In “There Is a God” he explained that he now believed in a supreme intelligence, removed from human affairs but responsible for the intricate workings of the universe.

DNA research, he said, “has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce life, that intelligence must have been involved.” In 2004, however, he announced on a DVD titled “Has Science Discovered God?” that research on DNA and what he believed to be inconsistencies in the Darwinian account of evolution had forced him to reconsider his views.

Flew elaborated his thinking about atheism and religious belief in “God and Philosophy” (1966), “The Presumption of Atheism” (1976) and “Atheistic Humanism” (1993). Genuine assertions, by contrast, can be falsified. In a little more than 1,000 words, it argued that the idea of God is philosophically meaningless, since it cannot be falsified that is, believers cannot posit an instance that would cause them to deny the existence of God. “Theology and Falsification,” a short paper presented to the Socratic Club at Oxford and published in 1950, brought him immediate attention. He was best known, however, for his books arguing against the existence of God and for atheistic principles.

But in more than 30 books he also explored topics as varied as evolutionary ethics, psychic phenomena, logic, education, crime and egalitarianism. He was an expert on the Scottish philosopher David Hume, about whom he wrote the indispensable “Hume’s Philosophy of Belief” (1961). The rejection of religious faith, he said, was the start of his career as a philosopher. “Yet there were evils in abundance which could not be put down to a consequence of human sin.”

“It just seemed flatly inconsistent to say that the universe was created by an omnipotent and perfectly good being,” he told The Sunday Times of London in 2004. Flew, the son of a Methodist minister, embraced atheism as a teenager. His death was confirmed by Roy Abraham Varghese, with whom he wrote “There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind,” published in 2007. Antony Flew, an English philosopher and outspoken atheist who stunned and dismayed the unbelieving faithful when he announced in 2004 that God probably did exist, died April 8 in Reading, England.

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