Eight weeks ago I told you about my uncle. The man who believes in God the way he believes the sun will come up, who has never once argued for it, and who looked at me — back when I was young and pleased with myself and demanding his evidence — the way you'd look at someone who had just asked you to prove you love your wife. I told you I read that look as defeat. As a man with no answer to give.
I want to return to that kitchen table one more time tonight, because my understanding of what happened there has changed, and the change is the whole reason there were eight of these.
Eight weeks ago, when I sat across from him and asked for his proof, I was sure I knew what I was doing. I was the reasonable person weighing a claim; his belief was the claim to be weighed. And I was certain I was assessing it from neutral ground — the position any fair-minded person would take to decide whether a belief is warranted. He had to make his case. I only had to judge it.
Tonight, if I sit back down at that table and try to do that again — try to stand on the neutral position and deliver the verdict at last, yes there is someone there or no there isn't — I find I cannot. Not because anyone proved God to me in the meantime. Not because I lost my nerve. Because over these eight weeks I came to see that the position I was judging from was never neutral at all. It was one particular point of view among the others, with a history and a cost. What I had taken for solid, impartial ground was in fact a standard of evidence I had adopted, years ago, and never once examined.
So this is where eight weeks have actually left me, and I suspect they have left you somewhere near it. Faced with a set of serious arguments, and no neutral position from which to rank them — no vantage above the disagreement from which to award the result. And that is not despair, and it is not a trick I have played on you. It is, I have come to think, the honest place this question leaves a person. And tonight, the last night, I am not going to rescue you from it. I am going to lead you into the centre of it, and then do the hardest thing, which is leave you there.
This is Philosophy for Us — philosophy for everyone, no degree required.
This is Is There Anyone There?, episode eight of eight — the last one. Last week we put the full weight of the argument on the one thing you were surest would hold it: your certainty that some acts — a child tortured for someone's amusement — are really, bindingly wrong, wrong whatever anyone says. And even that certainty turned out to rest on assumptions you had never examined. After seven weeks, you had run out of anything you could stand on without question. So tonight I am going to do the thing I have refused to do all series. I am going to bring every rival we have met into a single hour, all at once. And then I am going to tell you, plainly, that I will not rank them. Not because it is a draw, and not because I am being coy. In the place where the verdict should go, I am going to hand you back the question that was underneath this whole enquiry from the very first night — the one you walked in having skipped.
So let me set them out. Let me bring them all together, the way I promised I would not until the end, and place them side by side where you can see the whole field at once. I am not going to re-argue any of them — each one had its own hour, and you were there. I am simply going to name each in turn, at the full strength it actually reached, so that you are looking at the real thing and not a caricature of it. And I will tell you now what you will notice by the end: not one of these arguments has been refuted. Every one of them is still defensible.
Start where we started — with the universe itself. The fine-tuned constants. The numbers underneath all of physics, set so precisely that a small change either way and there are no stars, no carbon, no chemistry, no one here to notice: the strength of gravity, the energy of empty space, tuned to something like one part in a number with a hundred and twenty zeroes after it. And the claim that a universe arranged like this is far more to be expected if something intended it than if it is simply the one arrangement chance happened to produce, and we happened to land inside it. That argument has careful defenders, and it has serious critics — perhaps there are countless universes, and we were bound to find ourselves in one of the rare habitable ones; perhaps the very idea of assigning odds to the constants does not make clean sense. I gave you both. And the question was left undecided: does the fine-tuning point to something, or is it simply where we happened to land? I did not settle it. It does not settle.
Then the hardest case in the opposite direction — suffering. Rowe's fawn, burned in a forest fire no one ever sees, dying slowly for no good that any honest look can find. The enormous quantity of pain that appears to purchase nothing, redeem nothing, mean nothing — and the argument that a good and all-powerful God would have prevented it, so that pointless suffering counts, heavily, against there being anyone there at all. At full strength. And beside it, the reply that would not go away: that a mind as limited as ours, looking for a justifying reason and failing to find one, is in no position to conclude there is none — that the goods which might justify a horror could lie as far beyond our grasp as our reasons lie beyond an animal's. And then the further point that runs in both directions: if we really are that limited, we cannot use our limitation to rule God out and then quietly stop being limited enough to rule God in. Two serious positions, the case and its reply, and I told you the truth — it does not resolve. Does the fawn settle the matter, or are the goods we cannot see precisely the ones a mind this size would miss? Still open.
And its quieter counterpart — the silence. Not suffering but absence: that a love which genuinely wished to be known would surely have said something, shown something, to the person who looked honestly and kept looking and found no one; and that the very existence of that person — sincere, open, not refusing — is itself evidence that no such love is present. The case built not from God's acts but from God's not appearing. And the same reply standing against it: perhaps we are too limited to know what a reason for the silence would even look like. Does the silence count against, or are we too limited to interpret it? I left it open, because it is.
