Book Alert / There Is A God

There Is A God -- How The World's Most Notorious Athiest Changed His Mind by Antony Flew, HarperOne '08, $24.95, 222 pages, ISBN #B001FOR58K. Source notes, two appendices, no bibliography, index or illustrations.

A twenty-seven year old philosopher writes a landmark essay, arguing God does not exist, which treatise becomes the most widely reprinted philosophical publication of the past 50 years. Now, at 85, he disclaims it, arguing that there is indeed a deity. Perhaps, you ask, he's done so because there are no athiests in the foxholes of mortality.

Antony Flew is canny enough to see you coming and cut you off at the pass. As early as his introduction, in what he calls his "last will and testament," Flew zeroes in on those who think he may have changed his mind to create the comforting expectation of an afterlife. "For over fifty years," Flew writes, "I have not simply denied the existence of God, but also the existence of an afterlife.....This is one area in which I have not changed my mind." Fair enough -- that evens the playing field....somewhat.

Antony Flew was born in London in 1923, the son of a Mathodist minister. During his career as an Oxford-trained philosopher, he has published more than 30 books while a professor of philosophy at the University of Keele, as well as in positions at Oxford, the University of Aberdeen and the University of Reading.