He was vice president of the Conservative Monday Club, a grouping of right-wing Tories who opposed British decolonisation in Africa and who generally shared Powellite sympathies. Politics įlew's politics were on the right wing of the British Conservative Party, while taking a libertarian view on some issues. Neither did he believe in an afterlife, which he explicitly stated in his book There Is a God. He rejected the idea of a personal god and he certainly did not believe in the gods of Christianity and Islam calling them "the monstrous oriental despots of the religions of Christianity and Islam". Thus Flew's conversion is, by Flew's own admission, baseless.įlew remained a deist but calls his belief a "very modest defection from my previous unbelief" He later conceded, "I now realize that I have made a fool of myself by believing that there were no presentable theories of the development of inanimate matter up to the first living creature capable of reproduction".
Flew, by his own admission, had not kept up with the relevant science and was mistaught by Gerald Schroeder, a physicist and Jewish theologian. įlew's one and only piece of relevant evidence for accepting a deistic god was the apparent improbability of a naturalistic origin for life. It is simply out of the question that the first living matter evolved out of dead matter and then developed into an extraordinary, complicated creature of which we have no examples. "It had to begin with a creature capable of producing creatures that are not always identical to their parents. Using these arguments he apparently felt the burden of proof had been met.ĭarwin saw that there was a problem with the origin of life," he says. At the age of 81 he repudiated atheism in favour of a type of deism largely because of some form of God of the gaps argument applied to the origin of the universe and the origin of life, and an argument from incredulity applied to evolution.
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