Then the argument that arose last week from within your own moral life — the wrong you could not argue away. That the wrongness you feel facing real cruelty, the flat and absolute this must not be done, has the form of a command: an authority you never granted, a debt the wrongdoer owes, a claim that binds him even as he breaks it. And that a command of that kind ordinarily has someone behind it — so your most confident secular certainty might be resting, all this time, on something much like the thing you came to examine. At full force. And beside it, just as serious, the atheist's refusal to take that step: that some things simply matter, simply are wrong, real and binding whether or not anyone stands behind them, in the way that two and two make four without anyone issuing the sum; the ought as something fundamental, binding everyone, requiring no commander at all. I ranked neither above the other. A will behind the imperative, or a real wrong resting on nothing? You left last week without that settled, and you are not getting it settled tonight.
And then the two arguments that are not about the cosmos or about suffering at all — the two that turned out to be about you, about the enquiry itself. These matter most, because this is where the question changed. On one side, the claim that your demand — show me the proof first — is not the neutral foundation of all rational thought you took it for; that it quietly assumes a whole theory of when a belief is permitted, a theory that cannot pass its own test and that you would never apply to your belief in other minds or in the past; and that belief in God might be something a person can hold rationally without first submitting it to a proof, just as you hold a hundred things you have never proved and never apologise for. That is a real position, held by serious people, and it has not been refuted. And on the other side, facing it and not defeated by it, the demand itself: the old rule that it is wrong to believe anything on insufficient evidence, that beliefs guide action and pass to other people, so we must proportion them to the evidence. That rule has not been refuted either. I want to be careful here, because this is the point where it would be easiest for me to mislead you: showing you that "prove it first" is a position and not neutral ground does not show you it is the wrong position. It may be exactly the right one. It may be the rule you ought to live by. Both of these — the claim that the demand for proof assumes what it should prove, and the demand for proof itself — come through these eight weeks intact. Neither was defeated.
So consider the field. Six arguments, and every one still defensible. The fine-tuned constants. The fawn. The silence. The command. The claim that your demand for proof is not neutral, and the demand for proof that says it is. Not one of them refuted in eight weeks. And the thing you came here for — the thing you have waited eight weeks for me to do — is to step in among them, point, and say this one wins. To rank them. To deliver the verdict.
And I am not going to. Let me tell you exactly why — because the reason is not cowardice, and it is not that the contest is too close to call.
To deliver a verdict, I would need a standard to deliver it by. I would need to know already — and to have given you — the thing that says what counts as a point in God's favour, what counts as a point against, and how strong a piece of evidence has to be before it may reasonably move you from where you started. You cannot settle a contest without the rules for settling it. And the rules for settling this contest are exactly what these eight weeks turned out to be about.
That is the difficulty, and it is why it weighs on me as hard as it weighs on you. In the first episode I told you what I refused to do: I refused to line the arguments up, judge them from some calm position above the disagreement, and hand you a tidy result so you could feel you had been fair. I called it the most tempting wrong turn in the whole subject. And now you can see exactly why it is wrong, because we have spent seven weeks taking that procedure apart. It only appears neutral. It presents itself as impartial — I am not taking sides, I am only weighing the evidence — while it quietly relies on the one thing that actually decides the outcome: the standard of evidence being used. Two honest people, neither of them cheating, can run the very same arguments and reach opposite conclusions — not because one of them lied, but because they began with different standards and never noticed they were applying any standard at all. If I hand you a verdict tonight, I am not handing you the truth about God. I am handing you my standard, presented as though it were the neutral structure of reason. And the one promise I have kept for eight weeks is that I would not do that to you.
So when I say I will not rank them, understand what kind of refusal this is. It is not the contest is too close to call — as though the evidence were evenly balanced, with nothing to choose between the two sides. It is deeper than that. It is that the very standard by which one would weigh the evidence is itself one of the things in dispute. This question is unsettled at two levels at once. At the first level, the arguments are genuinely open — the constants, the fawn, the silence, the command; no competent person treats any of them as closed, and you saw why. But there is a second level beneath that one, and it is the one almost nobody examines: the standard you would use to settle the first level is itself contested. What is allowed to count as evidence, whether belief must wait for proof at all, whether "prove it first" is the foundation of reason or one position resting on some other foundation — that is a real dispute, and it does not follow from the God question, it lies underneath it. Which means I cannot hand you "the arguments fail" or "the arguments succeed" without first quietly settling that deeper dispute — deciding whose rules of evidence win — and passing that decision to you disguised as a verdict about God. To judge the arguments honestly I would first have to judge the standard, and the standard is not mine to judge for you. It is yours.
And I want to say, as plainly as I can, what this does and does not permit — because there are two easy exits here and I am refusing both, and they point in opposite directions.
