Atheist's God and philosophy

One of world's leading atheists now believes in God ? not an almighty.

At age 81, after decades of insisting belief is a mistake, Antony Flew has concluded that some sort of intelligence or first cause must have created the universe.

A super-intelligence is the only good explanation for the origin of life and the complexity of nature, Flew said in a telephone interview from England. Flew said he's best labeled a deist like Thomas Jefferson, whose God was not actively involved in people's lives.

'I'm thinking of a God very different from the God of the Christian and far and away from the God of Islam, because both are depicted as omnipotent Oriental despots, cosmic Saddam Husseins,' he said. 'It could be a person in the sense of a being that has intelligence and a purpose, I suppose.'

Flew first made his mark with the 1950 article 'Theology and Falsification,' based on a paper for the Socratic Club, a weekly Oxford religious forum led by writer and Christian thinker CS Lewis.

Over the years, Flew proclaimed the lack of evidence for God while teaching at Oxford, Aberdeen, Keele, and Reading universities in Britain, in visits to numerous US and Canadian campuses and in books, articles, lectures and debates.

There was no one moment of change but a gradual conclusion over recent months for Flew, a spry man who still does not believe in an afterlife.