The renowned rationalist philosopher, Professor Anthony Flew died on April 8 aged 87. Flew had spent much of his life emphatically denying the existence of God until 6 years ago when he radically changed his views.
Professor Flew had always called himself a "negative atheist", arguing that "theological propositions can neither be verified nor falsified by experience", a position he explained in his renowned work Theology and Falsification (1950). Flew asserted that any philosophical debate about the Divine should have atheism as its starting point, placing the burden of proof firmly on believers.
"We reject all transcendent supernatural systems, not because we've examined or could have examined each in turn, but because it does not seem to us that there is any good evidence in reason to postulate anything behind or beyond this natural universe," he explained. A central aspect of his thinking was the Socratean concept of "follow the evidence, wherever it leads".
It came as a massive shock to his fellow atheists, when in 2004; Flew revealed that he now believed in the possibility of a God after all. What was even worse is that Flew appeared to have abandoned Plato for Aristotle, since it was two of Aquinas's renowned five proofs for the existence of God – the arguments from design and for a prime mover – that had apparently been the final straw in his move to belief in a Creator.
In defending his new position, Flew argued that research into DNA had "shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce life, that intelligence must have been involved". Whereas, he still accepted Darwinian evolution, it still could not explain the beginnings of life in his opinion.
"I have been persuaded that it is simply out of the question that the first living matter evolved out of dead matter and then developed into an extraordinarily complicated creature," he said.
Flew felt strongly enough about his new convictions to make a video of his conversion entitled 'Has Science Discovered God?' and seemed to want to redeem himself for past mistakes: "As people have certainly been influenced by me, I want to try and correct the enormous damage I may have done," he said.
However, Christians and other believers were soon to be disappointed as they realized that Flew’s change of belief did not embrace notions such as the afterlife, or even good or evil. Flew’s theology was firmly minimalist and very different from what he termed "the monstrous oriental despots of the religions of Christianity and Islam."
Flew remained to his death a committed ‘Deist’ and so did not believe the Creator was intimately involved with creation at all. God may have called his creation into existence, then, but why did he bother? To that question, it seemed, Flew had no theories, the Telegraph says.
(To read the full story, go to http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries).