Author of the week

last updated 8 January 2015

Antony Flew

Antony Flew The “World’s Most Notorious Atheist” can’t seem to make his mind up about the existence of God, said Mark Oppenheimer in The New York Times Magazine. Eightyfour- year-old British philosopher Antony Flew has a new book out whose title, There Is a God, might seem to settle where its author now stands. A first-person account of how he turned away from a long and distinguished career of fighting for unbelief, it ranks as “perhaps the handiest primer ever written” on the arguments some scientists make that an “intelligence” must underlie all creation. What’s confusing, though, is that Flew announced two years ago that he would cease issuing statements about religion. His drift toward belief, he acknowledged then, was influenced in part by the fading of his mind. More to the point, he now admits that he didn’t write the new book. “This is really Roy’s doing,” Flew said recently, referring to credited co-author Roy Abraham Varghese. “He showed it to me, and I said okay. I’m too old for this kind of work!” Varghese, an American business consultant, says for his part that the book is drawn from interviews and correspondence, and that it expresses Flew’s current thinking. Maybe so: Flew has consistently expressed in recent years an inclination to believe in an “Aristotelian” God who does not intervene in the universe. But when the Times asked him to elaborate on specific thinkers quoted in his book, Flew seemed at a loss. Laughing, he said, “I’m afraid this is making a spectacle of my not remembering!”