It was announced yesterday that the philosopher Antony Flew died on 8th April following a long illness. Flew was long-regarded as one of Britain’s finest philosophical proponents of rational atheism, and a widely respected humanist. He epitomised a deeply British approach to academic philosophy: rationalist, empiricist, closely argued in analytic prose.

Flew often criticised afterlife beliefs, and once told the Sunday Times, “I don’t want a future life.” But on earth at least, Antony Flew’s work and reputation seem destined to remain live issues. Once controversial for this stalwart atheism, it is the final work bearing his name which has attracted most criticism and controversy in recent years. The Christian ghost writers of There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed his Mind, have been accused of foisting Intelligent Design-inspired deism on a philosopher whose memory and philosophical faculties were failing.

But There is a God was preceded by several years of muddy and conflicting reports about Flew’s  wavering views. Whatever the truth, it has become an acrimonious battle for the mind and soul of one man, perhaps a battle which – like attempts to claim for atheism or theism the personal beliefs of Einstein (or to disown those of Hitler) – will be waged for generations.

Throughout most of his career Flew criticised religious truth-claims for their lack of falsifiability (for a true believer, nothing seems to count against their god). He championed the “presumption of atheism” as a default position on religious matters. Flew’s essay Theology and Falsification is required reading for theologians and philosophers of religion – apparently the most quoted essay on philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century – and indeed it is written plainly enough that it features in many of the more open-minded school RE lessons. His book Atheistic Humanism pulled together various of his papers against religious beliefs, before moving on to the practice and theory of Humanism and exploring live ethical and political issues.

Flew’s work was partly influenced by his early teachers, in particular Gilbert Ryle. His longstanding humanism was reflected in his involvement with organisations such as the Rationalist Press Association. He had various hobbyhorses, and many found him obsessional. He detested the progressive, egalitarian ethos of the late 1960s and 70s, supported the cold war and lamented the state of education.

… Many former colleagues and students remembered him with great respect. One acknowledged him as having high principles and high standards, always following arguments where they led him. Another, then a novice lecturer at Keele, noted his helpfulness, in spite of political differences. A former student recalled how, in 1962, he boomed at a bemused philosophy class that “sex … is a very dangerous thing”, fearing that it would interfere with studying. But his views on abortion and homosexual law reform were liberal, and he was a trenchant critic of the Roman Catholic church’s teaching on contraception.

– from the Guardian obituary

In the new millennium Flew’s philosophical trajectory performed a slow burn about-turn. As early as 2001 rumours spread that his “negative atheism” was being chipped away by supposed evidence that there might, just might, be a creator god. In a short essay, “Sorry to Disappoint but I’m Still an Atheist!“, the mild-mannered philosopher rejected these claims of his conversion. (Rejected them “vehemently”, according to the Telegraph obituary, but this sensational description shows an unfamiliarity with Flew’s character and  doesn’t bear out in the language of the piece.) Flew wrote:

I can suggest only one possible source of the rumours. Several weeks ago I submitted to the Editor of Philo (The Journal of the Society of Humanist Philosophers) a short paper making two points which might well disturb atheists of the more positive kind. The point more relevant here was that it can be entirely rational for believers and negative atheists to respond in quite different ways to the same scientific developments.

After outlining his reasons why neither atheists nor theists would be converted by cosmological Fine Tuning arguments, he concludes:

In short, I recognize that developments in physics coming on the last twenty or thirty years can reasonably be seen as in some degree confirmatory of a previously faith-based belief in god, even though they still provide no sufficient reason for unbelievers to change their minds. They certainly have not persuaded me.

This is at best a double-edged, perhaps even slightly confused refutation of his alleged conversion, conceding as it does that some scientific findings would count as evidence for theism – if only for theists. Looking back as we do from the age of the Four Horsemen, Flew’s 2001 atheism may sound like agnosticism to many, closer to not being a theist than to active disbelief in any god:

I remain still what I have been now for over fifty years, a negative atheist. By this I mean that I construe the initial letter in the word ‘atheist’ in the way in which everyone construes the same initial letter in such words as ‘atypical’ and ‘amoral’. For I still believe that it is impossible either to verify or to falsify – to show to be false – what David Hume in his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion happily described as “the religious hypothesis.” The more I contemplate the eschatological teachings of Christianity and Islam the more I wish I could demonstrate their falsity.

Many popular humanist philosophers today (think A C Grayling, Stephen Law, Nigel Warburton, Julian Baggini) seem quite happy to regard non-falsifiability as just one tool in an armament against gods, and non-falsifiability is no bar to offering plenty of active reasons to be skeptical. Today, philosophical complaints about the non-falsifiability in principle of god-beliefs is likely to sit alongside robust arguments against God, like the argument from suffering which had indeed compelled Flew himself in earlier days.

