Way back in March, on this site, I highlighted the near-death experience of the atheist philosopher, A. J. Ayer (see “An Athiest Sees the Light” below). Two weeks after I posted this short piece on Ayer, another famous atheist philosopher, Anthony Flew, passed away. For more than half a century, Flew was one of the most outspoken atheists in England, the “Richard Dawkins” of an earlier generation. In Theology and Falsification (1950) he offered a Logical Positivist refutation of God’s existence. 

Like Bertand Russell before him and Dawkins since, Flew was almost obsessed with proving the non-existence of God. In God and Philosophy (1966) and The Logic of Morality (1987) he returned to the subject with the sort of irrepressible tenacity that we have come to expect of Dawkins and the neo-atheists of today. Unlike some of these neo-atheists, however, Flew proceeded from a position of genuine intellectual integrity, nurtured by his encounters with the apologetics of C. S. Lewis and the arguments of the Catholic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe whilst a student in Oxford in the years following World War Two. This genuine curiosity and intellectual integrity stood him in good stead as developments in scientific knowledge threw some of his atheistic presumptions into question. It was the unravelling of the mystery of DNA, coupled with his reappraisal of Einstein’s views on theism, and his own further reflections on the laws of nature that led him to abandon his life-long atheism. 

Always fearless in the face of controversy, Flew shocked the world of philosophy in 2004 by publicly professing theism and refuting the arguments for atheism that he had spent the whole of his life disseminating. In 2007, with Roy Abraham Varghese, he published There is a God, definitively proving the philosophical arguments for the existence of the divine. 

Richard Dawkins was outraged by Flew’s “coming out” as a theist and dismissed it as the product of old age and the consequent fear of death. Typically, Dawkins had descended to the level of emotion-driven invective and had not even sought to address Flew’s arguments. Flew considered it outrageous that Dawkins, “a man who has never spoken to me should make such remarks. If he had done any research, he would know that I am one of the few philosophers who have actually written on death and he would know that I don’t expect very much from it!” 

Although Flew’s Deism did not mature into fully-professed Christianity, he acknowledged a respect for Christian revelation and came to accept at least some of Aquinas’s proofs for the divine. Furthermore, and crucially, he proclaimed his desire in his last years to “correct the enormous damage I may have done”. Perhaps, as a by-product, he may also help to correct some of the damage being done by Dawkins and his ilk. In any event, Flew has flown over the cuckoo’s nest inhabited by the neo-atheists and has found in death the truth that had eluded him in life. We can but pray that Dawkins will also “fly the nest” before his own inevitable end.