Professor Antony Flew
22nd March 2005

My conversation about belief is with someone who was until recently one of Britain's most resolute unbelievers. A philosopher who for many decades has proclaimed his lack belief in any kind of God. Then late last year Professor Antony Flew declared that he had changed his mind, and was now a deist, and believed in God. This position appeared to come quite suddenly. In response to internet rumours in 2001 of his change of heart, he declared 'Sorry to disappoint, but I'm still an atheist.' His volte-face since then has intrigued his philosophical colleagues, and been hailed by believers as giving support to their world view. Atheists have felt betrayed.

The story began in 1950 when Professor Flew, then still a Probationary Fellow wrote 'Theology and Falsification', a paper that was published later that year. Over the years since then he's continued to argue the lack of evidence for God while teaching at Oxford, Aberdeen, Keele and Reading universities. His classic treatise, 'God in Philosophy' is due to be republished, but with a new introduction. It's one of the most high profile conversions of modern theological debate.

Q It has indeed made the headlines, Professor Flew. Were you surprised by the impact of your statement?
A Yes (laughs). That it should er, well I know nothing about the Internet, but that it should be a great thing there. And of course in the world of print journalism. Yes I was surprised about the amount of fuss there was over this.

Q Well tell me the story of how it came about. It seems you'd been in conversation with Dr Gary Habermas over a number of years.
A Oh well many...
Q Who exactly was he?
A ...well he is an Evangelical theologian and we have debated in the United States on various campuses over many years - 2 or 3 times it was - the thing's organised by an outfit called 'The Campus Crusade For Christ', y'know. Which establishes discussions and so on hopefully working to a religious conclusion. And we began to become personal friends over this.

Q And the change of mind on your part was published in the Evangelical Philosophical Society - not a magazine at everybody's fingertips.
A Er no. And I think it is all rather misleading, and the new introduction to 'God and Philosophy' will make some things clear. What I was converted to was the existence of an Aristotelian God, and Aristotle's God had no interest in human affairs at all.

Q We're going to come to that in a moment...
A Yes...
Q ...and indeed, I hope that you will expound it at some length. But let's talk about your own background so that we can sense where you come from. You were born into a devout Methodist family, and your father was a preacher...
A Yes indeed.
Q ...and a minister of that Church. He was President of the Methodist Conference, and he was also involved at one time with the World Council of Churches.
A Oh yep.

Q So this is a very high profile Christian commitment, which you grew up with as a boy.
A Yes.
Q And how did you experience that?
A Well looking back on it, I realised that because I couldn't sing and didn't enjoy the singing, I was an attender at religious services rather than a participant. And it meant I think that when I met an argument that seemed to me to constitute a compulsive disproof of the idea of a God who is omnipotent and good... I later discovered that Aquinas was going to interpret the meaning of 'good' as simply, well following Plato in "The Republic" saying that the form of the real and the form of the good are the same thing.

Q But wait a minute - you're still a boy at this stage.
A Ah yes. Yes.
Q And you accept the Christian story do you, as a child?
A Well of course, I accepted everything. I was very well brought up by a devoted mother, and I went to what is a first class Methodist boarding school - a school originally founded by John Wesley himself. I went there as a simple believer.

Q You tell the story of how, when you were a child in Switzerland you saw a child who you felt... A Oh - it was a mons... the product of a monstrous birth.
Q Can you explain what it was you saw?
A Well it's not (laughing) still vivid in my mind, but it was, y'know, bits and pieces of a human being obviously being fed and kept alive, but not really a member of the family or anything else. I mean, he or she was just lying on a heap of things outside the house, y'know and...
Q And what did you feel about that?
A I was appalled (wry laugh).

Q And did it affect how you regarded...the God, the Creator, who was omnipotent and good?
A I don't know that it did affect it long term. I was beginning to be a thinker about things, you know. I was, I think already in the sixth form - I was a very young sixth former at that time - the youngest one in the school. And I then looked at the official definition of God, you know, as omnipotent and good, and this seemed to me inconsistent - not just with that particular thing - but with all sorts of other undenied evils that can't be put down as the consequences of human sin. What is known in em Church of England circles as 'the problem of evil'.