Over the following years the picture became more confused.

Flew’s belief was in deism, involving a remote creator who takes no interest in human affairs.

Flew said he was impressed by the work of Gerald Schroeder, a physicist and Jewish theologian who wrote “The Hidden Face of God,” published in 2001.

“He pointed out the improbable statistics involved and the pure chances that have to occur. It’s simply not on to think this could occur simply by chance,” the Sunday Times quoted Flew as saying.

– from the Los Angeles Times obituary

Despite the 2001 claim, “I’m Still an Atheist!”, by 2004 in an interview with Gary Habermas for the journal of the Evangelical Philosophical Society, things had changed. Habermas and Flew had been friends for some time. Flew first says, “I don’t believe in the God of any revelatory system”, but goes  on to answer a question about theistic revelation:

Yes. I am open to it, but not enthusiastic about potential revelation from God. On the positive side, for example, I am very much impressed with physicist Gerald Schroeder’s comments on Genesis 1. [Endnote references: Gerald L. Schroeder, The Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom.] That this biblical account might be scientifically accurate raises the possibility that it is revelation.

The book by Schroeder, which apparently so influenced the great philosopher, interprets the six days of Biblical Creation as billions of years corresponding with a Big Bang model of the universe and was dismissed by Victor J Stenger (among many other skeptical critics) as  ”fitting the Bible to the data” and reading at times like a “parody” of itself.

By the end of the interview, Gary Habermas asks if “there is any chance that you might in the end move from theism to Christianity?” The once proud atheist apparently doesn’t bat an eyelid at being described as a theist, but he does answer that he probably won’t become a Christian theist:

I think it’s very unlikely, due to the problem of evil. But, if it did happen, I think it would be in some eccentric fit and doubtfully orthodox form: regular religious practice perhaps but without belief.

‘Deist’ seems to be the best fit by this point.

But believers waiting to welcome this most prodigal of sons back into the fold were to be disappointed. Flew’s conversion did not embrace such concepts as Heaven, good and evil or the afterlife – let alone divine intervention in human affairs. His God was strictly minimalist – very different from “the monstrous oriental despots of the religions of Christianity and Islam”, as he liked to call them. God may have called his creation into existence, then, but why did he bother? To that question, it seemed, Flew had no answer.

– from the Telegraph obituary

His view of Christianity had not changed: he still could not accept the God who revealed himself, and intervened in the world, and he still admired the moral force of the tradition. He had no such admiration for Islam, which, he said, is “best described in a Marxian way as the uniting and justifying ideology of Arab imperialism”.

– from the Times obituary

In 2006 Flew’s signature was associated with a joint, open letter to Tony Blair calling for the teaching of Intelligent Design in UK schools. And finally in 2007, with the publication of There Is a God, it appeared that the journey from ardent atheist and humanist to religious apologist was complete.

There Is a God details some already well-rehearsed Arguments from Design. According to the book’s most infamous critic, it “is perhaps the handiest primer ever written on the science (many would say pseudoscience) of religious belief.” It’s just that Flew isn’t really the author. This critic is Mark Oppenheimer, the historian who, shortly after publication, visited Antony Flew and writing in the New York Times upped the ante on Flew’s legacy forever.

Oppenheimer damned Flew’s co-author Roy Abraham Varghese as the kind of “ghost writer” who takes complete possession of the ostensible author. Oppenheimer describes finding Flew a shadow of his former self, unable to remember key names and events not just from his philosophical career but even from the new book. The impression is of a mind approaching senility, without the energy or the wherewithal to construct a new chapter, let alone a full book. Debate about the battle for Flew’s soul was already raging and Oppenheimer acknowledges this, but his description of events puts him firmly on one side.

The version you prefer will depend on how you interpret a story that began 20 years ago, when some evangelical Christians found an atheist who, they thought, might be persuaded to join their side. In the intellectual tug of war that ensued, Flew himself — a continent away, his memory failing, without an Internet connection — had no idea how fiercely he was being fought over or how many of his acquaintances were calling or writing him just to shore up their cases. … With his powers in decline, Antony Flew, a man who devoted his life to rational argument, has become a mere symbol, a trophy in a battle fought by people whose agendas he does not fully understand.

Investigating how Flew came to write such a surprising book, Oppenheimer describes Flew’s correspondence with Richard Carrier. Carrier, a skeptic who took it upon himself to investigate the earlier rumours of Flew’s theism, had exchanged numerous letters with Flew following the 2004 dabblings in theism. Flew had responded in a way which Carrier could only interpret as warped by too much theist propaganda. Carrier was exasperated.

