Philosophy for Us
Part Two · Across Time, Death & Meaning · Series 26

Is There Anyone There? (the God arguments)

Show me something — and I'll believe there's anyone there.

8 episodes ↓ 31 sources ↓ ReligionEpistemology

The question

My uncle believes in God the way he believes the sun will come up — he doesn't argue for it, he just lives inside it, and when I push him, when I say "but what's your evidence," he looks at me like I've asked him to prove he loves his wife. And I used to think that look meant he had nothing. That I'd won. You can't produce the evidence, so the belief is empty — case closed.

But I tried, the other night, to say exactly what would have counted. What he'd have had to show me. And the sentence wouldn't finish, because every time I filled in "evidence" I heard myself smuggling in a whole picture of what believing even is — believing as a thing you do after the proof comes in, the way you accept a verdict, the way a reasonable person waits for the facts. And I realised I'd never once asked where I got that picture. I'd been walking around with a courtroom in my head and calling it the way thinking works. I'd appointed myself the judge. I'd never noticed that "show me the evidence" is not a neutral request. It's already a verdict — about what belief is, and what makes it allowed. And I'd never put that on trial.

What you practise

You can state the rule you are judging by, out loud, before you use it. Most of us ask about God with one already running: show me the evidence. It feels like plain reason rather than a position. Here you say it plainly, then hold your other beliefs to it — your own memory, other people's minds, the world being older than five minutes — and see which survive. You find that the rule has an author, a date, and serious opponents, and that it may still be the right rule. What you leave with is a standard you chose on purpose, and the reasons you chose it.

The episodes

Each episode builds on the one before, and the finale hands the question back to you sharper, not settled.

  1. 01

    Show me the evidence

    An uncle who believes in God the way he believes the sun will rise, and a demand for his evidence that turns out impossible to finish. The first episode examines no argument about God at all; it goes looking for the standard of proof each of us carries — the rule for what would count — and finds that no one has ever read it back.

    ▶ Listen Read transcript →
  2. 02

    The dials were set

    The fine-tuning argument, in the form defended by Robin Collins — the constants of physics sit within margins so narrow that a small change either way means no stars, no carbon, no us. The case is built at its strongest, its sharpest critics answer back, the multiverse among them, and no winner is called.

    ▶ Listen Read transcript →
  3. 03

    The fawn in the fire, and the silence

    The strongest case against, on two fronts — William Rowe's fawn, dying slowly in a forest fire no one will ever know of, and J. L. Schellenberg's argument from divine hiddenness, the honest seeker who asks and hears nothing. The one reply — a mind our size cannot rule out unseen reasons — rescues the believer and then takes the design argument with it. Nothing is settled.

    ▶ Listen Read transcript →
  4. 04

    Name the standard

    No new argument this week. The episode asks for the standard itself — what evidence would settle the question — and finds it applied unevenly, since no one demands public, checkable proof that their own mother has an inner life. Neither believer nor unbeliever is knocked down; what goes is the position marked neutral.

    ▶ Listen Read transcript →
  5. 05

    Whose rules for 'enough'?

    The unbeliever's strongest reply — that proportioning belief to evidence is not a position but simply what reason requires — is examined and found to have an author, a date and a name. W. K. Clifford's rule cannot pass the test it sets for everything else, and Alvin Plantinga argues that aimed at God it assumes the very thing in dispute. Both sides are left standing.

    ▶ Listen Read transcript →
  6. 06

    Believing used to mean something else

    Saying "I believe in you" is not a report on the evidence — it is closer to a promise. Wilfred Cantwell Smith's history of the word shows that believing once meant to hold dear and to pledge oneself, and that the juror's sense, a verdict returned on the evidence, is the newer and narrower one. Which meaning belongs in the question of God is left to the listener to decide, knowingly.

    ▶ Listen Read transcript →
  7. 07

    The command you can't argue away

    The certainty that some things are really, bindingly wrong — cruelty to a child, say — arrives faster than thought and asks for no evidence at all. The moral argument of Robert Adams and Stephen Evans holds that a command of that force wants a commander; the episode asks what this last unquestioned certainty rests on, and declines to answer on the listener's behalf.

    ▶ Listen Read transcript →
  8. 08

    Is there anyone there?

    The final episode brings every position in the series into one room and declines to grade them — not out of coyness, but because there is no neutral ground to grade from. The question of God turns out to rest on a prior question about the standard you judge by; keeping it and letting it go both remain defensible, and no verdict is offered.

    ▶ Listen Read transcript →

Thinkers

The thinkers and traditions this series draws on:

Robin CollinsWilliam RoweJ. L. SchellenbergWilliam CliffordAlvin PlantingaWilfred Cantwell SmithRobert AdamsDerek Parfit

Related series

Your turn

A friend of yours is a forensic accountant. She is careful and hard to fool. She checks her sources and laughs at horoscopes. Ten years ago, walking home alone on an ordinary night, she became completely sure, for about a minute, that someone was there with her. No voice, no vision, nothing she could show you. She has believed in God ever since. She has never argued for it, and she says she wouldn't know how.

  1. Is it reasonable for her to believe? If you say no, name the rule her belief breaks. Then say whether your trust in your own memory, which you can't prove either, would pass that rule.
  2. Does her experience give you any reason to believe? If it counts for her and not for you, say why. If it counts for neither of you, say what would.
  3. Is she handing down a verdict on the evidence, or trusting someone she thinks she met? If it is trust, can you still fairly ask her for proof?

A good answer names the rule you are judging her by, says whether you live by that rule yourself where living by it would cost you something, and says why that rule and not another one. Explaining away her state of mind does none of that, and nor does standing back from the question.

Sources

Written by AI under human direction. This is the reading the series was built from. checked against source means the passage was found in the cited work and a second, independent model checked the episode's use of it; supports in part means that check judged the use a little stronger than the passage alone establishes; passage located means a reader found the passage but it has not had the second check. Unmarked entries are background reading.

Where to start