Q You went to university where you joined the Socratic Club...
A Yes
Q ...which was then chaired by C S Lewis.
A It was founded by Lewis and its weekly meetings, always in term time - were in my time always chaired by C S Lewis. And in the two terms I was in Oxford during the war, this was really at the centre of what intellectual life there was in wartime Oxford. And it was particularly fortunate in having one or two Jewish refugees who were really interestingly eccentric professors (laughs).

Q But Lewis of course was the great apologist for Christian faith - and you must have encountered him. Did you debate, did you argue with him?
A Oh yes. I suppose as he was chairman one didn't really directly argue with him often. Of course one did, and he, he was I think the most effective Christian apologist for certainly the latter part of the twentieth century. One can always find Lewis's books in the campus bookstores of most of the campuses which I ever visited.

Q But you weren't persuaded by his theology?
A No.
Q Just absolutely refuted it?
A No I just didn't believe there was sufficient reason for believing it. But of course when I later came on to think about theological things, it seemed to me that the case for the Christian Revelation is a very strong one, if you believe in a Revelation at all. Because Jesus is a charismatic figure?
Q A charismatic...
A A defining case of that. And St Paul, who wrote most of the New Testament, was quite clearly a man with a first class philosophical mind who knew all the then relevant languages.

Q Well let's just stay with you yourself, Professor Flew. Because your first book was called 'A New Approach to Psychical Research'.
A Absolutely.
Q Now explain the interest in this.
A The interest in this was just that this enterprise started in England in the 19th century and it grew, William James became interested in this in the United States. Well I was interested in this supposed evidence of human survival of death, and it seemed to me this was a worthy subject of inquiry.
Q Did it, was it persuasive? Did you feel that there might be evidence for life after death?
A Well I thought there might be, but there wasn't (laughs).
Q How hard did you look?
A Oh I looked very hard, because what evidence there was, it seemed to me y'know, and I didn't drop this. Much later when, after I'd retired from Reading I spent one semester a year at York University in Toronto, and I did a course on psychical research, and then became persuaded that the available book was just no good. And I got my publishing friends to promote, so I have published a collection of essays with introductory pieces by me which was up to date at that time - which is now a long time ago.

Q Why d'you think the evidence em put forward by people who follow the research into psychical research persuades so many people?
A Well, they've never actually formulated a falsifiable theory about this. But they think that information is coming from the subjects of psychical research which could only have come from the spirits of the people who produced that information - that's the main reason for believing this.

Q But you don't give it any credence?
A Well basically I don't believe it because I believe, and another of my major (laughing) works is called 'The Logic of Mortality'. Already when I was a graduate student under Gilbert Ryle, it was in the same year in which he published the book 'The Concept of Mind', arguing that the word 'mind' doesn't refer to an object, it refers to aspects of human behaviour. Well his view about mind, I took to apply to the concept of soul. Well, I decided that if ever I was going to be invited to give lectures following William James, I would give them on the logic of mortality. And when I was invited, I did.

Q Let's now talk about what you have come to believe recently and the changes you have made to your non-belief. The explanations seem to be several. One, not necessarily the prime one, but it concerned 50 years of research into DNA. Can you explain why you regard those developments, those 50 years as...
A Well when I did most of my talking about this, I was not aware that there has actually been apparently some progress in what looked to Darwin himself as the insoluble problem of... Darwin's theory ended in chapter fourteen of 'The Origin of Species' with Darwin's account of how the whole story began. It began with a creature capable of reproduction with occasional errors.

