Attempts have been made to prove God's non-existence. Often this takes the form of an appeal to the so-called Argument from Evil: if God were to exist, then he would not permit as much suffering in the world as there actually is. Hence the fact that there is so much suffering constitutes evidence for God's non-existence. In this essay I propose a variation which I shall call ‘The Argument from Non-belief’. Its basic idea is that if God were to exist, then he would not permit as much non-belief in the world as there actually is. Hence the fact that there is so much non-belief constitutes evidence for God's non-existence.

The most elusive and perhaps famous argument in the history of the philosophy of religion was put forth in the eleventh century by St Anselm. Now known as the ontological argument, it is based on the idea that God is that being greater than which is inconceivable. Although historically debate focused on the issue of whether existence is a property, or a perfection, required in our concept of such a being, recently it has taken a back seat to the examination of the indisputable attributes a perfect being must exemplify if He exists. Traditionally such attributes include: omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence, immutability and so forth. The first challenge to the accepted attributes was posed in the Middle Ages; it is the oldest and probably the best known paradox in the philosophy of religion: Can God create a stone so heavy that even He cannot lift it? Whatever the answer is, apparently He is not Almighty. A slightly different version of the omnipotence paradox was advanced in 1955 by J. L. Mackie who questioned whether an omnipotent being could ‘make things He cannot subsequently control’.Both versions are intended to show that the concept of omnipotence suffers from internal incoherence and is therefore inapplicable to any being.

There is a short section of Peter Harvey's recent book on Buddhism in which he offers a thumbnail sketch of Buddhist groups in the United Kingdom. Among the groups he describes is the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order, and I declare an interest, as one of its members. I have no particular quarrel with the description of FWBO activities, but there is a sting in the tail, which is, I think, a point of some conceptual interest, which others have also focused on.

God knows or hath ideas; but His ideas are not convey'd to Him by sense, as ours are. Your not distinguishing where there is so manifest a difference, makes you fancy you see an absurdity where there is none.

If proof is required that yesterday's scandal can become today's fashion, we need look no further than recent discussions of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Just a generation ago, Trinitarians typically insisted that the members of the Godhead are not distinct persons in any literal sense. But during the past few years, more and more philosophically sophisticated Christians have unblushingly maintained that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are not just different persons, but different individuals – that the Trinity consists of three divine beings.

In my ‘No Other Name’, I asserted that detractors of Christian exclusivism are, in effect, posing a soteriological problem of evil, to wit, that the proposition

Discussions of immortality have tended to focus on the nature of personal identity and, in a related way, the mind/body problem. (i) Who is that is going to survive, and (ii) is it possible to survive bodily destruction? There has been far less discussion of what immortality would be like; e.g. the nature of heaven. Richard Swinburne, however, has recently discussed ‘heaven’, and has constructed a novel theodicy fundamentally based on his conception of what heaven is like. I shall criticize both his conception of heaven – a conception he claims is consonant with the classical theistic one of Aquinas – and also his theodicy. I will argue that his theodicy reintroduces the problem of evil in connection with his idea of heaven – and does nothing to resolve it.

Advocates of the traditional argument from evil assume that an omnipotent and morally perfect being, God, would create a world of the greatest value possible. They dispute that this world is such a world. It is difficult to disagree. They go on to conclude that this world could not have been created by God. It is, however, possible consistently both to agree that God could have guaranteed the existence of a better world than this world and to reject the conclusion that this world could not have been created by God. Specifically, one may argue that this world is not a world of the greatest value God could guarantee, not because there is some other world which is, but because there is no such world. After all, it is plausible that for any possible world, no matter how good, there is another possible world which is even better, that the range of values for possible worlds has no upper limit. If this is correct, then for any world God creates there is a better world God could have created. So the argument from evil collapses, since it is logically impossible even for an omnipotent god to create a particular world which is the best or equal best possible world. God cannot act in accordance with the prescription ‘Create the best world possible!’, since there is no such thing. Nor can God act in accordance with the prescription ‘Create the best world you can!’, since from the perspective of an omnipotent being there is no such thing. This no best world defence has been advanced by Peter Forrest, John McHarry and George Schlesinger.