specifically to start life on earth and "intervene" repeatedly again to increase its complexity. What could possibly have motivated a disinterested God to do that? What was His purpose in doing it? By what mechanism did He accomplish it? Why that life instead of some other? Why didn't this God simply make the universe capable of producing life and complexity in the first place? That is, why did this God create a universe incapable of producing life, and then change his mind billions of years later and alter the laws of physics just to put life on one planet, and then continually alter the laws of physics again to increase that life's complexity toward some mysterious end? Flew consistently ignored me when I asked him such questions before. He avoided answering Underdown's questions, too. And he still has offered no answers to this day. I can only conclude he has no answers. It seems as if Flew has no clear understanding of what he means by "God" and is basing his belief in this "God" on entirely unsound reasoning. That this is what a Christian university praises and rewards perhaps tells us something about the epistemic values of Evangelical Christians.

Update (January 2007)

On November 2 of 2006, Christian apologist Lee Strobel posted an article on his webpage detailing his interview with Antony Flew (Why Top Atheist Now Believes in a Creator), including short, edited clips from video footage of the interview. Those known to me are: An Interview With a Former Atheist: Why Did Your Beliefs Change?, An Interview With a Former Atheist: What Is God Like? and An Interview With a Former Atheist: Afterlife and Christianity. If anyone knows of other portions that are available online please use the feedback link below to let me know where.

Strobel never says when this interview was taped. If anyone knows for sure, please send feedback through the link below. By publishing this only now and giving no other indications of the interview's date, Strobel is certainly implying that it was taped in late 2006. From internal evidence, though, there are indications it might have been 2005, maybe early 2005, or even late 2004. That would mean during the interview Strobel referred to the year of taping in the past tense, and although that would not be too unusual in an interview taped for posterity, it seems unlikely, which would almost rule out a 2004 taping. But the evidence from the interview itself leaves me a bit perplexed:

Flew reveals he is substantially unaware of the Christian reception of his conversion, and implies he has had no major dealings with the Christian community and even asks why he would have, which are all remarks he could not have made after he accepted, in person, the Phillip E. Johnson Award for Liberty and Truth in May of 2006 (see previous update above). Unless he doesn't remember that event, which would be alarming. He also implies he is largely unaware of the atheist reaction to his conversion, which can't have been true even in early 2005. Indeed, it would be a strange thing to say even at the end of 2004. He also exhibits signs of not having thought through many issues (and outright says as much), as if some of Strobel's questions he had never been asked or even thought about, which can't have been true by mid-2005, unless, again, Flew's memory is in shambles.

Finally, at least in what is shown, neither Strobel nor Flew ever mention me or what I've said about Flew's correspondence, his irrationality, or his ignorance of the scientific evidence, especially as led to his retractions on the matter of biogenesis, yet these remarks of mine were all reported in early 2005 and even made national news, and would surely be of interest to any journalist interviewing Flew now. The fact that Strobel never asks Flew about what I've written about him on these points, and the fact that Flew shows no indication of having admitted to being corrected on the science of biogenesis, suggests to me this interview was actually taped before late December of 2004. The only other explanation I can imagine is that Flew's memory is failing to an alarming degree.

As a point of comparison, compare this with his BBC Radio 4 interview by Joan Bakewell on March 22 of 2005. Directly contrary to what he says in the Strobel video, in this radio interview Flew retracts his certainty of the unexplainable complexity of DNA, noting that the "starting point" for life "is a thing that still needs a naturalistic explanation" but though "many people after the findings of DNA looked around and wondered whether they'd ever be able to find it, and thought it would simply be impossible to do it," Flew instead concedes, "Well, it isn't." In other words, as of March 2005 he publicly admitted that naturalism was not incapable of providing explanations of biogenesis (exactly as he admitted to me, even more emphatically, in his letters). Yet he shows no awareness of having made this concession in his interview with Strobel. So either Flew forgot (not only everything he said in his letters to me but even in his BBC interview), or the Strobel interview must have preceded March of 2005, probably by many months.

Another oddity is that in the BBC interview, Flew references his new Preface to God and Philosophy, noting that "the really long introduction which I wrote for this book did express my own incredulity about this," i.e. the plausibility of naturalistic explanations for biogenesis, but "the new one" will say "what has in fact been done" on that question, and instead "indicates that my incredulity has stopped in the face of the evidence." This is not at all consistent with what he says in the Strobel interview. Likewise, in the Strobel interview he implies he finds a quasi-Einsteinian form of the fine-tuning argument somewhat convincing, yet in the BBC interview he says, "No. No I, I've never thought the, the fine tuning argument was any sort of proof," and instead says "I don't think it proves anything but that it is entirely reasonable for people who already have a belief in a creating God to regard this as confirming evidence," which he had already been saying since at least 2001 when he was still an atheist.

In the Strobel interview, Flew says "Einstein didn't have any authority at all" to assess the biological argument for Intelligent Design, which is ironic because Flew has even less authority to do so, but I find it odd that he would make this point and yet not mention his recent discovery of the actual status of the science of biogenesis, which led to correcting himself, both to me and to the BBC. Instead, in the Strobel video, Flew says:

If the integrated complexity of the physical world is a good reason, as Einstein clearly thought it was, of believing that there was an intelligence behind it, then this argument applies a fortiori with the inordinately greater integrated complexity of the living world, isn't it? It seems to me this is just obvious, that that argument is much stronger now.

Strobel presses and asks if this is indeed Flew's reason for believing, and Flew emphatically answers "Yes!" No other reasons are given. Notably, Strobel's quotation of Flew's remarks on this point, in Strobel's article about the interview, is substantially different, suggesting either Strobel is not being careful at all with Flew's exact wording, or he got Flew to repeat the same point in different words and simply didn't include the second version in the available video clips, which would be strange. But either way, what Flew says above is what he was saying to me and others before January of 2005, which he specifically retracted and heavily qualified afterward, as evidenced in the BBC interview, and his letters to me.

Ultimately, since I can't determine when this interview was conducted, nor is the entire interview available to me, but only a few short, edited clips, I don't know what to make of it, apart from the fact that it offers no illumination whatsoever as to what Flew actually believes or why. The portions made available say nothing new or different from what Flew has already said in other venues, which have been discussed throughout my original article and all the updates above. All this Strobel interview establishes is either that it is uselessly out-of-date (if shot years ago, even before Flew and I corresponded) or that Flew no longer has a functioning memory--since if this video was shot recently, then he has completely forgotten everything he has learned, thought and said over the past two years.

Either way, Flew has yet to explain in any coherent way what he believes or why. Unfortunately, in his BBC interview, when Bakewell asked Flew what I had been trying to get him to answer before March 2005 myself, "So what is your final evidence? What is the, what was the clincher for you, Professor Flew?" Flew gives no answer at all, but rambles on about how his newfound deism is no big deal and just an opinion, a conclusion that is "pretty thin." But what he bases this "pretty thin" conclusion on he still fails to say. Later in that same interview he says "I haven't really formulated what I do believe," but it sounds as if he hasn't even formulated why he believes. And I've heard nothing to suggest anything has changed this past year.