Late Oxford philosopher and outspoken atheist Antony Flew shocked the world when he announced that he had reversed his views about God’s non-existence. In his autobiographical work There is a God, which he humorously describes as a last will and testament of sorts, Flew describes his upbringing, intellectual development, and some of the arguments that ultimately led him to embrace theism.

Flew grew up in a devoutly religious home. His father was a prominent Methodist minister and tutor of New Testament studies at Oxford and then at Cambridge. Flew attributes his scholarly tendency of gathering supportive context about a subject to his father’s careful examination of Hebrew or Greek words before reaching any definitive conclusions or interpretations.

Flew could not tie his atheism to a clear chain of events leading back to his childhood, but whatever faith he had faded around age 15. He went to Kingswood School in Bath, England—a school that Methodism’s founder, John Wesley, established for the sons of preachers. However, he was far more interested in history, literature, and political theory than religious studies. He never experienced a transcendent encounter that John Wesley once described as the “heart…strangely warmed.” He entered the school as an obedient but tepid Christian, and left with no faith at all.

Ironically, it was the love of critical, dispassionate investigation of the evidence at hand learned from his father that obliterated Flew’s faith instead of strengthening it.

Over the course of his academic career, Flew’s areas of interest and research were broad: parapsychology, political philosophy, philosophy of science and language, logic, education, and even metaphysics.

His row with Christian theism really began when he wrote an essay while still a graduate student at Oxford called “Theology and Falsification.” It has since become the most commonly reprinted philosophical publication of the twentieth century. He first read his paper at the Socratic Club, a weekly forum where Christians and unbelievers locked horns. The club’s president at the time was Christian writer, C.S. Lewis. Flew attributes the Club’s insistence on following the argument wherever it may lead to the refinement and altering of his views. In “Theology and Falsification,” he argued that while qualifications can strengthen arguments, the sheer volume of qualifications that the theist must make to defend religious propositions (e.g., “God is loving.”) weakens the force of believers’ arguments—to the point that the theist’s arguments are “killed by inches, the death by a thousand qualifications.”

A bit over a decade later, Flew wrote God and Philosophy—a work that he now considers a relic, valuable as a stage of the intellectual journey, but not a tenable viewpoint. In God and Philosophy, Flew took the concept of God to task, arguing that God was too complex and too varied a concept for a meaningful discussion about God to take place.

A decade after God and Philosophy, he wrote another book called The Presumption of Atheism, in which he argued that the burden of proof for the existence of God was on the theist—not the atheist, because theists were making a positive claim.

These works significantly shaped the discourse about philosophical atheism for over half a century. Inadvertently, Flew’s ideas encouraged a resurrection of the Christian rationalist tradition within analytical philosophy. He’d unknowingly sown the seeds of his atheism’s destruction through arguing for its veracity.

Flew now believes that a Being of infinite intelligence brought the universe into existence, that nature’s laws point us to the Mind of God, and that life comes from a Divine Source.

When he announced to a convention in May 2004 that he now believed in the existence of God, there was shock and outrage. Scientists came out of the woodwork, triumphantly commenting that Flew had clearly not read a particular journal article or heard about recent developments in abiogenesis (i.e., life coming from non-life). Atheists thought Flew was off his rocker, that he was losing his mind. The backlash brought Albert Einstein’s remarks to Flew’s mind, that, “The man of science is a poor philosopher.” Many scientists believe that only scientific conclusions can be derived from scientific discoveries, but the questions Flew had been exploring were philosophical in nature.

Whence came the grounds from which non-life became life? How molecules interact is a scientific question. Why they exist instead of nothing at all is a philosophical question, and it is on philosophical grounds that the scientists would have to meet him. In doing so, scientists have moved from science to the philosophy of science, where they cannot use their credentials to assert intellectual superiority.

In one sense, the shift was a slow, glacier-like one that took decades. In another sense, the worldview remained the same, the root assumption springing from Plato’s Republic—that we must follow the argument wherever it leads. For Flew, this had been his approach all along.

Flew ascribes to an Aristotelian concept of God: omnipotent, omniscient, immutable, perfectly good, immaterial, and indivisible. The remarkable parallels between Aristotle’s Divine Being and the God described in Judeo-Christian thinking suggests that they had the same Being in mind. Flew keeps his investigations within the realm of natural theology. The conclusions he has made about the existence of God have been built on rational grounds, rather than appealing to the supernatural.

