The death this month of Antony Flew brings an end to one of the most interesting lives in twentieth century philosophy. Throughout the last half of that century, Professor Flew was recognized as one of the most significant philosophical advocates of atheism, eventually writing at least 35 works, many arguing for the non-existence of God. Then, at age 81, Antony Flew changed his mind. God, he explained, probably does exist.
Mohler goes onto recount that though Flew rejected atheism, he did not embrace Christianity or any religion:
Antony Flew never embraced Christianity. He rejected the possibility of divine revelation and flatly rejected the idea of divine judgment and hell. He told The Sunday Telegraph [London] that the God he had come to believe “probably” existed is “most emphatically not the eternally rewarding and eternally torturing God of either Christianity or Islam,” but only God as First Cause of the universe. In other words, Anthony Flew embraced a form of Deism (the belief in a God who creates but then removed himself from creation), rather than theism (the belief in a communicating, ruling, and judging deity).
When atheist critics suggested that Professor Flew, then in advanced age, had experienced something like a deathbed conversion out of fear of death, the professor retorted with a rejection of any afterlife. “I want to be dead when I am dead and that’s an end to it,” he made clear. “I don’t want an unending life. I don’t want anything without end.”
I bet he was surprised.
Wow, that ending quote is really sad. “I want to be dead when I am dead and that’s an end to it,” “I don’t want anything without end.”
It would be a very depressing thing to desire that. Although text has no tone of voice, those sound like angry words. Why is it that some people desire to resist God so much that even when they admit he must exist in some form, they heartily reject His identity as a loving God? Sad story.