On the 11^th of Feb­ru­ary, 1923, a British Methodist min­is­ter and the­olo­gian named Robert Flew and his wife Winifred gave birth to a boy they named Antony. He attended St. Faith’s School in Cam­bridge and Kingswood School in Bath. Despite his being raised by a Chris­t­ian intel­lec­tual, he had con­cluded by the age of 15 that there is no god.

He went on to study at

the School of Ori­en­tal and African Stud­ies, Uni­ver­sity of Lon­don, and was a Royal Air Force intel­li­gence offi­cer. After a period with the Inter-​​Services Topo­graph­i­cal Depart­ment in Oxford, he was posted to Bletch­ley Park in June 1944.

After the war, Flew achieved a first class degree in Lit­erae Human­iores at St John’s Col­lege, Oxford. Flew was a grad­u­ate stu­dent of Gilbert Ryle, promi­nent in ordi­nary lan­guage phi­los­o­phy. Both Flew and Ryle were among many Oxford philoso­phers fiercely crit­i­cised in Ernest Gellner’s book Words and Things (1959). A 1954 debate with Michael Dum­mett over back­ward cau­sa­tion was an early high­light in Flew’s career.

For a year, Flew was a lec­turer in phi­los­o­phy at Christ Church, Oxford. After­wards, he was a lec­turer for four years at the Uni­ver­sity of Aberdeen, and a pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy at the Uni­ver­sity of Keele for twenty years. 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, Toronto.

…While an under­grad­u­ate, Flew attended the weekly meet­ings of C. S. Lewis’s Socratic Club fairly reg­u­larly. Although he found Lewis to be “an emi­nently rea­son­able man” and “by far the most pow­er­ful of Chris­t­ian apol­o­gists for the sixty or more years fol­low­ing his found­ing of that club,” he was not per­suaded by Lewis’s argu­ment from moral­ity as found in Mere Chris­tian­ity. Flew also crit­i­cised sev­eral of the other philo­soph­i­cal proofs 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…

Dur­ing the time of his involve­ment in the Socratic Club, Flew also wrote the arti­cle “The­ol­ogy and Fal­si­fi­ca­tion,” which argued that claims about God were mean­ing­less where they could not be tested for truth or false­hood. Though ini­tially pub­lished in an under­grad­u­ate jour­nal, the arti­cle came to be widely reprinted and dis­cussed. Later, in God and Phi­los­o­phy (1966) and The Pre­sump­tion of Athe­ism (1976, reprinted 1984), Flew argued that one should pre­sup­pose athe­ism until evi­dence of a God sur­faces. Flew was also crit­i­cal of the idea of life after death and the free will defence to the prob­lem of evil.

-Wikipedia

He was an Hon­orary Asso­ciate of the New Zealand Asso­ci­a­tion of Ratio­nal­ists and Human­ists, and was cel­e­brated for his con­tri­bu­tions to polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy as well, being awarded the Schlar­baum Prize by the Lud­wig von Mises Insti­tute for his “out­stand­ing life­time achieve­ment in the cause of liberty”.

And then, in Jan­u­ary of 2004, Dr. Flew called his friend Gary Haber­mas on the tele­phone to inform him that his mind had been changed and that he had become a the­ist. He said in a later phone call that he felt he had sim­ply been “forced to go where the evi­dence leads”. You can read the tran­script of a sub­se­quent inter­view between Haber­mas and Flew here.

In 2007 Flew went on to write a book, “There Is a God: How the World’s Most Noto­ri­ous Athe­ist Changed His Mind”, Haber­mas’ review of which can be read here. N. T. Wright him­self con­tributes an appen­dix to the book argu­ing for the his­toric­ity of the res­ur­rec­tion of Jesus.

In an inter­est­ing twist of fate, Flew’s life­time of argu­ing for athe­ism had been one of the cat­a­lysts of the renais­sance in the­is­tic phi­los­o­phy that started in the 60’s and 70’s, major play­ers in which, espe­cially Alvin Planti­nga and Richard Swin­burne, were in turn instru­men­tal in Flew’s own con­ver­sion to the­ism. Flew taunts the “New Athe­ists” for falling short of the intel­lec­tual great­ness and philo­soph­i­cal rigor of the athe­ists of yore.

There has been a lot of out­cry about Antony Flew’s con­ver­sion to the­ism, even from such promi­nent athe­ists as Richard Dawkins, to which Flew per­son­ally responds in his review of “The God Delu­sion”.

In May of 2006, Flew was awarded the sec­ond “Phillip E. John­son Award for Lib­erty and Truth” from Biola Uni­ver­sity. The award was given to Flew “for his life­long com­mit­ment to free and open inquiry and to stand­ing fast against intol­er­ant assaults on free­dom of thought and expression”.

What finally con­vinced one of the 20^th century’s lead­ing athe­ist philoso­phers that God exists? Sci­en­tif­i­cally rig­or­ous argu­ments from the empir­i­cally detectable pres­ence of design in the world, ren­dered all the more com­pelling by recent dis­cov­er­ies in biology.

Antony Flew passed away in April of 2010.