Antony Flew 1923 – 2010

Antony Garrard Newton Flew was a British analytic philosopher of religion and ethics who, for most of a long career, was one of the most prominent philosophical defenders of atheism in the English-speaking world. After Oxford studies under Gilbert Ryle, he held chairs at Aberdeen, Keele, Calgary, and Reading, and produced a long series of works including God and Philosophy and The Presumption of Atheism. In 2004 he announced publicly that he had come to accept some form of deistic belief in God on the basis of arguments from physical and biological design, an episode extensively discussed in his late book There Is a God.

Antony Garrard Newton Flew was born in London in February 1923, the son of a Methodist minister. He read classics and then philosophy at St John's College, Oxford, taking his bachelor's in 1947 under the supervision of Gilbert Ryle, and held lectureships at Christ Church and Aberdeen before moving to chairs at Keele (from 1954), Calgary, Reading (1973–1983), and finally Bowling Green State in Ohio.

His books include A New Approach to Psychical Research (1953), Hume's Philosophy of Belief (1961), God and Philosophy (1966), An Introduction to Western Philosophy (1971), The Presumption of Atheism (1976), Atheistic Humanism (1993), and the late and controversial There Is a God (2007). His 1950 contribution to a symposium on 'Theology and Falsification', built around the parable of the imperceptible gardener, became one of the most reprinted philosophical articles of the twentieth century.

Flew was for half a century the most prominent academic atheist in the English-speaking world, arguing that the burden of proof in religious debate belongs to the believer, that classical theism collapses before the problem of evil and the indeterminacy of the concept of God, and that Hume's analysis of belief and miracle is essentially correct. In 2004 he announced that the complexity of biological information had moved him to a minimal Aristotelian deism, a position he retained without Christian commitment until his death at Reading in April 2010.