Q Can I read in fact the sentence which you quote from Darwin, which is fundamental to the way you have changed your mind? Darwin wrote 'I should infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings that have lived on the earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed.'
A Yes.
Q Can you expand your...
A Well Darwin presumably believed himself that it was breathed by the deity, and a great many people - not only me -were shaken by the enormous complexity of DNA, and wondering whether it would ever be possible to produce a naturalistic theory there. I believe that it has now begun to...

Q The argument that you pursue is that at, as it were, the beginning of the development of life, which Darwin expounds and you accept his exposition...
A No he's only expounding the origin of species you know. He offers us really, in this fourteenth chapter, the starting point of his whole theory. But that starting point is a thing that still needs a naturalistic explanation. And many people after the findings of DNA looked around and wondered whether they'd ever be able to find it, and thought it would simply be impossible to do it. Well it isn't.

Q And what you believe, what you argue in the text that I have read is that there is no explanation for how that life began from no life.
A Yah. Well the really long introduction which I wrote for this book did express my own incredulity about this. The new one that will go in points to what has in fact been done, and indicates that my incredulity has stopped in the face of the evidence.

Q You're not going back on your statement though, about now believing in something called God?
A Oh no. But I think it would be useful to everyone if I quoted a quotation from Einstein, who might be regarded as the Newton of the twentieth century in his importance. 'Certain it is a conviction akin to a religious feeling of the rationality or intelligibility of the world which lies behind all scientific work of a higher order. This firm belief, a belief bound up with the deep feeling in a superior mind that reveals itself in the world of experience, represents my conception of God.' Well that seems to be an opinion which I would, which I could've added to the four statements from Einstein always indicating that he didn't believe this God was interested in human behaviour in the original book.

Q Another argument you put forward to support your change of view is the 'fine tuning' argument. And the argument goes that the facts of the physics of the universe are so exactly tuned that they, if they were only the tiniest bit different, one way or another, then none of the existing created world could've come about.
A No, I've never reached myself - I've known about the 'fine tuning' article and in this new introduction, I point out the existence of this argument and say only that I don't think it proves anything but that it is entirely reasonable for people who already have a belief in a creating God to regard this as confirming evidence. And it's a point of argument which I think is very important - to see that what is reasonable for people to do in the face of new evidence depends on what they previously had good reason to believe.

Q So the fine tuning argument is one that you acknowledge as appropriate for people who are already believers, but not one that you yourself would use.
A No. No I, I've never thought the, the fine tuning argument was any sort of proof.

Q So what is your final evidence? What is the, what was the clincher for you, Professor Flew?
A Well (sigh) I mean it's not a very big thing that really I've come to. I mean everyone seems to interpret atheism in a quite different way from which they interpret amoral, atypical and so on. Y'know, I've never been a crusading atheist. I've argued in this way, and gone along arguing about this, but these are my opinions which other people are invited to argue against. And so it's been a continuing enquiry which I didn't think would ever lead to this conclusion... and the conclusion is itself pretty thin stuff. I mean (laughs) I now see that Thomas Jefferson and many others of the founding fathers who couldn't go along with the Christian religion and said they were Deists... Well I don't think Thomas Jefferson ever made what he positively believed at all clear. He just wanted to be (laughs) respectable as he was. And he had read some very good, political stuff in John Locke and so on, but...

Q So...let me get this right - you now believe that there was a prime, intelligent mover behind the world as it exists.
A I think so. But I'm, y'know, I'm not going over big about this. I just think 'OK well, allowing this and let's call it Deism.' Y'know, there's been far and away more excitement about this than there ought to be, simply because people insist on interpreting atheism in this peculiar way.

Q But there's also, Professor Flew, a great yearning to have someone of your previously held scepticism on board for a Christian God, a participating God, a God of goodness, and so on. Now can you tell me what your reaction is to that?
A Well I don't think I have offered the slightest reason for believing in a good God. You know, if that's what they want - a good God in any ordinary sense of the word 'good' - it seems to me it is inconsistent with what they believe this good God is going to do. I mean to torture anyone eternally is a violation of the most fundamental principles of merely human justice.
Q So this is the tortures of Hell, which you would reject entirely?
A Well this appalling nightmare, you know. If it was proved that I was wrong in this book 'The Logic of Mortality' I would myself get worried because it seems to me entirely possible that the universe around us was created by an evil figure who would do this sort of thing.

