Psychologist Valerie Tarico in Two Liars for Jesus and an Aging Philosopher. speculates that Antony Flew has Alzheimer's Disease. Admittedly, it is a diagnosis based on other people's accounts of their interactions with him, which has its limits. And I've seen insinuations that Antony Flew's detractors have been talking about his mental decline in order to explain away his "conversion". But if his mental faculties have indeed declined, then it may be hard for him to do what a philosopher is supposed to do: make arguments for his position. And ideas and arguments are supposed to stand and fall by their merits, not by name-dropping. The people who complain about his detractors' discussing his mental state are often the sort of people who say what a superior philosopher he is, implying that we ought to accept his arguments on that basis.

She starts out by noting that his handlers may believe that the end justifies the means, that one cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs; "For Evangelical Christians, the greatest good in the world is winning converts. A Christian who wins a convert saves a soul that would otherwise be condemned to eternal torture." And "The problem isn’t that Evangelicals, like the rest of us, weigh alternatives on a sort of moral balance. The problem is that fundamentalist dogmas simply outweigh normal moral constraints on behavior."

Getting back to his condition, she claims that it is evident in Oppenheimer's New York Times article:

Ed Babinski has suspected something similar; he has written about Anthony Flew's Conversion, wondering why it is such big news while the numerous conversions the other way have not been. Steve Locks has also noticed this one-way conversion direction among the knowledgable in Asymmetry of Conversion, as has Brian Holtz in Atheist Deconversion.