Flew, he sees, has been taken to dinner by the theists, has been fed questionable science and swallowed it with pleasure. Carrier is fighting a rear-guard action, via snail mail, from a continent away.

Carrier urged Flew to take back responsibility and reconsider the state of the science and the direction of his philosophy.

Perhaps the single most damning piece of evidence of the extent to which Flew might have been manipulated by a theist in-crowd comes from the fact that a few simple nudges from Carrier actually worked! Flew wrote back to say he had been mistaken in trusting his Christian correspondents; that Schroeder and his modern-science-is-Genesis theory obviously wasn’t up to date, and that he would withdraw the forthcoming introduction to a new edition of one of his books. As a consequence, a passage about his deism was indeed dropped from publication. For Oppenheimer the implication is clear. Flew was in a state of severe suggestibility, whether to his multiple theist correspondents or to the skeptic Carrier. Flew was unable to assess new writing for himself.

In further correspondence with Carrier, Flew spoke of retracting other recent statements on religion, including an endorsement for a book by his 2004 interviewer, Gary Habermas. Revealingly, Flew refers to his own “decline” as an inhibiting factor, and in the context of his quickly-reversed positions on the biggest questions of his philosophical life, it’s hard to disagree.

“The statement which I most regret making during the last few months was the one about Habermas’s book on the alleged resurrection of Jesus bar Joseph. I completely forgot Hume’s to my mind decisive argument against all evidence for the miraculous. A sign of physical decline.”

Flew had been a leading authority on the philosophy of David Hume.

But by the time There Is a God was published, with Varghese as credited co-author, Flew seemed to have forgotten his re-conversion to atheism. The book happily cites Schroeder, as well as Gary Haldane and Varghese himself. Oppenheimer points out darkly that having previously forgotten even his beloved Hume, the Flew of There Is a God is ”deeply read in many philosophers — John Leslie, John Foster, Thomas Tracy, Brian Leftow — rarely if ever mentioned in his letters, articles or books. It’s as if he’s a new man.”

When Oppenheimer visited Flew he asked him, he admits, questions to test his faculties, which may seem cruel.

In “There Is a God,” Flew quotes extensively from a conversation he had with Leftow, a professor at Oxford. So I asked Flew, “Do you know Brian Leftow?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t think I do.”

“Do you know the work of the philosopher John Leslie?” Leslie is discussed extensively in the book.

Flew paused, seeming unsure. “I think he’s quite good.” But he said he did not remember the specifics of Leslie’s work.

“Have you ever run across the philosopher Paul Davies?” In his book, Flew calls Paul Davies “arguably the most influential contemporary expositor of modern science.”

“I’m afraid this is a spectacle of my not remembering!”

… As he himself conceded, he had not written his book.

“This is really Roy [Varghese]’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!”

Roy Varghese had twenty years in which to foist God-friendly works of pseudo-science on Flew, Oppenheimer argues. But he is careful not to accuse the co-author of outright manipulation.

To believe that Flew has been exploited is not to conclude that his exploiters acted with malice. If Flew in his dotage was a bit gullible, Varghese had a gullibility of his own. An autodidact with no academic credentials, Varghese was clearly thrilled to be taken seriously by an Oxford-trained philosopher; it may never have occurred to him that so educated a mind could be in decline.

Modelling his philosophical martyrdom on Socrates, Flew had always said he would take the evidence where it led him. At some point around twenty years ago, the evidence Flew was exposed to started to come in weighted measures with a very particular slant. Did Roy Varghese and Gary Habermas and others at Biola University manipulate Flew over years as he succumbed to the mental erosion of time, culminating at last in a book written, in essence, by themselves, espousing their own views?

There is something ghoulish, let alone highly speculative, about trying to determine from a distance and in retrospect exactly when (if ever) a person can be said to have lost their mental autonomy. It seems already that people will point to this interview or that book or the other letter to argue that Flew was manipulated on the one hand, or that he came to his own theistic conclusions on the other. The patchy change in his language and outlook over at least a decade probably points to a mixture of the two, at least until the ghost writing of There Is a God.

If someone did write and publish a book which essentially committed identity theft against a great philosopher then that is tragic, and it is important. But as Flew himself would undoubtedly never have disagreed, the philosophy is more important than the fate of one man. Really,  the clues about Flew’s own personal beliefs should pale into insignificance against  the body of work.

We have one work of dubious authorship, to set against a lifetime of truly great, analytic British philosophy.

Bob Churchill is Head of Membership at the British Humanist Association.

Antony Flew dies, and the battle for his soul will continue, 8.9 out of 10 based on 8 ratings