Q So you reject the Christian concept of God?
A I follow what has become the universally accepted definition by Richard Swinburne of the entire English-speaking philosophical world which includes a very large part of the philosophical world.

Q So you don't believe in life after death?
A Certainly not, no. If I believed in life er... I would get very worried indeed, because...
Q Because you'd be...
A ...the facts of the universe suggest that it's run by this, you know, this sort of being.

Q So you're not alarmed by the prospect of your own death, because there's nothing to follow?
A No - I hope for it. I wouldn't, I don't want a second life at all. I've had an exceedingly good one, I've been extremely fortunate in every way, and any future life would be inferior to the one I've already had. No, no, no - I don't regard the news of a future - I regard it as most alarming news, if there was a future life 'cause I think it would be fundamentally, wildly irrational that the future life would be, so to speak, freely available to everyone with no fears of eternal punishment.

Q Well let's get back then to the kind of God you believe. This is the God who has brought forth everything that followed, that began things, that was the intelligent design behind the world as we know it.
A Well I haven't really formulated what I do believe here. And this quotation from Einstein is very indefinite. Einstein's thinking he sees a mind, but what the function of this mind is, if there's any function at all, is not made clear by Einstein. Because presumably he didn't (laughs) think, or he wasn't trying to expound his ideology.

Q So this God, because we're using the word 'God' - which is a very tricky word to define - but He is not interventionist. He does not answer prayers, he does not move human beings around like pawns on a chessboard. He doesn't have any role in the way we all live?
A It began for me with Aristotle's God, and Aristotle's God wasn't interested in human behaviour, and was supposed to be mildly approving of people who devoted their attention to thinking, I think it was thinking about the concept of God (laughs).

Q So do you think that all human societies seem to evolve their own systems of worship and religions, all communities wherever they are - Amazonian, Indians and so on - do you think there's just something about the human consciousness that brings forth the idea of religion?
A Yes I think this must be so. Yeah - I should've thought.

Q And in a sense it's unavoidable then?
A Well it brings it forth in certain circumstances. It seems to me that it has pretty well disappeared in this country, except for the mass immigration. The Church of England is in decline, and likely to disappear except possibly for a few cathedrals, using the old prayer book and so on. Well in France it happened (laughing) long ago.
Q But, but surely we're witnessing a great revival. I mean the Evangelical Church in Britain is thriving, is acquiring new devotees, the churches are full. There is a strong Evangelical movement - indeed it is likely to swamp the established Church of England in many ways. So, and there is a lot of religious passion going on...
A Oh yes, that's so.
Q ...would you believe? And certainly in America where you've been to lecture...
A Oh America, this is a very real phenomenon - oh yes. Part of Bush's second election success is due to this. And the unbelievers are absolutely furious, not believing that anyone with any intelligence could be anything but a Democratic voter.

Q What view do you take of what is happening in America - where presumably you're being hailed now as ... one of them?
A Well, too bad (laughs). I'm not 'one of them'.

Q You started a hare running when you made this change of mind back at Christmastime. You've been inundated with letters. Do you think you see the end of this debate?
A Well, the introduction to the new edition that you see was going into print at an earlier stage has been now replaced by another one, which is a bit more up to date on my views now. It still won't give much comfort to my fellow unbelievers (laughs) of old and so on. But it is less open to objection, 'cause I've taken account of various scientific things that I didn't know of before.

Q So the view that you hold now will give comfort neither to unbelievers, or particularly devout believers?
A No I don't think so.
Q (Laughs)
A But then I have not been in business to give comfort to anyone, I've been concerned to pursue the truth. (Laughs).

Q Professor Flew, thank you very much.