The first easy exit is the one many of you have been waiting for me to take all series, and it sounds like the mature one: the arguments do not add up, the proof is not there, so the reasonable thing — the honest, adult thing — is to stop believing. The answer is no. I am not handing you that. Not to protect anyone's feelings, but because that conclusion only pretends to be a conclusion. It quietly adopts one standard — belief must wait for sufficient proof — as the measure of all belief, and then announces the result that standard was always going to produce. It presents itself as the outcome of the argument when it is in fact the assumption you began with, presented as an outcome. The fawn, the constants, the command, the charge that "prove it first" assumes what it should prove — none of those was refuted. You do not get to conclude that unbelief is the rational position unless you can defend the standard that delivers it, and we have just spent eight weeks discovering that you had never examined it.
But here is the other easy exit, pointing the opposite way, and it is the one I may have inclined you toward by accident, so let me close it firmly. Very well — if "prove it first" is only a position and not neutral ground, then the demand for evidence has no authority, the whole rational case collapses, and I may believe whatever comforts me. That exit answers yes, or near enough. My answer is no — certainly not, and if you heard me say it, I have failed. Showing you that "show me the evidence" is a standard you are relying on, and not neutral ground, does not show you it is the wrong standard. The old rule — that beliefs are not private, that they guide what you do and pass to the people who trust you, so you must proportion them to the evidence — that rule is serious, and it stands untouched at the end of all this. I did not weaken it. I only showed that it has a name, a history, and a rival, which is an entirely different thing from showing it is wrong. It may be exactly the rule a person should live by. So you do not get to take the other option either, the one that says reasons were never the point, just believe. That move discards the most serious form of the case for taking evidence seriously, and it concedes the whole matter at the first step.
Both standards come through this intact. The one that demands the proof, and the one that says the demand assumes what it should prove — both still defensible, neither declared the winner, because declaring either one the winner is exactly what I have spent eight weeks refusing to do. The neutral position you came in expecting me to judge from and deliver the verdict — I cannot occupy it. Not because I will not. Because it was never there. There is no place above this disagreement from which to settle it. There are only the arguments, all still defensible, and you, holding a standard you now have to look at.
So let me hand you back the question. The real one. The one underneath.
So — is there anyone there?
You came in wanting me to tell you whether the arguments work. The constants set to one part in a number with a hundred and twenty zeroes — does that point to something, or is it simply where we happened to land? The fawn burning in a fire no one ever sees — does that settle the matter, or are the goods we cannot see precisely the ones a mind that limited would miss? The silence, where a love that wished to be known would surely have said something — does that count against, or are we too limited to know what a reason for it would even be? And I am not going to judge them for you. Not because I am being coy. Because to judge them I would have to hand you the standard — the one that says what counts as a point, what counts as enough — and we have spent these eight weeks watching that standard turn out to be something you carried in the whole time and never once took out and examined.
You said: show me the evidence. Fair enough. It is a good rule; I have never told you otherwise. So now ask yourself where you got it. Ask where you got the rule that belief must wait for evidence — because you do not apply it to your own mother's mind, or to the world being older than five minutes. Those are things you cannot prove, and you hold them anyway, without a flicker of apology, and you consider yourself perfectly rational for doing so. Perhaps belief in God really is different from those. Different in some way that would justify the demand you make of it, and of nothing else you believe. Perhaps. But then you would have to say how — and you never have, because you never noticed you were applying the rule to the one and quietly letting the others through. You walked in thinking you were the judge. You were also, the whole time, the one who had written the rules of evidence — and you had never once read them back. The entire enquiry ran, from the first night, on rules you had adopted and never inspected. Not deliberately. Not dishonestly. The way nearly everyone does it: you were handed a set of standards, long ago, and mistook them for the plain structure of reason itself.
So here is the question, sharper than the one you walked in with, and I am leaving it with you. Not do the arguments for God work? — but the one underneath it, the one you skipped on the way in: before you ask whether they work, whose standard of "working" are you using, and why that one?
And note that this cuts more than one way. Perhaps you will examine the standard and keep it. Decide that yes, on reflection, with your eyes open, belief really should wait for proof — and hold that knowingly. Which is an entirely different thing from holding it because you never noticed you were holding anything. And then "show me the evidence" will mean something it never meant before tonight, because for the first time you will know what you mean by it. Or perhaps you will find that you cannot, in the end, defend demanding of God a kind of proof you never once demand of your own mother's mind — and the demand will go quiet in you, and that look on my uncle's face will begin to mean something it never used to. I do not know which way it goes for you. I genuinely do not. Both outcomes remain defensible at the end of tonight. That is the honest place to leave you, and I am going to leave you there.
Because I do not have it for you. I will say it plainly, as the last thing I say: I cannot tell you whether there is anyone there. I can only tell you that you were about to answer the oldest question there is with a standard you had never once examined. The God question turned out, underneath, to be a question about you — about which standard you are using when you decide what counts as real. And I cannot examine that standard for you. I am not even sure it is the kind of thing one person can examine for another. But you know now that it is there. You know that it is yours. And you know that until these eight weeks you had never taken it out and examined it. That is all I have. It is smaller than an answer.
Thanks for listening.