Imagine you show up at a hotel, and you find everything perfectly aligned with your particular tastes and preferences: the song that’s playing, the book on your bedside, the movies in the que, the brand of coffee, the snacks and drinks in the minibar—all your favorites. With each new item you discover as you walk around the suite, the thought that there is an intelligent mind behind the arrangement will likely become firmer and firmer. This is a rather silly, limited analogy, but it gets at the thinking behind the fine-tuning argument, that the long (and growing) list of conditions necessary for life to emerge and sustain itself strongly suggests an Intelligent Mind at work. It all appears meticulously orchestrated—not the product of dumb luck.

The multiverse is used as a counter to the fine-tuning, that the anthropic principle is more of a myopic principle. If there exists a multiverse containing an infinite number of universes, atheists and scientists argue, then we should not be surprised that there happens to be a universe that contains life, because life-creating and –sustaining universes would inevitably fall within an infinite set of logical possibilities.

But this doesn’t get us any closer to a scientific explanation for why life is viable in our universe. Rather than a straightforward, well-ordered account of phenomena, the multiverse gives us a complicated theory so bloated with infinite possibility that it tells us nothing in the end. The multiverse is a logical possibility, but that does not make it a strong possibility. It remains an unhelpful, highly speculative theory.

Not only are conditions meticulously suitable for life on earth, but life that has emerged is purpose-driven. Anything that is alive is teleological in nature. In other words, it has intrinsic purpose, and moves toward a certain goal or set of goals. Could it be that an Intelligent Mind better explains this directedness than naturalism?

Richard Dawkins and others have criticized this explanation, arguing that it falls back on the “God of gaps” view, and that it is only a matter of time before science replaces God as the explanation for directedness with something better. The naturalist has a hard time accounting for these developments, other than a white-knuckled optimism that science will eventually oust the God explanation. Yet again, the naturalist is committing a categorical error, looking to biology for an answer to a philosophical question.

The question we need to be asking is, “How is it that living matter has emerged from the primordial, meaningless slime to have directedness, capacity for self-replication, and coded chemistry?” And it’s not a question that biology can answer, because it’s a different category of question.

So let’s set aside for a moment the arguments that the universe’s age doesn’t leave sufficient time for abiogenesis to get us from non-life to life—which many physicists and biologists are concluding. There still remains the question about the nature of life, which puts us in the realm of philosophy. Flew agrees with Aristotle’s view that random chance does not do a great job explaining the concomitance of bios and telos.

There is also the challenge of explaining why, if evolution is the mechanism by which living organisms develop advantageous mutations, would they have immediately developed the means of replicating or the coding mechanism like DNA to facilitate that? That life came from non-life is amazing—that it could emerge with the mechanisms necessary to create a second generation of life makes already-slim probabilities even slimmer. These are logistical challenges that a purely material view can’t properly answer. The chances are unbelievably slim. Materialism is not the safest bet. An Intelligent Mind that has orchestrated the process is far more likely.

In The Presumption of Atheism and elsewhere, Flew argued that the universe and its laws should be taken as ultimate. Every system relies on some assumptions that need not be explained. These are the “brute facts” from which we must begin our cosmology. The theists, Flew maintained, do the same thing when they take God as a brute fact behind existence and nature, as an ultimate explanation beyond explication. To Flew, it made no sense to make inferences about the nature of the universe based on a transcendent force beyond the material existence. It is not firm ground upon which someone can build his/her cosmology. The physical universe itself is a far surer ultimate starting point.

These arguments were made well before the Big Bang became a serious discussion and then established fact within the scientific community. In the 1980s, Flew began to entertain that the universe had a beginning, and acknowledged that this was an embarrassment for many a scientist and atheist who had banked on the universe’s eternality. Flew saw an uncomfortable overlap between scientific discovery and Genesis 1 (“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”). The universe’s beginning—which made theological lines of thought far more tenable all of a sudden—was looking more like the brute fact than the universe’s mere existence.

Flew also watched as the scientific community did its best to develop explanations that would preserve a creator-less status quo. The theories that gained the most traction were the theories of the multiverse and Hawking’s idea that the universe is self-contained. Flew found these theories unsatisfactory. By contrast, he finds former Oxford professor Richard Swinburne’s cosmological argument a compelling formulation, that if there is a God, the chances that he would create a universe with both finitude and complexity are far better than a universe existing uncaused.

Writing and debating against theism for half a century speaks to Flew’s deep and enduring interest in philosophy, and that the change was not a flippant one. It also set the stage for a deep rift, as intellectual comrades came to consider him an adversary rather than fellow pursuer of truth.

There’s been a great deal of controversy surrounding the late-in-the-game reversal. Many construe the event as a fearful deathbed conversion, others as a mind in decline. Flew leaves the psychologists to analyze and speculate about the decision, but he maintains that his approach to intellectual questions has never changed—he has followed the evidence, and it has led him to belief in God.