Antony Flew announces a deist belief; CCWV.LIFE

In 2004 Antony Flew, for decades the most prominent philosophical defender of atheism, announces that he has come to believe in a God of the Aristotelian kind: an intelligence behind the laws of nature who does not intervene in the world. Flew calls the position deism and publishes his account in There Is a God in 2007. The announcement is contested by his former allies and stands as the word deism's most noted modern use.

Tagged: Deism

The Event

Date: 2004 (exact)
Era: Decline and Legacy; Standard periodization of deist history
Location: Reading; today Reading, England
Traditions: Deism
Streams: Deism
Key figures: Antony Flew
Key texts: There Is a God

How the Tradition Tells It

Flew's former colleagues disputed how far the change was his own settled work, a debate conducted in print in 2007 and after; the record states his announced position and its name, deism, as he gave it.

Primary Sources

Flew, Antony, with Roy Abraham Varghese. There Is a God. New York: HarperOne, 2007.

Secondary Sources

Barnett, S. J. The Enlightenment and Religion: The Myths of Modernity. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003.
Byrne, Peter. Natural Religion and the Nature of Religion: The Legacy of Deism. London: Routledge, 1989.
Walters, Kerry S. The American Deists: Voices of Reason and Dissent in the Early Republic. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992.

Provenance: HIST-1371; confidence 0.95; accessed 2026-10-30.